Road to the Delta (Location Key)

In "Delta Autumn" the 200-mile trip that the hunters take from Yoknapatawpha to their camp in the Delta gives Faulkner an opportunity to describe the interior of Mississippi in both spatial and temporal terms. Geographically, they travel from the "cradling hills" in the east (270, 324) to the "rich unbroken alluvial flatness" of the vast flood plain along the Mississippi River (267, 319). And as Ike travels past the "little countless towns," the "tremendous [cotton] gins" (325) and the occasional Indian burial mounds that dot the land, he thinks of the decades during which the white planters who "owned" the land and "the negroes who worked it" cleared the wilderness to create "cotton patches which as the years passed became fields and plantations" (270, 323-4), and the landscape's transition as "paths made by deer and bear became roads and then highways, with towns in turn springing up along them and along the rivers Tallahatchie and Sunflower, which joined and became the Yazoo" (270, 324).