The Digital Yoknapatawpha Project

This is the doctor whom Lucas Beauchamp goes to get when Zack Edmonds’s wife has trouble in labor; he arrives too late to prevent her death.

Henry Beauchamp is the oldest child of Lucas and Molly Beauchamp. He is raised alongside Roth Edmonds as the white child's "black foster-brother" (106), just as his father was raised alongside Roth’s father, Zack. When Roth, however, insists on drawing the color line between them, the seven-year-old Henry accepts the new terms of their relationship, but tells Roth, "peacefully," that "I aint shamed of nobody . . . Not even me" (110).

In this novel Zack Edmonds’s unnamed wife dies giving birth to their son, Roth Edmonds.

The unnamed county sheriff who arrests Lucas is described by the narrator as "a tremendous man, fat" (62). When Lucas thought about him earlier in the story, he calls him "a redneck without any reason for pride in his forbears nor hope for it in his descendants” (43). There are two other Yoknapatawpha sheriff's in the novel, Sheriff Maydew in "Pantaloon in Black" and a second unnamed one in "Go Down, Moses." They are essentially contemporaneous, but the text does not suggest any connection between any of them - so we have created three separate "Sheriff" entries.

Labor on the McCaslin-Edmonds plantation is supplied by Negro tenant farmers. They don't appear in the novel, but when Lucas sees the sun coming up he thinks that in "another hour . . . every field along the creek would have a negro and a mule in it" (40). Like the fields, these mules belong to Roth Edmonds.

These "men women and children come at some time during the day and look quietly on" as the archaeologists investigate the Indian mound (37).

Zachary is the son of Cass and Alice Edmonds and the great-great-grandson (on the "distaff" side, 5) of the patriarch Lucius Quintus Carothers McCaslin. Zack was raised alongside his Negro cousin Lucas Beauchamp, and as boys they lived "almost as brothers lived" (54). But Zack grows up to inherit the plantation and Lucas grows up to be a tenant farmer on the same land, and when Zack brings Lucas' wife Molly into his big house to care for his son Roth after his wife dies in childbirth, the relationship between them festers to the point of erupting into homocidal violence.

The daughter of Lucas and Molly Beauchamp, Nat appears in "The Fire and the Hearth" as seen through her father’s eyes: "small, thin as a lath, young; she was their youngest and last - seventeen" (71). She marries George Wilkins, apparently in secret, but the 'ever after' involves her in an ongoing struggle against her domineering father and with her lazy husband. Despite her size, she is determined to get what she deserves from both of them.

Both the essentially comic character of "Molly" who appeared in "A Point of Law" and "Gold Is Not Always" and the very poignant "Molly" who appeared in "Go Down, Moses" are present in the novel Go Down, Moses. The daughter of slaves who belonged to the Worsham family, she grew up with Miss Worsham in Jefferson but moved to the McCaslin-Edmonds plantation when she married Lucas Beauchamp.

Lucas initially sees his George Wilkins as a competitor in the moonshine whiskey business, along the lines of this earlier "other competitor," who "about five years ago" also tried to set up another still on the McCaslin-Edmonds place, but now, Lucas reminds himself with apparent pleasure, was "plowing and chopping and picking cotton which was not his on the State penal farm at Parchman" (33).