The Digital Yoknapatawpha Project

The archaeologists, "a group of white men, including two women," descend on the Indian mound in "The Fire and the Hearth" to study the ways of the "old people." Most of them are bespectacled and all are dressed in "khaki clothes which had patently lain folded on a store shelf twenty-four hours ago" (37).

"Roth," the name by which this Edmonds is known, is short for "Carothers"; he is the son of Zack and Louisa Edmonds, and the great-great-great grandson of Lucius Quintus Carothers McCaslin. Because Roth's mother died in childbirth, Molly Beauchamp is "the only mother he, Edmonds, ever knew" (113), and Lucas and Molly's son Henry was Roth's childhood playmate. In the narrative present of most of the novel (i.e. c1940) Roth is the current owner of McCaslin plantation.

Lucas is the last child of Tomey's Turl and Tennie Beauchamp, and the grandson (and great-grandson) of the white patriarch Lucius Quintus Carothers McCaslin. When Lucas married Molly Worsham in 1896, he lit a fire in the hearth on their wedding night, where it burned for the duration of their long marriage. As in other Faulkner texts, in boyhood Lucas was raised alongside his cousin Zack Edmonds, the child of the white family that now owns the plantation.

George Wilkins is a tenant farmer on the McCaslin-Edmonds plantation who is at times Lucas' rival, and at others his assistant. He is also Lucas' son-in-law, though there is some uncertainty about when the marriage took place. The judge who oversees the pair's aborted trial for making moonshine calls George a "jimber-jawed clown" (72), and that verdict is mostly upheld by the rest of his scenes in the novel.

The unnamed member of the group of slaves drawn into the hunt for Tomey’s Turl who retrieves a fyce, whisky, and a token from Sophonsiba from the Beauchamp house.

Sophonsiba only briefly mentions her father as she flirts with Buck McCaslin. Ike, however, recalls the Beauchamp family line, and Hubert’s and Sophonsiba’s father in it, as he contemplates his inheritance (294).

Jonas, a slave on the McCaslin plantation when it and he were owned by Buck and Buddy, appears once in Go Down, Moses in the familiar pose of the 'lawn jockey': "Jonas had the two horses saddled and waiting" (9).

The boy is a slave on the Herbert Beauchamp's plantation; he blows the fox horn announcing dinner time. Cass Edmonds thinks the boy is "about his size" (11)

The girl is a slave on Hubert Beauchamp's plantation. Since she follows Sophonsiba Beauchamp down the stairs, “carrying her fan” (12), it is likely that she is being trained as a house slave or personal slave for Sophonsiba.

Lucius Quintus Carothers McCaslin - "Old Carothers" - was one of Yoknapatawpha's earliest and wealthiest white settlers, a slave-owner, and the patriarch of the family that comprises McCaslins, Beauchamps, and Edmondses. Although he never appears directly in the narrative, the larger narrative and much of the cast of Go Down, Moses originate with him. He has three legitimate children: the twin sons Amodeus, a lifelong bachelor, and Theophilus, father of Ike McCaslin; and an unnamed daughter, from whom Cass, Zack, and Roth Edmonds are descended.