McCaslinsInR

The extended McCaslin family is again at the center of a novel. There are four Edmondses and four Beauchamps. There are six characters named McCaslin. Ike and his father Buck reappear briefly. The mention of Old Carothers acknowledges the "family skeleton" - that "old Lucius Quintus Carothers" had fathered a daughter with "a Negro slave" (31). This recalls the truth that had appalled Ike in Go Down, Moses, but is in fact a revision of that story: the slave here is a different woman than Eunice, and the particular horror of Old Carothers fathering a second child on his own enslaved daughter Tomey has disappeared. The product of this interracial relationship is not Tomey's Turl, but Ned McCaslin. Ned is one of the novel's three major characters, but in a comic role that enables the narrative to revisit the past nostalgically. Ned is a new member of the family. Even more interestingly, in this final Yoknapatawpha fiction, Faulkner extends the McCaslins onto an entirely new branch of the family tree, the Priests. It seems significant that this new line originates with the marriage between an Edmonds and a man named Lucius Priest, who is actually "a distant kinsman" of Lucius Quintus Carothers McCaslin (279). On the one hand, the idea of sex between kinfolks recalls, even as it renders harmless the incest in the McCaslin past in the past of Faulkner's fiction. On the other, this "Lucius" begets a family that is entirely white, which could be seen as a kind of bleaching of the racially mixed McCaslin family. The addition of a dozen Priests gives the final aggregated McCaslin family a majority of white members - 31, to 30 blacks and mulattoes.