The middle child among Lucius Priest's three younger brothers in The Reivers. Since he still takes a nap after "dinner" (as Lucius calls the midday meal) he's probably less than six years old (56).
The oldest of Lucius Priest's younger brothers in The Reivers is named Lessep, his mother's maiden name. Since he still takes a nap after "dinner" (as Lucius calls the midday meal) he's probably less than seven years old (56).
Lucius Priest, protagonist and narrator of The Reivers, is both the 11-year-old boy who comes of age among the adventures and misadventures of a trip to Memphis and beyond in 1905, and the 67-year-old grandfather who is recounting that trip for his grandson in 1961. His lineage is white and aristocratic, but his two companions on the journey are poor white and black.
The great-great-great-grandson of Carothers McCaslin, the first Yoknapatawpha McCaslin after whom he is named, Carothers (Roth) Edmonds is the last owner of the McCaslin-Edmonds plantation in the fictions, the white landlord of the Negro tenant farmers who work the fields that he owns. Among those tenants is his 'black' relative, Lucas Beauchamp, the grandson of Old Carothers. In Go Down, Moses and the stories the precede it - "A Point of Law" and "Gold Is Not Always" - the relationship between Roth and Lucas is mainly an occasion for comedy.
The most vivid detail that Lucius Priest, the narrator of The Reivers, provides about his mother, Alison, is her love for riding in her father-in-law's automobile: she sits in the back seat with her children, her "face flushed and bright and eager, like a girl's" (41). She is resourceful enough to "invent a kind of shield" to keep them all safe whenever Grandfather discharges the tobacco he chews (41).
In Go Down, Moses Zack Edmonds' unnamed wife dies giving birth to their son Roth; that would be around 1898. In The Reivers "Cousin Louisa" is the woman at the McCaslin-Edmonds place who takes care of Lucius' siblings when his parents go to Bay St. Louis (48). Although that happens in 1905, Louisa is probably Zack's wife, though Faulkner may have instead decided to give Zack a sister named Louisa.
In "Go Down, Moses," and again in the chapter with that title in the novel Go Down, Moses - the only texts he appears in - Samuel is the grandson of Lucas and Molly Beauchamp. As he tells the census taker, to whom he identifies himself by his real name, Samuel Worsham Beauchamp was "born in the country near Jefferson, Mississippi" (256, 351). Like well over a million rural black southerners by the 1930s, he has relocated to the urban north.
The woman with whom Roth Edmonds has an affair and a child in Go Down, Moses is part of the extended McCaslin family: she is the granddaughter of James Beauchamp and so related to both Roth and Ike McCaslin. She is 'white' enough to pass as 'white' - until the fact that her aunt "took in washing" makes Ike realize that she is a Negro (though Ike uses a more offensive term, 343). She was born and educated in the North, and has taught school in Mississippi. Roth refuses to marry her, and even her "Uncle Isaac" tells her to take her child and "Go back North.
Like William Faulkner's father Murry in real life, Lucius' father Maury Priest owns a livery stable. In the first chapter of The Reivers, Maury displays considerable force of character when he handles the trouble caused by Boon's rash anger. And the "gentlemanly" way he treats even his black employees is worth noting (8). But after that he becomes almost invisible, even before departing with the rest of the adults in the family for Bay St. Louis.
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).
