Submitted by tmtowner@utdall... on Mon, 2016-06-20 18:02
Old Carothers McCaslin has three legitimate white children, one of whom is this daughter. This elusive figure is never named; the first time she appears in Go Down, Moses she is referred to as Cass Edmonds' "grandmother" (who "raised him following his mother's death") and "Uncle Buck and Uncle Buddy's sister" (9). She is at the head of the "distaff" side of the white McCaslins (5), "the woman" through whom Cass inherits both McCaslin blood, and, since Ike renounces his inheritance, the McCaslin property (243).
Submitted by tmtowner@utdall... on Mon, 2016-06-20 17:58
Cass' first name is actually McCaslin; he is named after his great-grandfather, "Old Carothers" McCaslin. In the novel's opening chapter Cass appears as the nine-year-old narrator of "Was," living on the McCaslin estate with his uncles Amodeus and Theophilus. Sixteen years older than his cousin Ike McCaslin, Cass becomes Ike's surrogate father after Ike’s father dies in 1879. Since Cass is descended from Old Carothers by the "distaff" (5) or female side of the family (his grandmother was Carothers McCaslin's daughter), Cass would not ordinarily inherit the McCaslin property.
The back route Ratliff and his fellow treasure-seekers take from Bookwright's to the Old Frenchman's place takes them down "lanes" that run "pale between the broad spread of fields" past "scattered and remote homesteads" and then through "tunnels of trees" (373). Apparently he drives this route in the other direction later, on his way to meet Flem Snopes and buy the Old Frenchman's.
In The Hamlet the back route Ratliff and his fellow treasure-seekers take from Bookwright's to the Old Frenchman's place takes them down "lanes" that run "pale between the broad spread of fields" past "scattered and remote homesteads" and then through "tunnels of trees" (373). Apparently he drives this route in the other direction later, on his way to meet Flem Snopes and buy the Old Frenchman's.
To keep his negotiations with Flem Snopes for the purchase of the Old Frenchman's place secret, Ratliff drives hurriedly away from the Bend up the road that "turns off to McCaslin's farm," three miles along a "winding and little-used lane," and a mile toward Jefferson on the "highroad" to a spot two miles from the hamlet (390).
All we know about the place where Lump Snopes lives in The Hamlet is that it is "five miles" from the tenant farm where Mink Snopes lives (271). Lump is a clerk in Varner's store, not a farmer, but the place is lives is probably another tenant farm.
After dragging Houston's body for "better than a mile" along "an old logging road, choked with undergrowth and almost indistinguishable now, about two feet below the flat level" of the creek bottom, Mink Snopes tries to hide it a second time in "the shell of a once-tremendous pin oak [tree], topless and about ten feet tall" (249-50). Nearby are both the "slough" into which he throws his gun (257) and the water, called both a "river" and a "stream" (281), into which he throws Houston's body - or most of it.
