The Digital Yoknapatawpha Project

While hunting for the first time in Go Down, Moses Ash is talking about this "new light-colored woman who nursed next door to Major de Spain's" when he is surprised by a yearling bear in the path (309). It's clear that this young 'nurse' - that is, wet nurse - has caught his eye, but nothing else about her is known. Our decision to identify her as biracial is based on the way 'light-colored' or '-complexioned' is used elsewhere in the fictions.

Daisy is mentioned by Major de Spain when he tells Ike that Ash would be glad to go into the woods, "where he won't have to eat Daisy's cooking" (301). It seems clear that like Ash, Daisy works for the Major as a cook, and it becomes likely that she is Ash's wife when De Spain adds "complain about it" - her cooking - "anyway" (301).

Although Go Down, Moses does not say so explicitly, this man would have been a slave on the Beauchamp plantation before the Civil War. After it, he is an "ancient and quarrelsome" old man who continues to live with his former master, Hubert Beauchamp (289).

Part of the Federal force occupying Mississippi after the South surrendered in 1865, this "travelling Army paymaster" passes through Jefferson with Percival Brownlee as part of his "encourage" (278).

After Ike McCaslin moves into town, this landlady rents him the room where he continues to live at least at the beginning of his marriage.

The young woman, with skin "even lighter in color than Tomey’s Terrel," is characterized by Hubert Beauchamp as his cook (288); however, his sister Sophonsiba is almost certainly right to suspect that she is also his mistress. In response to Sophonsiba's accusation that this woman's presence "defiles" their home, Hubert exclaims "They’re folks too just like we are!" (288). But she is last seen hurrying away from the house, "the worn heavy carpet-bag jouncing and banging against her knee, routed and in retreat" (288).

An A[rmy] P[rovost] M[arshal] is the head of a unit of military police. This "Federal A.P.M." is one of the Yankee troops who are stationed in Mississippi as part of the post-war Reconstruction (277). He has a black mistress, the sister of Sickymo, which is why he ensures that Sickymo is made a marshal in Jefferson.

She is the mistress of a federal official in Yoknapatawpha during Reconstruction, a connection that leads to her brother’s installation as a marshal in Jefferson. She is described as "half-white" (277).

Sickymo was a U.S. marshal in Jefferson during Reconstruction, a period in which more than 2,000 African-Americans - many of them, like Sickymo, former slaves - held public office. Because he is illiterate, he "signs his official papers with a crude cross" (277).When still a slave, he stole alcohol, diluted it, and stored it in a sycamore tree in order to sell it - hence his name. His character and tenure in office are referred to as an instance of the evils that befell the defeated (white) South after the loss of the Civil War.

Alice is the wife of McCaslin Edmonds and the mother of Zack Edmonds. She is mentioned only once in the novel: "[Cass'] wife Alice had taught Fonsiba to read and write too a little" (263). (However, in "The Fire and the Hearth," the narrative claims that it was Ike's mother, Sophonsiba, who taught the Beauchamp children to read, 106.)