The Digital Yoknapatawpha Project

Carothers McCaslin owned a number of slaves, including the ones he brought with him from Carolina and the ones he fathered; those named slaves have their own entries. This entry represents the rest of the enslaved people on the McCaslin plantation. Old Carothers' sons Buck and Buddy, are reluctant to buy Tennie from Hubert Beauchamp because they "had so many niggers already" (7), but their reluctance extends to other aspects of slave-owning as well.

Tennie was born a slave and worked on the Beauchamp plantation until, as recounted in the novel's first chapter, "Was," she is won by Buddy McCaslin in a card game. She brings the surname Beauchamp with her when she is brought to the McCaslin plantation, where she and Tomey’s Turl marry and have six children. Amodeus, Carolina (or "Callina"), and an unnamed child all died in infancy, but James ("Tennie's Jim"), Sophonsiba ("Fonsiba"), and Lucas grew to adulthood.

Sophonsiba is Hubert Beauchamp's sister and the one who insists that their family plantation be called "Warwick," to draw out their purported connection to English royalty. The first description of her in "Was" tends toward absurdity rather than elegance, in part because it is related through nine-year-old Cass Edmonds: "Her hair was roached under a lace cap; she had on her Sunday dress and beads and a red ribbon around her throat" (12).

The full name of Ike McCaslin's Uncle Hubert, as readers learn when he signs the i.o.u.'s he leaves his nephew instead of a golden treasure, is Hubert Fitz-Hubert Beauchamp. The son of the man who built it, he owns the "Warwick" plantation that is half-a-day’s ride from the McCaslin plantation. Until her marriage, his sister, Sophonsiba, lived with him. After the Civil War he takes a black mistress for a while, and then lives with an aged black servant "in one single room" in the decaying mansion (290) until it burns down.

These "children" live in Ike's house in Jefferson with their mother, the sister of his dead wife (6).

Tomey's Turl is both the son and the grandson of the white man, Old Carothers McCaslin, who owned his grandmother and mother. The name by which he is known, Tomey’s Turl, instead of simply Terrel, underscores his ties to his mother, Tomey, but Hubert Beauchamp puts in words the paternal identity that makes white men nervous around Tomey's Turl: he is "that damn white half-McCaslin" (7). And actually, as Ike discovers in the plantation ledgers, he is 'three-quarters' McCaslin, though his incestuous origin is not ever mentioned explicitly.

Amodeus "Uncle Buddy" McCaslin is the twin brother of Theophilus and the son of Carothers McCaslin. He is described in "Was" as "all one gray color, like an old gray rock or a stump with gray moss on it, that still, with his round white head like Uncle Buck's but he didn’t blink like Uncle Buck and he was a little thicker than Uncle Buck, as if from sitting down so much watching food cook, as if the things he cooked had made him a little thicker than he would have been and the things he cooked with, the flour and such, had made him all one same quiet color" (26).

Theophilus "Uncle Buck" McCaslin is a son of Lucius Quintus Carothers McCaslin, the twin brother of Amodeus McCaslin, and the father of Ike McCaslin, who was born into his father's old age when Buck, after eluding Sophonsiba Beauchamp's determination to marry him in the novel's first chapter and a bachelor "past fifty and then sixty" (248), is somehow trapped - their wedding takes place offstage. Buck is "the one who ran the plantation and the farming of it" while his brother "did the housework and the cooking" (248).

The novel identifies Ike as a "widower" twice on its first page (5). His wife - possibly the daughter of the bank president who hires Ike and his partner to put a new roof on his stable - remains in the background for most of the novel, but in her brief appearances Faulkner emphasizes her hostility, as Ike meets her "tense bitter indomitable voice" with a posture of familiarity (104). Ike's wife considers the McCaslin plantation Ike's property, and her husband a fool for handing it over to Cass Emonds.

Although the man who becomes Ike's partner in the carpentry business is never named, the description of him is very vivid: he is a "blasphemous profane clever dipsomaniac who had built blockade-runners in Charleston in '62 and '3," who "appeared in Jefferson two years ago nobody knew from where" (295). Ike takes care of him when he succombs to drink, and the man helps to build a "bungalow" in town (297) as a wedding present for Ike.