Isaac McCaslin is the son of Theophilus "Uncle Buck" McCaslin and Sophonsiba Beauchamp, and the grandson and only direct white male descendant of Old Carothers McCaslin. Although Ike McCaslin is "father to no one," he is also, as the novel’s opening sentence has it, "uncle to half a county" (5). Ike is central both to the McCaslin-Beauchamp family tree and to the binding together of the stories that comprise Go Down, Moses.
Next to the church beside the main road into Frenchman's Bend is the churchyard, with "its sparse gleam of marble headstones in the sombre cedar grove" (The Hamlet, 349). Curiously, none of the fictions seem to mention anyone being buried in it - but see the entry Churchyard where Ellie Flint Is Buried.
The old Frenchman's body lies, along with the remains of many of his slaves, whom the narrator refers to as "the progenitors of saxophone players in Harlem," "beneath the weathered and illegible headstones" on a knoll four hundred yards away from the big house (375).
The original "rose-garden" of the Frenchman's plantation, supposedly the site of buried treasure, is a mass of "man-tall briers and weeds and persimmon shoots" (375, 374). It lies on "a vague slope" that rises to the "shaggy crest" on which the ruins of the mansion house stand (375).
