Lucas

Lucas has lived as a sharecropper for sixty years on the Edmonds plantation (227), a tenant first of Roth's father and then Roth. He is shrewd, manipulative, and "absolutely impenetrable" in his calculated dealings with others, especially white people (237). In this story, he outwits a big-city salesman and Edmonds in order to use a metal detector in search of buried treasure. In Go Down, Moses, Lucas gives up his search in order to save his marriage, but in this narrative he is still certain that "that money is buried down there by the creek," even in the face of Edmonds' exasperation and incredulity (237). Lucas has central roles in the family narrative at the heart of Go Down, Moses and the racialized murder mystery of Intruder in the Dust.