Bobo Beauchamp

In The Reivers, Bobo Beauchamp is "another motherless Beauchamp child whom Aunt Tennie raised" on the McCaslin place (223). The narrative says he is the grandson of Tennie's Jim (21) and the cousin of Lucas Beauchamp (chronologically, however, Tennie's Jim, having been born only about two decades before Bobo, should be his father). When "the call of the out-world became too much for him," Bobo moved from Yoknapatawpha to Memphis (223), where he worked as a groom for Mr. Van Tosch, the white man who owns the horse Coppermine (i.e. Lightning). But being "a young country-bred Negro," it was also in Memphis that Bobo got "mixed up" with an unscrupulous white man (280), and this was the one thing which led to the other which drives the novel's plot: the loss and very roundabout recovery of Grandfather's automobile. Lucius refers to him as "one of us" (224) - though it's not clear if he means as a member of the extended McCaslin family or as a partisan of the reivers in the horse race.