¶ … 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...

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…