The Digital Yoknapatawpha Project

Samuel is the grandson of Lucas and Molly Beauchamp. As he tells the census taker, to whom he identifies himself by his real name, Samuel Worsham Beauchamp was "born in the country near Jefferson, Mississippi" (351). Like well over a million rural black southerners by the 1930s, he has relocated to the urban north. According to him, his "occupation" in Chicago before he shot and killed a policeman was "getting rich too fast" (352); according to Gavin Stevens, he was a criminal involved in the numbers racket. Gavin calls him "Butch Beauchamp" (354).

The young woman who has an affair and a child with Roth Edmonds tells Ike that her "father" died while his family lived in Indianapolis (343). No mention is made of her mother. One of her "folks" is a child of James Beauchamp, and so descended from Lucius Quintus Carothers McCaslin, but we cannot say definitively that it was this father (343). (He also is mentioned in the magazine version of "Delta Autumn," but there no connection is made between the young woman's family and the McCaslin-Beauchamp-Edmonds family, so that earlier father has his own entry in the database.)

Like Nat Beauchamp, James Beauchamp’s unnamed granddaughter has an aunt in Vicksburg with whom she stays. This unnamed aunt is a widow who takes in washing to support her family. (She first appears in an identical passage in the magazine version of "Delta Autumn," where there is no connection between 'Roth's mistress' and the Beauchamp family. That aunt has her own entry in the database.)

The last member of the McCaslin-Edmonds-Beauchamp family in Go Down, Moses appears essentially as a "blanket-swaddled bundle" (340) being carried by his mother; he is the illegitimate child of Roth Edmonds and Edmonds's mistress, the granddaughter of James Beauchamp. Roth and the young mother are distantly related, making the child the multi-racial product of incest; this an echo of Lucius Quintus Carothers McCaslin's impregnation of Tomey, the slave girl who was also his daughter.

Ike McCaslin shares his house in Jefferson with a woman who is called "his wife's sister" and his "sister-in-law" at the beginning of the novel (6), and his "dead wife’s widowed niece" near the end (335). In the earlier published version of "Delta Autumn" she was his wife's niece; Faulkner either forgot that when he wrote "sister" in the novel's first mention or forgot to change "niece" to "sister" in the second mention, in the revised version of "Delta Autumn" that appears in the novel in the second mention.

As "the oldest Negro" on the hunting expedition (337), Isham attends to the needs of the white hunters; he seems to take particular care of Ike McCaslin, both physically by preparing his bed and emotionally by "warning" him about the young woman who visits the camp (340).

Wyatt joins Will Legate, Roth Edmonds, Ike McCaslin and some other men from Yoknapatawphaon the hunting trip to the Mississippi Delta.

The woman with whom Roth Edmonds has an affair and a child is part of the extended McCaslin family: she is the granddaughter of James Beauchamp and so related to both Roth and Ike McCaslin. She is 'white' enough to pass as 'white' - until the fact that her aunt "took in washing" proclaims her as a Negro (though Ike uses a more offensive term, 343). She was born and educated in the North, and has taught school in Mississippi. Roth refuses to marry her, and even her "Uncle Isaac" tells her to take her child and "Go back North. Marry: a man in your own race" (345).

Will Legate is a member of the Yoknapatawpha hunting party that travels to the Delta in 1940, a son of one of Ike's "old companions, whom he had taught" the discipline of hunting (320). As a member of this newest generation of hunters, Legate is protective of Ike as "a man your age," but shows only a little concern when Roth Edmonds violates that code by killing a doe, and no concern at all for the "pretty light-colored" two-legged "doe" with whom Edmonds has an affair (321).

These descendants of Ike’s earliest hunting companions have had benefit from his tutelage in reading the sights and sounds of the forest, but nevertheless seem to be a diminished version of the men they're descended from - especially when one of them kills a doe with a shotgun.