Go Down, Moses, William Faulkner

Go Down, Moses

This novel is in essence a collection of seven related short stories. The most prominent character is Isaac McCaslin, “Uncle Ike”, who will live to be an old man; “uncle to half a county and father to no one.” Though originally published as a short story collection, Faulkner considered Go Down, Moses to be a novel in the same way The Unvanquished is considered a novel. Therefore, most editions today no longer print “and other stories” in the title.

Go Down, Moses tells the composite history of the McCaslin family, of the descendents of Carothers McCaslin and the residents of the plantation he founded. The histories emerge gradually over the course of the novel, with parts of information appearing in successive stories, sometimes contradicting the information given in previous stories.

Each story features its own plot and is independent of the other stories. The first story, Was, involves young McCaslin Edmonds, who helps his Uncle Buck chase the slave Turl to Hubert Beauchamp’s plantation, where Buck narrowly avoids having to marry Beauchamp’s sister Sophonsiba.

Contents
Was
The Fire And The Hearth
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Pantaloon In Black
The Old People
The Bear
Delta Autumn
Go Down, Moses

To Mammy

CAROLINE BARR

MISSISSIPPI

(1840-1940)

Who was born in slavery and who gave to my family a fidelity without stint or calculation of recompense and to my childhood an immeasurable devotion and love.

Was

I

ISAAC MCCASLIN, ‘UNCLE IKE,’ past seventy and nearer eighty than he ever corroborated any more, a widower now and uncle to half a county and father to no one.

This was not something participated in or even seen by himself, but by his elder cousin, McCaslin Edmonds, grandson of Isaac’s father’s sister and so descended by the distaff, yet notwithstanding the inheritor, and in his time the bequestor, of that which some had thought then and some still thought should have been Isaac’s, since his was the name in which the title to the land had first been granted from the Indian patent and which some of the descendants of his father’s slaves still bore in the land.

But Isaac was not one of these: — a widower these twenty years, who in all his life had owned but one object more than he could wear and carry in his pockets and his hands at one time, and this was the narrow iron cot and the stained lean mattress which he used camping in the woods for deer and bear or for fishing or simply because he loved the woods; who owned no property and never desired to since the earth was no man’s but all men’s, as light and air and weather were; who lived still in the cheap frame bungalow in Jefferson which his wife’s father gave them on their marriage and which his wife had willed to him at her death and which he had pretended to accept, acquiesce to, to humour her, ease her going but which was not his, will or not, chancery dying wishes mortmain possession or whatever, himself merely hold it for his wife’s sister and her children who had lived in it with him since his wife’s death, holding himself welcome to live in one room of it as he had during his wife’s time or she during her time or the sister-in-law and her children during the rest of his and after.

Not something he had participated in or even remembered except from the hearing, the listening, come to him through and from his cousin McCaslin born in 1850 and sixteen years his senior and hence, his own father being near seventy when Isaac, an only child, was born, rather his brother than cousin and rather his father than either, out of the old time, the old days.

II

When he and Uncle Buck ran back to the house from discovering that Tomey’s Turl had run again, they heard Uncle Buddy cursing and bellowing in the kitchen, then the fox and the dogs came out of the kitchen and crossed the hall into the dogs’ room and they heard them run through the dogs’ room into his and Uncle Buck’s room then they saw them cross the hall again into Uncle Buddy’s room and heard them run through Uncle Buddy’s room into the kitchen again and this time it sounded like the whole kitchen chimney had come down and Uncle Buddy bellowing like a steamboat blowing and this time the fox and the dogs and five or six sticks of firewood all came out of the kitchen together with Uncle Buddy in the middle of them hitting at everything in sight with another stick. It was a good race.

When he and Uncle Buck ran into their room to get Uncle Buck’s necktie, the fox had treed behind the clock on the mantel. Uncle Buck got the necktie from the drawer and kicked the dogs off and lifted the fox down by the scruff of the neck and shoved it back into the crate under the bed and they went to the kitchen, where Uncle Buddy was picking the breakfast up out of the ashes and wiping it off with his apron. “What in damn’s hell do you mean,” he said, “turning that damn fox out with the dogs all loose in the house?”

“Damn the fox,” Uncle Buck said. “Tomey’s Turl has broke out again. Give me and Cass some breakfast quick. We might just barely catch him before he gets there.”

Because they knew exactly where Tomey’s Turl had gone, he went there every time he could slip off, which was about twice a year. He was heading for Mr Hubert Beauchamp’s place just over the edge of the next county, that Mr Hubert’s sister, Miss Sophonsiba (Mr Hubert was a bachelor too, like Uncle Buck and Uncle Buddy) was still trying to make people call Warwick after the place in England that she said Mr Hubert was probably the true earl of only he never even had enough pride, not to mention energy, to take the trouble to establish his just rights. Tomey’s Turl would go there to hang around Mr Hubert’s girl, Tennie, until somebody came and got him.

They couldn’t keep him at home by buying Tennie from Mr Hubert because Uncle Buck said he and Uncle Buddy had so many niggers already that they could hardly walk around on their own land for them, and they couldn’t sell Tomey’s Turl to Mr Hubert because Mr Hubert said he not only wouldn’t buy Tomey’s Turl, he wouldn’t have that damn white half-McCaslin on his place even as a free gift, not even if Uncle Buck and Uncle Buddy were to pay board and keep for him.

And if somebody didn’t go and get Tomey’s Turl right away, Mr. Hubert would fetch him back himself, bringing Miss Sophonsiba, and they would stay for a week or longer, Miss Sophonsiba living in Uncle Buddy’s room and Uncle Buddy moved clean out of the house, sleeping in one of the cabins in the quarters where the niggers used to live in his great-grandfather’s time until his great-grandfather died and Uncle Buck and Uncle Buddy moved all the niggers into the big house which his great-grandfather had not had time to finish, and not even doing the cooking while they were there and not even coming to the house any more except to sit on the front gallery after supper, sitting in the darkness between Mr Hubert and Uncle Buck until after a while even Mr Hubert would give up telling how many more head of niggers and acres of land he would add to what he would give Miss Sophonsiba when she married, and go to bed.

And one midnight last summer Uncle Buddy just happened by accident to be awake and hear Mr Hubert drive out of the lot and by the time he waked them and they got Miss Sophonsiba up and dressed and the team put to the wagon and caught Mr Hubert, it was almost daylight.

So it was always he and Uncle Buck who went to fetch Tomey’s Turl because Uncle Buddy never went anywhere, not even to town and not even to fetch Tomey’s Turl from Mr Hubert’s, even though they all knew that Uncle Buddy could have risked it ten times as much as Uncle Buck could have dared.

They ate breakfast fast. Uncle Buck put on his necktie while they were running toward the lot to catch the horses. The only time he wore the necktie was on Tomey’s Turl’s account and he hadn’t even had it out of the drawer since that night last summer when Uncle Buddy had waked them in the dark and said, “Get up out of that bed and damn quick.” Uncle Buddy didn’t own a necktie at all; Uncle Buck said Uncle Buddy wouldn’t take that chance even in a section like theirs, where ladies were so damn seldom thank God that a man could ride for days in a straight line without having to dodge a single one.

His grandmother (she was Uncle Buck’s and Uncle Buddy’s sister; she had raised him following his mother’s death. That was where he had got his christian name: McCaslin, Carothers McCaslin Edmonds) said that Uncle Buck and Uncle Buddy both used the necktie just as another way of daring people to say they looked like twins, because even at sixty they would still fight anyone who claimed he could not tell them apart; whereupon his father had answered that any man who ever played poker once with Uncle Buddy would never mistake him again for Uncle Buck or anybody else.

Jonas had the