The Digital Yoknapatawpha Project

According to the narrator, the townspeople of Jefferson turn the event in which "the white and the negro cousins [Ike McCaslin and Lucas Beauchamp] went side by side to the bank that morning" into a piece of local lore, part of "the minor annals of the town" (105).

Fonsiba Beauchamp is the fifth child of Tomey’s Turl and Tennie Beauchamp, descended through her father from Old Carothers McCaslin and related to Ike McCaslin, whose mother (nee Sophonsiba Beauchamp) is the source of Fonsiba's first name. After Emancipation, when she is seventeen, she marries a Northern black, and moves with him to a farm in Arkansas, where Ike finally finds her some years later and arranges for her $1000 inheritance to be issued to her in monthly installments.

The tangled thread tracing this character's role(s) in the novel is a good instance of how Faulkner is evolving Go Down, Moses from a set of previous short stories and from his own awakened interest in the stories of the black inhabitants of Yoknapatawpha. "Tennie's Jim" originates in the character of "Jimbo" in the magazine version of "The Old People," where he is a black servant accompanying the white hunters on their yearly trips to the big woods.

Memphis is the city closest to Yoknapatawpha. When Roth Edmonds believes his mule has been stolen, he thinks about notifying the police there to be on the lookout for the animal.

Oscar works for Roth Edmonds as a stableman, and along with Dan, the head stableman on the McCaslin-Edmonds place, he helps Edmonds search for the missing mule. Like Dan, he recognizes the human as well as the animal footprints they are following; the fact that Edmonds doesn't "realise" until "later" that "both the negroes" withheld the name of the man, another Negro, subtly calls attention to the racial dynamics in play in Faulkner's world (81).

Dan is the head stableman on the McCaslin-Edmonds' place, and is one of the two Negroes who help Roth search for "Alice Ben Bolt," the valuable mule who has gone missing. Dan immediately recognizes the mule's footprint and (as Roth "would realize" later) also recognizes the footprints of the man who led Alice away (81). The fact that Dan doesn't tell Roth who that man is puts Dan and his white boss on opposite sides of the color line.

Lucas Beauchamp tells the story of "two strange white men" who appeared in Yoknapatawpha "three or four years ago and dug up twenty-two thousand dollars in an old churn" (78). George Wilkins later corroborates this account, but it is doubted by Roth Edmonds - probably with good reason.

The man who comes to Yoknapatawpha to sell Lucas Beauchamp a metal detector is "young, not yet thirty, with the assurance, the slightly soiled snap and dash, of his calling" (76). When he falls for Lucas' story about buried treasure, he ends up renting the machine from Lucas to search for the money on his own. Just who has sold whom is suggested when the novel brings the two men face to face: "the shrewd, suddenly attentive face of the young white man, the absolutely expressionless face of the Negro" (80).

A political appointee, this United States Attorney moved to Jefferson "only after the administration changed eight years ago" - presumably a reference to the election of Franklin Roosevelt in 1932 (70). An "angry-looking man," his one comment during the trial is ignored by the presiding (and native born) judge (71).

Judge Gowan's assistant is described as a “young, brisk, slightly harried white man in glasses” (70).