Lucius Quintus Carothers McCaslin

Lucius Quintus Carothers McCaslin - "Old Carothers" - was one of Yoknapatawpha's earliest and wealthiest white settlers, a slave-owner, and the patriarch of the family that comprises McCaslins, Beauchamps, and Edmondses. Although he never appears directly in the narrative, the larger narrative and much of the cast of Go Down, Moses originate with him. He has three legitimate children: the twin sons Amodeus, a lifelong bachelor, and Theophilus, father of Ike McCaslin; and an unnamed daughter, from whom Cass, Zack, and Roth Edmonds are descended. He also has two illegitimate, "black" children; from them descend the novel's many "Beauchamps" - and from his relationships with them descends the "curse" on the land that leads Ike to repudiate his inheritance (283). The descendant who is said to resemble him most is Lucas Beauchamp, who is both Old Carothers' grandson and great-grandson, although Lucas' "negro" race rather than his ancestry defines his place in the social order. The "old man" whom Ike calls "evil and unregenerate" is a much more negative representative of the planter aristocracy that ruled Yoknapatawpha before the Civil War than the examples in Faulkner's earlier fictions: Colonel Sartoris or General Compson, or even Thomas Sutpen (280). And Ike is not the only one who repudiates his legacy: James and Fonsiba Beauchamp, Carothers McCaslin's grandchildren and Lucas' siblings, flee the plantation on which their father was a slave of his own half-brothers.