The Digital Yoknapatawpha Project

This is the melon patch on the Choctaw plantation in "Red Leaves" where Issetibbeha first sees the woman who will be Moketubbe's mother working there. Perhaps Faulkner included this example of 'field work' to reinforce the story's implicit parallel between Doom's "plantation" (313) and the slave plantations of the white settlers, but in fact the Choctaw people farmed land in Mississippi long before they had any contact with whites.

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).

On Doom's steamboat trips from New Orleans back to northern Mississippi, he is 'landed' at a point on "the Big River" a three days' journey away from his tribe's plantation in Yoknapatawpha ("A Justice," 347). The "Big River" is the Mississippi. Steamboats regularly stopped at places between ports for freight or passengers or fuel to drive their paddlewheels - this last is why "Red Leaves" calls the place Doom disembarks a "wood landing on the north Mississippi side" (318).

Faulkner lived in New Orleans in 1925 and 1926, and the city provides the setting for a number of his non-Yoknapatawpha novels, including Mosquitoes, Pylon, and The Wild Palms. It is also used as a setting or mentioned in 16 Yoknapatawpha fictions, putting it almost as high as Memphis on the frequency list of 'OutOfYoknapatawpha' Locations.

Faulkner mentions the 'mansion house' at the Indian plantation twice, in "Red Leaves" and again in "A Justice." According to the second story, Doom never thought the chief's "House" was "big enough (350), so he compelled the rest of the tribe and the slaves it owns to move a piece of a wrecked steamboat out of the river and twelve miles over land to make it bigger. "Red Leaves" describes this addition in the most detail.

After Doom has died in "Red Leaves," his body awaits burial in a hammock strung between two trees, gradually decaying and emitting a smell (333).

The slave quarters that the Choctaw Indians build to house their slaves in "Red Leaves" 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.

Faulkner uses the Indian settlement at the northern edge of what (about the same time the Indians themselves were removed) became known as 'Yoknapatawpha County' as the setting for three stories: "Red Leaves," "A Justice" and "A Courtship." The narrators of these stories and (in some cases) the Indians themselves refer to the settlement as a "plantation." The word 'plantation' pre-dates American slavery, and can refer to any large estate or new colony, but of course in Faulkner's world it is deeply saturated with the slave-owning economy of the Old South.