The Digital Yoknapatawpha Project

With Three Basket, Louis Berry leads the search for Issetibbeha's servant - which includes reminding Moketubbe, the new chief, about his traditional duty to make sure that the tribal custom of burying the chief's servant along with the chief is maintained. He is described as "squat," "burgher-like; paunchy" - and more metaphorically, as well as more exotically, as having a "certain blurred serenity like [a] carved head on a ruined wall in Siam or Sumatra" (313).

Flem and the other Snopeses who appear in the story are described by the narrator as members of "a big family" who live in a group down by the river (165). They are mainly sharecroppers who move every year from farm to farm. According to the narrator, "they all looks alike, yet there ain't ere a two of them that claims brothers. They're always just cousins" (180). Over the course of his career Faulkner will invent a great many Snopeses.

The "folks," as Suratt calls them throughout his narrative, are the poor farmers who congregate at Varner's store or the horse auction, and who provide a kind of audience for Flem Snopes' rise from tenant farmer to the son-in-law of the hamlet's richest man.

Res Grier, the narrator's "Pap," is not ordinarily ambitious or successful. He claims that "I don't own anything that even I would borrow" (34), though in the earlier story, "Two Soldiers," it is clear that he does own the land he farms. More aggressive here than in either of other stories in which he appears, Res shows himself as a trickster, and over-reacher, and a cock-eyed optimist.

Twice appointed Senior Officer of the U.S. Army between 1796 and 1812, James Wilkinson was a very controversial figure - while he fought for the young American nation, he was also secretly a paid agent of the Spanish crown. In the story "General Wilkinson" appears as an "intimate" friend of de Vitry in New Orleans (318). He lived in that city at several different times between 1787 and 1807.

The historical Baron de Carondelet served the Spanish empire as Governor of Louisiana between 1791 and 1797. In the story, he and de Vitry are "said" to be friends in New Orleans, which at that time belonged to Spain (318).

This white man is described as an "itinerant minister and slave trader" (318). While passing through the Indians' plantation "on a mule" that also carries "a cotton umbrella and a three-gallon demijohn of whisky," he marries Doom and his West Indian wife (318). Whether he also offers the Indians religion or whisky or more slaves is left unclear.

Doom's unnamed cousin, apparently the only son of "the Man" (317), was in line to become the chief of the Indian tribe. However, like his father, he dies mysteriously after Doom returns from New Orleans.

"The Man" - the chief of the Indian tribe before Doom - is not named in the story, but identified only as Doom's uncle, Doom's mother's brother, and "the hereditary owner of that land which belonged to the male side of the family" who rules the tribe (317-18). Along with his son, he dies mysteriously after Doom returns from his sojourn in New Orleans - presumably at Doom's hands, but that part of the story is left untold here.