McCaslin Commissary in Go Down, Moses (Location)

The commissary at the McCaslin-Edmonds Place is where the landlord's records are kept, and where the tenant farmers buy most if not all of their supplies. It is described in Go Down, Moses as a "long room with . . . ranked shelves of tinned food and tobacco and patent medicines, its hooks pendant with trace chains and collars and hames" (76), and its smell as that "of molasses and cheese and leather and kerosene" (93). Above the desk on a shelf are the ledgers where Isaac McCaslin reads about "the slow outward trickle of food and supplies and equipment which returned each fall as cotton made and ginned and sold" (242). It is situated one half mile from Rider's cabin.