Tennie was born a slave and worked on the Beauchamp plantation. In Go Down, Moses she is won in a card game by Buddy McCaslin, and brings the surname "Beauchamp" with her when she comes to the McCaslin plantation and marries a McCaslin slave (and half-brother to Buddy and Buck McCaslin) named Tomey's Turl. Together they have six children, three of whom - James ("Tennie's Jim"), Sophonsiba ("Fonsiba"), and Lucas - survive into adulthood. Also at the McCaslin place, she nurses the infant Ike McCaslin.
In Go Down, Moses Tomey's Turl is both the son and the grandson of the white man, Old Carothers McCaslin, who owned his grandmother and mother. The name by which he is known, Tomey’s Turl, instead of simply Terrel, underscores his ties to his mother, Tomey, but Hubert Beauchamp puts in words the paternal identity that makes white men nervous around Tomey's Turl: he is "that damn white half-McCaslin" (7). And actually, as Ike discovers in the plantation ledgers, he is 'three-quarters' McCaslin, though his incestuous origin is not ever mentioned explicitly.
Sophonsiba is Hubert Beauchamp's sister and the one who insists that their plantation be called "Warwick," as a claim on the family's purported connection to English royalty. The onstage role she plays in Go Down, Moses tends toward absurdity rather than elegance, in part because it is related through nine-year-old Cass Edmonds: "Her hair was roached under a lace cap; she had on her Sunday dress and beads and a red ribbon around her throat" (12).
Old Carothers McCaslin has three legitimate white children, one of whom is this daughter. This elusive figure is never named; the first time she appears in Go Down, Moses she is referred to as Cass Edmonds' "grandmother" (who "raised him following his mother's death") and "Uncle Buck and Uncle Buddy's sister" (9). She is at the head of the "distaff" side of the white McCaslins (5), "the woman" through whom Cass inherits both McCaslin blood, and, since Ike renounces his inheritance, the McCaslin property (243).
Amodeus (Uncle Buddy) McCaslin is the son of Old Carothers McCaslin and the twin brother of Theophilus (Uncle Buck). He is an outstanding poker player, a good cook and housekeeper, and a less significant presence in the fiction that his brother. During the Civil War present of The Unvanquished Buddy is in Virginia fighting in Tennant's brigade after beating his brother in a card game for the privilege of serving in the Confederate regiment that was raised in Yoknapatawpha.
Theophilus McCaslin - better know as "Uncle Buck" - is a son of Old Carothers McCaslin, the twin brother of Buddy, and the father of Ike. While Buddy appears in only two texts, Buck is present or mentioned in ten of them. He is actually called "Theophilus" when he attends the burial of Charles Bon in Absalom! and sends him off as a "Confedrit soldier" (122); the passage contains no hint of the larger McCaslin family or this man's place in it.
In Go Down, Moses, Tomey, born Tomasina, is listed in the McCaslin ledgers as the daughter of Thucydus and Eunice, slaves on the McCaslin plantation. Biologically, however, she was fathered by Lucius Quintus Carothers McCaslin, the white man who owned her and who was also her father. Like her mother, Tomey was a slave on the McCaslin plantation, and also like her mother, she was impregnated by Lucius McCaslin. She dies giving birth to their child.
Eunice appears in the novel only as a name in the McCaslin plantation ledgers, but behind those entries is the terrible story that much of Go Down, Moses is organized around. Eunice was bought by Lucius Quintus Carothers McCaslin in New Orleans in 1807 for $650. Although she is never physically described, our decision to identify her race as 'Mixed' rather than 'Black' is based on the extravagant amount of money Old Carothers paid for her on the New Orleans slave market, which is associated elsewhere in Faulkner with the sale of quadroons as concubines to wealthy white men.
The wife of Lucius Quintus Carothers McCaslin, the slave-owning patriarch at the head of the McCaslin, Beauchamp, Edmonds and Priest families in Faulkner's late fictions, is mentioned only once, in The Reivers. It is her Bible that Ned, the only one of her husband's illegitimate and biracial descendants who is named McCaslin rather than Beauchamp, carries in his bag - a symbolic gesture that is extremely interesting and opaque.
Lucius Quintus Carothers McCaslin - often referred to as "Old Carothers" - was one of Yoknapatawpha's earliest and wealthiest white settlers, the slave-owning patriarch of the racially diverse family that Faulkner puts at the center of two novels: Go Down, Moses and The Reivers. In two other texts - The Unvanquished and Intruder in the Dust he is a minor presence.
