The Digital Yoknapatawpha Project

"Yokohama" is the name of a city in Japan rather than a person (269). Boyd seems to be using it as a generic (and somewhat racist) way to refer to 'someone from Japan.'

"Smith and Jones" are generic American surnames (269). Boyd uses them to imply that any common American male could be capable of destroying America.

One Indian, Sam Fathers, is mentioned by name in "Delta Autumn." But the text also includes a brief mention of the Indians who once inhabited Mississippi. As the "successors" of the aboriginal inhabitants, they turned the aboriginals' raised refuges from the water into burial mounds, which suggests their inevitable historical fate: all that is left of these Indians in the present are their words as the names of "the little towns" along the river (271).

The story describes the "forgotten aboriginals" of Mississippi as the ancestors of the Indians (271). According to the narrative, the mounds on which the Indians buried their dead were originally built by these aboriginals as a refuge from the annual flood water. These aboriginals were the first humans who entered the wilderness and altered it.

After slavery was abolished, planters and plantation owners employed "hired labor" to grow cotton in the Delta; these men are also described as the "Negroes who work" the land for "the white men who own it" (270).

Before the Civil War the white planters who turned the rich soil of the Delta into endless miles of cotton fields exploited the labor of these "gangs of slaves" to do so (270).

The story traces the process by which several generations of planters, the white men who own the land, turned the wilderness into fields, using the labor of "gangs of slaves" before the Civil War and "hired labor" ever since (270).

McCaslin refers to the men who led the Confederacy in the Civil War as the "group of men . . . inside" the U.S. who "tried to tear the country in two with a war" (269). He calls these men "better men" than "Hitler" and "Pelley," but seems glad that "they failed" (269).

The one detail that this story provides about McCaslin's unnamed father differ substantially from his biography elsewhere in Faulkner's fiction. Here this "father" is remembered as having fought in the Civil War as a cavalryman under Major de Spain (273) - or as his son puts it, "my pappy" was one of the men who "tried once to tear [the U.S.] in two with a war" (269).