The first McCaslin to appear in the fictions is "Uncle Ike McCaslin" (69). He appears in an appropriate setting - the big woods - but merely as one of the older hunters who also plays poker with the rest. His 'title' of "Uncle" is unexplained; there is no mention of the family he belongs to, but his dialect ("noways," "durn," 74) identifies him as lower class.
The slave Thucydides/Thucydus only appears in the novel Go Down, Moses by way of the McCaslin plantation ledgers, but the story outlined there is striking. He is the son of Roskus and Fibby and the husband who marries Eunice in the same year she is made pregnant by Old Carothers McCaslin, the white man who owns all four of these slaves. He was born in North Carolina. In his will Old Carothers bequeaths him land, but like Ike McCaslin, Thucydides renounces this inheritance. Instead, according to the ledgers, he chooses "to stay [on the plantation] and work it out" - i.e.
These unnamed children of Ike McCaslin appear only briefly, and enigmatically, in the magazine version of "Delta Autumn," where it says that Ike "had had a wife and children once though no more" (274). Go Down, Moses begins by saying that Ike McCaslin was childless, and when Faulkner revised this story for that novel these children disappear.
In The Reivers, Ned McCaslin's grandmother is identified only as "a Negro slave" who belonged to Lucius McCaslin (31). According to McCaslin family lore, and Ned himself, she was impregnated by the white man who owned her, Old Carothers McCaslin.
In "Go Down, Moses" and again the the chapter with that title in Go Down, Moses, Samuel Beauchamp's father "deserted him" when he was born and is "now in the state penitentiary for manslaughter" (258, 354). This "father who begot and deserted him" is described as "not only violent but bad"; Gavin Stevens, a white man, believes the "seed" this man planted in his son is the cause of his criminality, though Samuel's black grandmother blames the white landlord Roth Edmonds for her grandson's behavior (258, 354).
Like Nat Beauchamp in Go Down, Moses, Roth's mistress - James Beauchamp’s unnamed granddaughter in the revised version of "Delta Autumn" Faulkner published in Go Down, Moses - has an aunt in Vicksburg with whom she stays. This unnamed aunt is a widow who takes in washing to support her family. For someone like Ike McCaslin, raised in the culture of the Jim Crow South, "taking in washing" is enough to identify this woman, and her very light-skinned niece, as black.
The founding Sartoris father and his son appear in Faulkner's last novel in two very different ways. The brief mention of the father, John, reads like an inscription on a statue, though admittedly some of the achievements are dubious: "the actual colonel, C.S.A. - soldier, statesman, politician, duelist . . . murderer" (72-73). This list doesn't include the railroad he "built . . . in the mid-seventies," but that too is mentioned in the novel (73).
In the prose sections of this novel, four members of the Sartoris family appear as part of the larger history of Yoknapatawpha, though always in summary fashion. John plays the largest role in that story, as the narrative ticks off a series of events that define his public significance: his arrival and leadership in re-building the courthouse, his raising of the regiment and service in the Civil War, his construction of the railroad.
The young narrator of this story, set during the early years of World War II, notes that the descendants of Colonel Sartoris "still lived in our county" (112). No Sartorises actually appear in the story, however, and the only two who are mentioned have been dead for over 70 years: the Colonel "himself" and Mrs. Rosa Millard, his "mother-in-law who stood off the Yankees and carpetbaggers" while the Colonel was away at war (112). This is the first mention of "carpetbaggers" in connection with her.
This eighth story about the Sartoris family during the Civil War, written half a dozen years after the others were collected into The Unvanquished, is like the rest narrated by Bayard. His father, Colonel John, appears several times, but the Sartoris men are both overshadowed by John's mother-in-law, Rosa, who not only runs the plantation while John at war, but gives orders to a Confederate General - though the field on which she fights is marital rather than martial.
