When Lucas Beauchamp looks at at his daughter Nat, he sees someone who is "small, thin as a lath, young . . . too young to be married and face all the troubles that married people had to get through" (222). Nat is young, seventeen years old, but whether she is married either at the beginning or by the end of the story is by no means certain. Her troubles include her desire to coerce her father into paying for the repairs she wants to George Wilkins' cabin, and either getting married or pretending to be married is her strategy for accomplishing that.
"At least sixty" (214), Lucas Beauchamp is a share cropper who has farmed land on the Edmonds plantation for forty-five years, and a moonshiner who has managed to make and sell whiskey in secret for "almost twenty" of them (213). According to the narrator, he has quite a bit of money in the bank. He is also a schemer who is capable of out-smarting himself, and the father of at least two girls, the youngest of whom knows how to scheme as well. Although he is the central character in this story, his role is essentially comic.
The courthouse at the center of the square in the center of Jefferson appears in many of the Yoknapatawpha fictions as the center of the county's social, legal and administrative life. However, in this story the narrative refers to it as "the federal courthouse" rather than the county one (216) - presumably because the crime with which Lucas and George are charged, moonshining, violates a federal statute.
Parchman Farm, the state penitentiary in Mississippi, is located in the Delta in the northwestern part of the state. In operation since 1901, it is a maximum-security prison farm where inmates plow, chop, and pick cotton.
According to Lucas, George Wilkins has set up a moonshine still "in that gully behind the old west field" (214); the adjective "old" here may mean the field is no longer planted. When the sheriff comes looking for the still, however, it has been relocated to Lucas' own cabin.
The field that Roth Edmonds calls "your south creek piece" when he orders Lucas to finish planting it (215, 218) actually belongs to Edmonds himself; it is one of the fields that Lucas works as a share-cropper on the plantation. It's either a corn- or a cotton-field.
The field that Roth Edmonds calls "your south creek piece" when he orders Lucas Beauchamp to finish planting it in "A Point of Law" (215) and again in Go Down, Moses actually belongs to Edmonds himself; it is one of the fields that Lucas is assigned to work as a tenant farmer on the plantation. It's either a corn- or a cotton-field.
According to Lucas Beauchamp in both "A Point of Law" and Go Down, Moses, George Wilkins set up his competing moonshine still "in that gully behind the old west field" (214, 58). A "gully" a large ditch created by running water. The adjective "old" here may mean the field is no longer planted - perhaps because of soil erosion, a severe problem in the 20th century South, though one that is not often explicitly addressed in the Yoknapatawpha fictions.
