McCaslinsInGDM

Faulkner's revision of eight short stories into the novel Go Down, Moses, where he brings the characters he'd created as members of different families together inside the story of the McCaslin family over a century and a half, is one of his great achievements. For a fuller account of that process, see the "Manuscripts Etc." section on the novel's main page. In brief, the process begins when in the novel's first 'chapter,' the previously unpublished "Was," he gives Buck and Buddy a new brother, a slave named Tomey's Turl who is described as a "white half-McCaslin" (7). It is developed in the extensive additions he makes to the previously written material about Lucas Beauchamp, who now shares a common ancestor (Carothers McCaslin) with his various Edmonds landlords. It concludes with a revision of "Delta Autumn," where the last McCaslin and the last Edmonds are brought together with one of the last members of the Beauchamp family, and Carother McCaslins' 'original sin' as a slave owner is repeated on the eve of World War II. In the long chapter called "The Bear," it is Ike McCaslin who plumbs the true darkness at the heart of the family's history. As a sixteen-year-old he is hunting in the ledgers of the plantation that he will inherit as Old Carothers' grandson, innocently hoping to learn more about the history of "his own flesh and blood" (254), when he discovers the terrible truth about his heritage that results in his principled renunciation of the estate. Like Absalom, Absalom!, this novel uses a family to represent the larger history of a culture. And unlike Thomas Sutpen's poor white ancestry, the class origins of Old Carothers are the same as those of the Compsons, or the Sartorises.