The place where Ike's annual hunting party made camp in the Delta had to move regularly, as the clearing of the land for agriculture kept spreading and the wilderness "retreated southward" (272). This location represents the likely place, two hundred miles from Jefferson, where they are camped during this story. What the text refers to as "the ultimate funneling tip" where the wilderness still exists (272) is probably the point at which the Yazoo River, "the River of the Dead of the Chocktaws" (270), joins the Mississippi.
Unlike the other towns mentioned alongside it - Tillatoba, Homochitto and Yazoo (271) - the town of "Aluschaskuna" was invented by Faulkner, though he probably was thinking of a real Delta town like Arcona when he did so - i.e. a small town with a majority black population, an economy dependent on the cotton crop, and an existence dependent on the rise and fall of the Mississippi River.
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).
In The Reivers, Faulkner's last novel, Lucius Priest tells his grandson that "by 1940," hunters from Yoknapatawpha had to "drive two hundred miles over paved highways to find enough wilderness to pitch tents in" (19). The place they go to, according to other texts, is the Mississippi Delta, and even in the Delta, over the years they had to keep moving the camp, as more and more land was cleared for agriculture and the wilderness "retreated southward" (272, 326). "Delta Autumn" is set at one of these camps.
Unlike the other towns mentioned alongside it in "Delta Autumn" and Go Down, Moses - Tillatoba, Homochitto and Yazoo (271, 325) - the hamlet of "Aluschaskuna" was invented by Faulkner, though he probably was thinking of a real Delta town like Arcona when he did so - i.e. a small town with a majority black population, an economy dependent on the cotton crop, and an existence dependent on the rise and fall of the Mississippi River. It is "the last little Indian-named town" (271, 325) on the road to the hunting camp.
Leland, Mississippi, the town mentioned in "Delta Autumn" as the place where the young mother plans to take a train north, is a real majority black town in the heart of the Delta region.
Vicksburg, where the young mother's aunt lives, is a city on steep bluffs overlooking the Mississippi River. In 1940 there were about 25,000 people living there. It has a long history, but it is probably best known for the role it played as a strategically important Confederate stronghold during the Civil War until it surrendered to Ulysses S. Grant on July 4, 1863. It is frequently mentioned in Faulkner's fictions.
