The Digital Yoknapatawpha Project

Before the story begins Issetibbeha's grave has already been dug; it remains unfilled even at the end.

Walking past the melon patch on his way to fish in the creek, Issetibbeha first sees the woman who will be Moketubbe's mother working there. Perhaps Faulkner included this kind of 'field work' as (like slavery) an example of what the Choctaw Indians - the tribe in the story - learned from the arriving white settlers, or perhaps to reinforce the implicit similarity between Doom's "plantation" (313) and the slave plantations some of those settlers built, but in fact the Choctaw people farmed land in Mississippi long before they had any contact with whites.

Issetibbeha visits France and returns home with several important items, including the slippers with red heels.

Before Doom becomes the chief in "Red Leaves," the slaves that belonged to the Choctaws lived in this "huge pen with a lean-to roof over one corner, like a pen for pigs" (320).

This wood landing on the Mississippi is where the West Indian woman Doom met in New Orleans, now pregnant with his child, disembarks from the "packet," a steamboat traveling upriver to St. Louis (318).

As a young man, Doom visits New Orleans, which is described as "a European city" (317). Much of his time there is spent "among the gamblers and cutthroats of the river front" (317).

To serve as the plantation house at the center of the Choctaw settlement, Issetibbeha's father Doom had the one-story "deck house" of an abandoned steamboat dragged twelve miles through the woods and set on a "knoll, surrounded by oak trees"; "chipped and flaked gilding" and "rococo cornices" adorn the house and the "gilt lettering of the stateroom names above the jalousied doors" can still be seen (317). Doom's previous "house" consisted of a "brick wall . . .

After dying, Doom lies above ground, gradually decaying and emitting a smell. He lies in a hammock between two trees (333).

The Choctaw Indian slave quarters are "neat with whitewash, of baked soft brick" (313). The two rows of houses face each other. They have no doors and have "chinked and plastered chimneys" (313), and a dirt lane runs between them. The central cabin with its shuttered windows is larger than the others, big enough, apparently, to hold all the slaves on the plantation. Inside, it is dark with a hearth in center of the floor, and a hole in the roof for smoke. The room also contains the slaves' "cryptic ornaments" and "ceremonial records" (315).