Submitted by ben.robbins@fu-... on Mon, 2016-02-29 11:33
In Go Down, Moses the friends' farm where Edmonds goes on Sunday afternoon to "look at other men's cotton" and join them in cursing the federal government is "three miles further" away from the McCaslin-Edmonds place than the church where Edmonds spent part of the morning (119).
Submitted by ben.robbins@fu-... on Mon, 2016-02-29 11:31
The text tells us that the country church that Roth attends is "five miles away" from the McCaslin-Edmonds place (119), but doesn't say in what direction. We have to speculate about that.
Submitted by ben.robbins@fu-... on Mon, 2016-02-29 11:19
There are at least two different Jefferson banks in Faulkner's fictions. One was opened before the Civil War, and the other was founded by Bayard Sartoris in the 1890s - which is just early enough, chronologically, for it to be the bank to which Ike takes Lucas on Lucas' 21st birthday to deposit the thousand dollars the McCaslin family is giving him as a legacy from the white slave-owner who was his grandfather. But we assume that that bank is the older one, elsewhere referred to as the Bank of Jefferson.
Submitted by ben.robbins@fu-... on Mon, 2016-02-29 11:06
When James Beauchamp runs away from the McCaslin plantation he doesn't stop "until he had crossed the Ohio River" (102). Before the Civil War, the Ohio was a boundary between slave and free states. Beauchamp was born the year after Abraham Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation. For him, the Ohio presumably represents the dividing point between South and North.
Submitted by ben.robbins@fu-... on Mon, 2016-02-29 11:03
When James Beauchamp runs away from the McCaslin plantation, Go Down, Moses suggests that he doesn't stop "until he had crossed the Ohio River" (102). Before the Civil War, the Ohio was a boundary between slave and free states. In texts from Uncle Tom's Cabin to Beloved, 'crossing the Ohio' meant escaping from slavery - though as both those texts make clear, slaves could be pursued even on the other side of the river. Beauchamp was born the year after Abraham Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation.
Submitted by ben.robbins@fu-... on Mon, 2016-02-29 11:01
Lucas Beauchamp's sister Fonsiba moves to a farm near the ominously named Midnight, Arkansas, after her marriage. The farm is described as "a single log edifice with a clay chimney . . . no barn, no stable, not so much as a hencoop: just a log cabin built by hand . . . a farm only in embryo" (264). Midnight itself contains a tavern, a livery stable, a big store, a saloon, a blacksmith shop - and a bank, to which Ike McCaslin later transfers money to provide Fonsiba with a kind of allowance.
Submitted by ben.robbins@fu-... on Mon, 2016-02-29 10:50
Lucas cons the salesman by planting silver dollars in the remains of an orchard on site of an abandoned plantation "almost two hours" by car from the McCaslin-Edmonds place (89). The road to it is "a gullied overgrown path winding through hills," and the site contains "a clump of ragged cedars, the ruins of old cementless chimneys, a depression which was once a well or a cistern, the old wornout brier- and sedge-choked fields spreading away and a few snaggled trees of what had been an orchard" (89).
