Lucas Beauchamp appears in seven fictions, all written after 1940. In Faulkner's last published novel, The Reivers, he is only mentioned, but the brief description of him there that one white character gives another sums him up well: "except for color," Lucas "looked (and behaved: just as arrogant, just as iron-headed, just as intolerant) exactly like" Lucius the first, the patriarch of the McCaslin family who is both Lucas' grandfather and his great-grandfather (223), and whom Lucas himself claims as his birthright.
In Go Down, Moses Fonsiba Beauchamp is the fifth child of Tomey’s Turl and Tennie Beauchamp. She is named Sophonsiba after white mistress of the plantation where Tennie was enslaved. In 1886, at the age of seventeen, she marries a Northern black, and moves with him to a farm in Arkansas, where Ike McCaslin finds her and arranges for her $1000 inheritance to be issued to her in monthly installments. Although Ike attempts to remove her from the squalor of her new life in Arkansas, her priorities are evident in the two words she offers in return: "I'm free" (267).
Although always a minor character, this black man reveals a lot about how Faulkner's imagination led him into and out of the haunted issue of slavery and its legacy. In his first published appearance he is "Tennie's Jim" in the hunting story "The Bear"; in that character he's a revised version of "Jimbo," one of the servants Major de Spain takes with him in "The Old People" on his annual hunting trips into the big woods.
Amodeus McCaslin Beauchamp is the first child of Tomey’s Turl and Tennie Beauchamp. Named after the white son of Old Carothers McCaslin, the father and grandfather of Tomey's Turl, he dies as an infant.
Isaac McCaslin's "dead wife" is very briefly referred to in "Delta Autumn." Go Down, Moses evokes her from the start, by identifying Ike as a "widower" twice on its first page (5). His wife - who may be the daughter of the bank president who hires Ike and his partner to put a new roof on his stable - remains in the background for most of the novel, but in her brief appearances Faulkner emphasizes her hostility, as Ike meets her "tense bitter indomitable voice" with a posture of familiarity (104).
The "Mrs. Edmonds" who is Cass Edmonds' mother in Go Down, Moses may be Lucius (Old Carothers) McCaslin's granddaughter, or she may be the wife of McCaslin's grandson - depending on whether her mother or she herself married a man named Edmonds. The novel doesn't allow us to decide between these alternatives. All it says about this character is that she died, presumably when her son was very young: his grandmother, McCaslin's daughter, "raised him following his mother's death" (9).
The Edmonds family descends from Lucius (Old Carothers) McCaslin "by the distaff" - that is, from McCaslin's daughter rather than one of his sons (5). The first Edmonds in this line may have been the man who married that daughter, or could just as easily be the man who married the daughter of that daughter - the novel provides no information about the sequence, nor any information at all about this man.
Few characters in the Yoknapatawpha canon are as protean as Isaac (Uncle Ike) McCaslin. If you only read "A Bear Hunt" (1934), "Lion" (1935), "The Old People" (1940), Intruder in the Dust (1948) and "Race at Morning" (1955), Uncle Ike is one of the men who are part of the annual hunting parties into the big woods.
