Unnamed People of the Delta

This icon represents the diverse group of human beings whom Ike McCaslin refers to as the "spawn" of the modern Delta, where the boundaries between races seem to have broken down. It includes "white men" who own plantations and "commute every night to Memphis," "black men" who own plantations and even towns and "keep their town houses in Chicago," and is an amalgamation of "Chinese and African and Aryan and Jew" who "breed and spawn together" (346). This is one of the most racially, ethnically and socio-economically diverse groups in Faulkner's fiction, though it is safe to say that it reflects Ike's (and perhaps Faulkner's) fears more than any reality, in the Mississippi Delta or anywhere else in the broader U.S. in 1940.