Delta Autumn, William Faulkner Tries to Show

¶ … Delta Autumn," William Faulkner tries to show us southern racism through the eyes of a septuagenarian white man from Mississippi. He also introduces some perspectives on the erosion of nature and the annual tradition of hunting. Delta Autumn is one of the short stories in Faulkner's "Go Down Moses" collection, which explores the relationship between black and white cultures in Mississippi. Alfred Kazin says of this piece, "The whole book recounts in the most passionate detail life as phenomenon, a descent into breakdown.

In the end we are saved and exhilarated by Faulkner's reconstituting all this in the speed and heat of his art." It is set in the Mississippi of the early 1940's, long before civil rights initiatives were to prevail in the state due to federal party. Our first impression of blacks in the story is of a couple of 'steppin-fetchit' servants that accompany the four whites on the hunting trip in order to make them food and brew them coffee.

The story starts out with the old man, "Uncle Ike," riding with his young companions into the Delta.

We are immediately struck by the rhythmic nature o f Uncle Ike's visits to the Delta: "It has been renewed like this each last week in November for fifty years." One of Ike's old huntin' buddy's grandchildren decides to stop the car, presumably to re-consider the merits of hunting: "I didn't intend to come back in here this time." In retrospect we assume that he has cold feet about killing the young black woman he has impregnated.

The fact that he likens this to hunting is central to Faulkner's allegory of the old southern racist status quo as the wilderness that is slowly being pushed back by the forces of modernity.

He couches this by reflecting on whether or not we can defend America against the Axis Powers, which ends up sounding so out of place that it resembles a Donald Duck "Buy War Bonds" message from the War Department: "We'll stop him in this country...even if he calls himself George Washington." The "good ol' boys" continue to debate the respective merits of killing bucks vs. killing does, they know that they can continue to get away with killing bucks, but that killing does will eliminate the herd.

Uncle Ike starts to harken back to the days when he could take a wagon thirty miles away and hunt; how he would lie in bed pretending to sleep: he "would not sleep tonight but would lie instead wakeful and peaceful on the cot amid the tent-filling snoring and the rain's whisper." The young whipper snappers make it clear to their old buddy that he isn't going to be very useful on this trip - he falls asleep recounting the good old days and feeling ashamed over a presumed homosexual tryst with an Indian that showed him how to hunt: "himself and McCaslin juxtaposed not against the wilderness but against the tamed land, the old wrong and shame itself." They all promptly wake up in the morning when the negro shouts: "Raise up an get yo foa clock coffy." They don't let old man McCaslin hunt, but he is entrusted with an envelope full of cash which we soon learn is to be put in the fair hands of the aforementioned 'doe,' a young cafe au lait woman who has rather fearlessly decided to drop in on the four armed red necks to have one of them own up to the fact that he has a bouncy baby boy.

She explains that they had a tryst and he lays into her: "what did you expect?...you have known him long enough or at least often enough." She won't take the cash: she says it's "just money" and that he's already sent her enough.

He advises her to go back north and marry a black man "who would ask nothing of you and expect less and get even still less than that." She leaves and the old man hears a struggle outside: one of the men comes in and reports that they have killed a doe. The ideology implied in Faulkner's work is one that is sympathetic to inter-racial marriages and critical of unsustainable development. One gets a sense of these views in the old man.

When he realizes that the educated young woman that walks into his tent in the morning is black and carrying a child of mixed blood, he thinks to himself "Maybe in a thousand years or two thousand years in America...but not now, not now!" His ideas are presented as those of a conservative that sees the damnation of the status quo at the hands of a cruel future that brings with it the eradication of the wilderness and of traditional barriers between the races.

When the young woman asks the man "have you lived so long and forgotten so much that you don't remember anything you ever knew" about love, Faulkner doesn't have him respond, which leaves these words to resonate with the reader. We are lead to believe that the author is an apologist for single women that seek emotional self-justification through motherhood.

Faulkner presents this young woman as seeming educated: "You sound like you have been to college even." This prompts the reader critique her motives, rather than dismissing her pregnancy as the whim of a poor uneducated black woman. It is important to remember that in the 30's, eugenics legislation.