The Digital Yoknapatawpha Project

George Wilkins is Lucas' son-in-law, "a lean-hipped, very black young man with a ready face full of white teeth and a ruined Panama hat raked above his right ear" (227). He corroborates the story of the white men and buried treasure and helps Lucas pull off his con on the white salesman.

Roth Edmonds' father is not named in this story, and only mentioned when Lucas tries to use him to convince Roth to lend him money: "Your paw would a lent me three hundred dollars is he was here" (227). But it turns out that Faulkner had a lot more to say about the relationship between Lucas and Zachary Edmonds. When he revised this story as part of the novel Go Down, Moses, he developed the relationship between him and Lucas - both as landlord and tenant, and as the 'white' and 'black' descendants of a common ancestor - very powerfully.

These are the "two strange white men" whom Lucas believes "come in here after dark one night three years ago and dug up twenty-two thousand dollars and got out again before anybody even seed um" (227).

Roth Edmonds is the vitriolic and exasperated landlord of the Negro sharecroppers on his family's plantation. He has known his tenants, especially Lucas, for years, and he expects them to conform to his ideas about what to do and how to do it. These ideas stem directly from his racial views: "I wish somebody would come into this country with a seed that had to be worked every day, from New Year's right on through Christmas. As soon as you niggers are laid by, trouble starts" (231).

Although he likes to think of himself as practical and smart, this salesman falls for Lucas' story about buried treasure and even ends up renting the machine from Lucas to search for the money on his own. He is Lucas' foil in the search, and he thinks because he is white and Lucas is black, he himself will triumph: "the shrewd, suddenly attentive face of the young white man, the absolutely impenetrable face of the Negro" (229).

Lucas has lived as a sharecropper for sixty years on the Edmonds plantation (227), a tenant first of Roth's father and then Roth. He is shrewd, manipulative, and "absolutely impenetrable" in his calculated dealings with others, especially white people (237). In this story, he outwits a big-city salesman and Edmonds in order to use a metal detector in search of buried treasure.