Zachary Edmonds

Zachary Edmonds is the son of Cass and Alice, the father of Roth, and the great-great-grandson (on the "distaff" side) of the patriarch Lucius Quintus Carothers McCaslin, from whom the Edmondses inherit the big plantation which Zack runs during the late 19th and early 20th century. In the Go Down, Moses stories he is characterized mainly through his relationship to the Negro tenant farmer Lucas Beauchamp - who is also his cousin. Like Bayard Sartoris and Ringo, the white and black boys grow up together, living "almost as brothers lived" (54). As adults, however, Zack lives in the big house and Lucas in a sharecropper's cabin, and when Zack brings Lucas' wife Molly into his house to care for his son Roth after his wife dies in childbirth, the relationship between the cousins festers to the point of erupting into homicidal violence. To his credit, Zack comprehends the other's rage. In Intruder in the Dust Faulkner revises Zack's role in the family history a bit: here Lucas lives on his own ten acres in the middle of the plantation, property that Zack has given to him "and his heirs in perpetuity" (8). Zack appears for the last time, very briefly, in Faulkner's last novel, The Reivers.