Ikkemotubbe and the Spanish Conspiracy

Abstract

N THREE SHORT STORIES involving the Chickasaw Indians who ocJ cupied Yoknapatawpha County before the white settlers arrived,' William Faulkner cites the relationship between Ikkemotubbe and the Chevalier Soeur Blonde de Vitry, a French adventurer he encounters in New Orleans. There De Vitry assumes the role of patron and tutor for Ikkemotubbe, guiding him alonig the full range of personal and political vice. Eventually the Frenchman accompanies Ikkemotubbe (now called Doom) back home and instigates a coup d'e'tat by which the ambitious young brave becomes Chief, or Man, of his tribe. Notwithstanding the significance of his contribution to the new Chief, however, the enigmatic Frenchman promptly disappears from the Faulkner chronicle, not to be heard of again until years later when Ikkemotubbe's son, Issetibbeha, visits him in Paris and finds him a broken old man. Two questions arise. What was Faulkner's basis for the relationship between the savage and the sophisticated Parisian in the first place? And why, after involving the two men so intimately, does he bring their association to an end? An historical allusion in Red Leaves suggests a possible answer for both questions. There we are told that De Vitry is reputed to be the friend . . . of Carondelet and the intimate of General (Collected Stories, p. 3I8). The references are to the Baron Luis Hector de Carondelet (1748I807), Spanish governor of Louisiana and West Florida, and governor of New Orleans; and to General James Wilkinson (17571825), Major General in the Army of the United States, eventually to become Commander-in-Chief under Adams, and first territorial governor of Mississippi and Louisiana under Jefferson. The imagined time of Faulkner's story, then, would most likely parallel Carondelet's jurisdiction in New Orleans, I795-I797, a time in which Spanish concern with American expansion was particularly intense. The cornerstone of the Spanish governor's foreign policy