The first McCaslin in Yoknapatawpha built a large slave plantation on rich bottom land along the county's northern boundary river. Like the Sartorises, his white descendants continue to own the property, though slave labor has been replaced by the tenant system. Through sexual relations with his female slaves, he has black descendants as well, including "his son" Lucas Beauchamp (7), in whose demeanor Chick sees the pride and arrogance of the man who begot him. The legacies of "Old Carothers" define a major theme in Go Down, Moses (1942).
Chick's father is a strangely elusive character. His wife and brother-in-law, Gavin, do the work of parenting his son, and, although he is physically present in the house where much of the story takes place, he is entirely irrelevant to what happens. There is no apparent dissatisfaction on anyone's part with this situation.
Chick's mother is also Gavin Stevens' sister, and from one of the oldest and most prominent Jefferson families. She is married to Charles Mallison, Sr., but apparently they live (with Gavin) in a large house that was built long ago by the Stevenses. For much of this novel she is characterized as a mother, by her excessive anxiety for her son's safety, but when the occasion calls for moral and physical courage she rises to it with grace and authority.
The great-grandson of the first Yoknapatawpha McCaslin, Carothers Edmonds owns and oversees the large tenant farm on which his distant cousin Lucas Beauchamp also lives. He is a major character in the novel Go Down, Moses (1942), where that first McCaslin is his great-great-grandfather. In Intruder he plays a much smaller role, mainly because during the story's action he is being operated on in a New Orleans hospital.
The county Sheriff is "a big, a tremendous man with no fat and little hard pale eyes in a cold bland almost pleasant face" (42-43). He is "a countryman, a farmer and the son of farmers" (105). As sheriff he lives in a rented house in Jefferson; in between the three non-consecutive terms he has served in office, he returns to "the farm and house where he had been born" (105). He knows how to curry favor with the people who elect him to office, but also shows great courage and moral character in making sure justice is done in the case of Vinson Gowrie's murder.
At the end of the novel Gavin mentions "Booker T. Washington" twice while talking to Lucas, contrasting the way Lucas did "what nobody expected you to" with how Washington "did only what everybody expected of him" (237). Gavin's meaning is extremely difficult to pin down. The historical Booker T. Washington was born into slavery but by the end of the 19th century perhaps the most prominent black leader in America. As the principal of Tuskegee Institute, a prominent orator and an adviser to several U.S.
John Brown's violent form of abolitionism, especially the assault he launched on the arsenal at Harper's Ferry, Virginia, as part of a plan to foment a slave rebellion, is often cited as a cause of the Civil War.
The real name of the writer whom Gavin Stevens calls "a sound sensitive lady poet of the time of my youth" (191) is Djuna Barnes, well known in the era between the World Wars as part of the Modernist movement in the arts. Today she is best known as the author of the lesbian novel Nightwood (1936), but she was also a visual artist, a journalist and, as Gavin's description says, a poet. The lines he quotes are taken, with a line omitted, from Barnes' poem "To the Dead Favourite of Liu Ch'e" (1920).
The Confederate brigade that General Cadmus Wilcox commanded fought on the last two days of the battle of Gettysburg. During Pickett's Charge they were deployed in support on Pickett's right flank, but were driven back by artillery fire fairly early in the attack.
