In this third volume in the Snopes trilogy, "Uncle Ike" is the only McCaslin mentioned. He is an "octogenarian," still associated with "hunting and fishing (407), but he is introduced into the novel's cast as the owner of what the narrative now calls "the McCaslin Hardware Company," where Jason Compson starts clerking (355).
Although two Edmondses and one McCaslin are mentioned in this novel, their place in it is extremely minor. All of them are connected in passing to Major de Spain's "old hunting camp" (61). The first mention of Ike, however, returns him to the role he had played twenty years earlier in Faulkner's career in "Fool About a Horse": the owner of the town's "hardware store" (13).
In this short story, one of the last that Faulkner ever published, the woods where Roth Edmonds and Ike McCaslin are hunting deer is a couple hundred miles from Yoknapatawpha, and the time is the 1950s. The roles both play in the narrative are minor, though the young unnamed narrator does acknowledge that Ike is not only "the oldest one in camp" (297), but also the best woodsman. "Race" in the story's title means 'a hunt, a chase' - not a cultural and historical problem that Roth perpetuated or that Ike ever tried to absolve himself of.
This 1948 novel is the McCaslin family's first re- appearance after Go Down, Moses (1942). Members from five generations and from all three of the family's branches - McCaslin, Edmonds and Beauchamp - are included in Intruder in the Dust, but the larger family story, as told in Moses, is significantly revised, a process that will continue in subsequent texts. Old Carothers McCaslin, the long-dead patriarch of the family, is described as Carothers (Roth) Edmonds' "great-grandfather" (7); in Moses he is Roth's great-great-grandfather.
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 In brief, the process begins when in the novel's first 'chapter,' the previously unpublished "Was," he gives Buck and Buddy a new brother, a slave named Tomey's Turl who is described as a "white half-McCaslin" (7).
This is the last story Faulkner wrote before beginning to pull eight short stories together into the novel Go Down, Moses. Ike's character is firmly associated again with the wilderness and hunting. But how far Faulkner still is from the novel's representation of the McCaslins is made clear by two things. First, the story refers, briefly but unambiguously, to Ike's "children" (274) - the very first sentence of the novel notes that Ike is "father to no one." Faulkner eliminated Ike's children when he revised the story for the novel.
Interestingly, this short story begins with a census taker interviewing a black convict named "Samuel Worsham Beauchamp" about his ancestry (256). In the novel Go Down, Moses, which ends with "Go Down, Moses" the story, this man will turn out to be one of the two last descendants of the McCaslin family - but Faulkner still hasn't worked out the family connections. Also interestingly, the rest of the story connects this man, through the wife of "Luke Beauchamp" (261), to a different white family that formerly owned slaves, the Worshams.
The white landlords and black tenant farmers from "Point of Law" return in this story, but Faulkner is no closer to imagining a familial relationship between them, or between either family and the McCaslins.
Although it is largely set on the plantation that will become morally charged with the worst aspects of slavery in Go Down, Moses, this story merely mentions a Beauchamp and an Edmonds. If we're following the way Faulkner's idea of the McCaslin family evolved, this story may seem very tangential - but it's worth noting that the white landlord of the plantation, whom Faulkner had called "Roth" in an earlier story, is now named "Carothers" (240). That name hasn't appeared before in the Yoknapatawpha fictions.
"Uncle Ike" is the only member of the McCaslin family who appears in the magazine version of "The Old People," published two years before the novel Go Down, Moses, for which Faulkner revised both the story - and still more dramatically, the McCaslin family. In the novel Ike is the central character, but the role he plays in the earlier story is a minor one, similar to his earliest appearances in the canon: he is simply one of the party of hunters who gather each November in the big woods, and does not speak at all.
