When Ike tells the younger hunters in the "Delta Autumn" chapter about the old days "when I first started hunting in this bottom," he mentions that among the men who hunted with him was "Will Legate's" grandfather (328).
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 (335). It is also "the youngest negro, the youth," who brings the young woman into the tent to talk with Ike McCaslin (339). When Ike mistakes the shadow of his white relative for the looming "shadow of the youngest negro," this character also becomes (in absentia) an extremely portentous presence (274, 335).
