These unnamed children of Ike appear only briefly, and enigmatically, in this magazine version of "Delta Autumn," where it says that Ike "had had a wife and children once though no more" (274). Go Down, Moses begins by saying that Ike McCaslin was childless, and when Faulkner revised this story for that novel these children disappear.
Ike McCaslin's wife has a brief but memorable scene in "The Bear" chapter of Go Down, Moses, and in that novel's version of "Delta Autumn" Faulkner elaborates on her place in Ike's life more fully. Here she is only referred to briefly: "he had had a wife," but she is "dead" (274).
Referred to only as a Chickasaw "chief" in this story, Sam's grandfather appears as Ikkemotubbe (nicknamed Doom, from the French for "the man") in many of the Yoknapatawpha fictions, often but not always as the leader of the tribe of Indians who inhabited the county when white settlers first appeared there (273).
Sam is a major figure in Faulkner's most famous hunting stories, "The Old People" and "The Bear." Even in this story he still lives in Ike's memory as the mentor who initiates him into the fraternity of hunters and their prey, though he has been dead for many years. Sam is identified here as "half Indian" and "half Negro," the "grandson of a chief" and a Negro slave (273); unlike "The Bear," this story does not make any mention of his white ancestors.
There are at least two characters in the Yoknapatawpha fictions called "Major de Spain." One, Manfred, is a "Major" only by courtesy. The one in this story is his father, who actually was a Confederate Major during the Civil War: a "cavalry commander in '61 and -2 and -3 and -4" (273). As in Faulkner's other hunting stories, he owned much of the "big woods," including the hunting "house" mentioned in the story (274), where fifty years earlier the hunters found big game in Yoknapatawpha.
The "youngest Negro" performs a specific job for the white hunters: he sleeps in the tent with them, "lying on planks" beside the wood stove and tending it throughout the night (273). He may also be "the young Negro" who brings the young woman into the tent to talk with Ike McCaslin (277).
Twice referred to as "the oldest Negro" on the hunting expedition (273, 275), Isham attends to the needs of the white hunters in the camp, and takes particular care of Ike McCaslin, both physically by preparing his bed and emotionally by "warning" him about the young woman who visits the camp (277).
It's not clear how many people from Yoknapatawpha go to the Delta, but at least several of them are black, and are there not to hunt but to serve the white hunters. The text names one, Isham, and singles out another as "the youngest Negro" - they have their own character entries. There is at least one more, because the narrative says that "two of the Negroes" cut firewood for cooking and warmth (272).
