IkkemotubbesInDEL

In this elegiac story an aged Ike McCaslin briefly looks back at the role Sam Fathers played as his spiritual guide in the wilderness that once belonged to the Indians. Sam's own story as part of a family, however, is complicated in new ways. Here he is "half Chickasaw, the grandson of a chief, and half Negro" (273). The only way to make those fractions work is to create a generation between this unnamed chief and Sam, with one Indian and one black parent - a couple that does not appear in any other account of the family. (The possible equivalent to this missing generation in the contemporaneous story "The Old People" would make Sam three-quarters black and one-quarter Indian.) Since the text says nothing about Sam's parents, we cannot represent them the graph.