It is the unnamed enslaved Black man’s destiny, according to tradition, to accompany Issetibbeha into death in order to serve him. When the enslaved man realizes that the time is near for the ceremony, he flees. Although he knows that the tribe caught the last enslaved person who tried in vain to escape, he clings to the possibility of life himself. He successfully evades them for days but is then bitten by a poisonous snake. Still not wishing to die of the infection and poison that overtakes his arm, he asks the tribe members if he can chop off his arm with a hatchet.

Refusing to face the inevitable death that awaits him, he is still willing to inflict horrific pain on himself in a desperate effort to live. When the hunters return the enslaved man to camp and begin to prepare him for the ceremony of burial, he clings to the very sustenance of life: food and water. Until the very last moment, he exerts every bit of energy toward escaping death, unwilling to passively accept the fate others have laid out for him.

The tribe members have inherited the prejudices of the white plantation owners. They scorn the enslaved Black people who serve them, often with their voices echoing stereotypically white sentiments. The tribe members comment that enslaved people “would even rather work in the sun than to enter the earth with a chief.” They call enslaved Black people a “people without honor and without decorum. Always a trouble.”

When Issetibbeha inherits the plantation and isn’t sure what to do with the land, his tribe tells him to “do as the white men do”—namely to use slave labor to clear the land and then “raise Negroes and sell them to the white men for money.” They comment that enslaved people “appear to like sweating.” Throughout the story, the echoes of racism, passed to the tribe through its interactions with white plantation owners at that time, is seen to influence both the Chickasaw men’s reasoning and their actions. The enslaved people are powerless and at the mercy of not only the white landowners but also the Chickasaw people whom they have come in contact with. Corruption spreads like a disease.

The tribe members do not wish to kill Issetibbeha’s enslaved man because of any particular vengeance toward him. Instead, they simply see it as his final destiny to accompany his former master into death in order to serve his needs, just as in life. Although he tries to escape and to delay this death, in the end the man is forced to accept his fate in service to his former enslaver. He doesn’t fight the tribe members and walks with honor toward his impending death. Issetibbeha’s son, Moketubbe, is not a physical representation of a leader for this tribe; even his father comments on how disgusting his son’s physical appearance is. Wearing the slippers, symbolic of power, inflicts a physical pain on Moketubbe which is only lessened by the removal of the slippers:

The stripling removed the shoes. Moketubbe began to pant, his bare chest moving deep, as though he were rising from beyond his unfathomed flesh back into life, like up from the water, the sea. But his eyes had not opened yet.

Because it is Moketubbe’s destiny to wear and display the power of the tribe, he submits to it.