Unnamed Negro Tenant Farmers(2)

In the novel's last story, "Go Down, Moses," it's made clear that "the only white person" on the McCaslin-Edmonds place is Roth Edmonds himself (260). The rest of the community there is made up of the black tenant farmers, sharecroppers, who farm small parcels of the land he owns. Earlier in the novel these sharecroppers are described as "in thrall" with the goods of the commissary, "snuff and cures for chills and salves and potions manufactured and sold by white men to bleach the pigment and straighten the hair of negroes that they might resemble the very race which for two hundred years had held them in bondage and from which for another hundred years not even a bloody civil war would have set them completely free" (242).