Ikkemotubbe. A dispossessed American king. Called ‘‘l’Homme’’

(and sometimes ‘‘de l’homme’’) by his fosterbrother, a Chevalier of

France, who...translated the Chickasaw title meaning ‘‘The Man’’;

which Ikkemotubbe, himself a man of wit and imagination as well

as shrewd judge of character, including his own, carried one step

further and anglicized it to ‘‘Doom.’’ Who granted out of his vast

lost domain a solid square mile of virgin North Mississippi dirt...

to the grandson of a Scottish refugee....This in partial return for

the right to proceed in peace, by whatever means he and his people

saw fit, afoot or ahorse provided they were Chickasaw horses, to the

wild western land presently to be called Oklahoma: not knowing

then about the oil.

—William Faulkner, appendix () toThe Sound and the Fury

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A long century after the Chickasaws, Choctaws, Chero-

kees, Creeks, and Seminoles walked, rode, or sailed west-

ward to the Territory, about seventy brutal years after the

white Mississippi kingdom of slavery fell in fire, and at the

very moment its successor, a reorganized cotton empire of

mules and sharecroppers, was disintegrating, Vernon Pres-

ley built a modest house in East Tupelo, a slightly raffish

town later incorporated into Tupelo proper. Presley’s viva-

cious wife, Gladys, was heavily pregnant—there would be

twin sons—and Vernon made them adequate shelter re-

flecting their Depression-plagued class: a shotgun house

of two in-line rooms. (The name derives from the morbid

possibility of firing a shotgun through either the front or

rear doors, covering both rooms with one blast. Shotguns

were efficient architecture for narrow urban lots in workers’

neighborhoods. The design resembles ‘‘railroad’’ houses in

the Northeast, but shotguns were common in the south-

ern countryside, too.) In January  the twin boys came

forth, one of them dead. Later, Vernon, his wife, and their

surviving son, Elvis, moved to Memphis, living in rooming

houses and then a public housing project. Elvis already had