William Faulkner’s Go Down, Moses formulates American South in the 20th century as a region undergoing changes and portrays the lingering effects of the Civil War and the violent legacy the protagonists encounter under the paternalism of the South’s entrenched white families. While tracing the roots and branches of the family tree, the novel not only restores a genealogy of the interracial McCaslin clan, which is a microcosm of the history of American South itself, but also represents the role of the black slaves in the making of the Southern plantation through the exploitation of the slaves in the antebellum era. With a series of related short stories, Faulkner tends to create the disturbing effects unfolded by these stories, in which many of his protagonists not only witness the misery marked by the plantation system but also get caught up in the destructive legacy caused by slavery. Faulkner in Go Down, Moses implicitly seeks to delineate the history of the white family and the slave life in the South. He “unflinchingly” restores what it means to have been forgotten and left in slavery, and confronts what it needs to restructure the past for the South, since the legacy of slavery and racism lingers and haunts the southern descendants as ripples have made to the surface of a lake.
In many of his novels, including Go Down, Moses, Faulkner historicizes racism and miscegenation through factual historical source. Traceable and inferable from the stories is Faulkner’s attempt to seriously research into the historical development, problems and transformation of the southern plantation society. His fictions actually provide recognizable references, upon which southern history is recorded and depicted. Sally Wolff’s interviews with Dr. Edgar Francisco III reveal that many of Faulkner’s novels are clearly based on a private farm diary: the Dairy of Francis Terry Leak, which is an antebellum plantation diary of Dr. Francisco’s forebear. Francisco
rememorized his childhood as Faulkner made frequent trips to Holly Springs to visit his father, Edgar Francisco Jr. and reported that Faulkner actually “was aware of the Leak Diary as early as the 1920s” (Wolff 16), and was so preoccupied with it that “[he]
appears to have turned to the Leak Diary as a source of information and ideas for his fiction” (17), since the similarities of the details between the real farm ledgers and his fictional ledgers are highly inferable and recognizable. As Francisco recollected and observed, Faulkner studied the farm ledgers in the 1930s and “was always scribbling”
and “did a lot of note taking” (16). Comparably, the real farm ledgers from the Leak Diary record the “meticulous details of plantation life from 1839 to 1862” (16), and
Go Down, Moses covers a longer time span, which was about to be situated far from
the antebellum period in 1830s across to the early 1940s to portray southern plantation life in American history.
Faulkner’s reference to the old Leak Diary appears obvious in Go Down, Moses.
The ledgers in the novel are described similarly to the Leak Diary as large volumes of old ledgers “clumsy and archaic in size and shape” (Faulkner 245) with the binding of
“yellowed pages scrawled in fading ink” (250). As a wealthy plantation owner, Francis Leak needed considerable quantity of necessities and foods for the support of his black slaves and carefully recorded every item of purchase for the management of his plantation. Running a plantation and farm requires the expenditure of “farm implements and machinery such as plows, hames, harrow teeth, and trace chains” (38) as well as food and clothing, such as “meat, bread, flour, sugar and coffee,” and
“shoes, coats, pantaloons, blankets” (38). The plantation vocabulary and everyday items associated with plantation life and farming are explicitly listed in the Leak Diary and adopted by Faulkner in rendering the contours of the lives of the black slaves in fiction. In Go Down, Moses, Faulkner provides a model of the operation of the slave-based plantation society and the text accounts the plantation life with the
items of “the barrels and kegs of flour and meal and molasses and nails, the wall pegs dependant with plowlines and plow-collars and hames and trace-trains” (Faulkner 245). And these words about plantation life in the Leak Diary cover even longer lists of the materials along with quantities and prices on it than the vocabulary Faulkner extracted for the same details in his fiction.
In the historical accounts of the diary, Leak not only records the materials bought for the plantation use, but also inscribes the transactions and transportations of slaves in his dairy. He goes into details and “carefully notes the ages, gender, health of his slaves and the price he would pay or receive as they are bought and sold” (Wolff 42).
From Leak’s correspondences with his neighbors and acquaintances in the ledgers, his acqusition of slaves in each transaction is written down as entry goes like: “the price of ‘negroes’ had changed ‘from $100. to $200. &…the number for sale was large’” or
“…sell to me a lot of ‘negroes’ consisting of a man 28 to 30 years of age, a boy about 16, a woman about 27 with a son about 9, & a girl about 16 with her first child about 4 months” (42). The black slaves are called “negro” by Leak in the antebellum time and appear to be acquired easily. These entries exemplify how a plantation owner and slaveholder marked down the purchases and conditions of his slaves. Faulkner’s fictional ledgers of the McCaslin family echo such entries which account for the transactions of slaves, for instance,
Eunice Bought by Father in New Orleans 1807 $650. dolars. (255).
Apparently, Leak regards the black slaves as pieces of property and commodity being purchased and sold through the transformation of human beings into monetary value for plantation economy. The transaction of slaves written in the ledgers thus illustrates that “equivalency is at the heart of the slave system and the violence perpetrated by that system against its victims” (Dussere 333). In this way, the ledgers testify to the violent, contentious legacy of slavery.
Faulkner’s representation of slave transaction in the South is so disclosed as entries in the Leak Diary through Isaac McCaslin’s reading of his family history recorded in the farm ledgers. The family ledgers Isaac read charges the expenses for the slaves carefully:
… the slow, day-by-day accruement of the wages allowed him and the food and clothing—the molasses and meat and meal, the cheap durable shirts and jeans and shoes and now and then a coat against rain and cold—charged against the slowly yet steadily mounting sum of balance. (Go Down, Moses 255)
In addition to the slave expenses and slave transactions, many of characters’ names in the novel are traceable and recognizable from the Leak Diary, such as: “Caruthers, Moses, Isaac, Sam, Tomey, Mollie, Edmund, and Worsham” (Wolff 31). These are the crucial characters, many of which are slaves, whose names are drawn in Go Down,
Moses. In crafting his fictional characters and deploying their stories, Faulkner seems
to incorporate his personal emotions so as to represent southern slave life as well as to suggest his own reaction towards it. In order to illustrate how the whites and the slaves lead their lives on the Mississippi plantation, Faulkner gives the names of the Leak slaves Sam, Isaac, and Tomey, for instance, to his protagonists with personality and identity, describing slaves’ daily lives and works on the plantation—“making bricks, working the land, plowing the fields” (31), celebrating holidays, and raising their children, and so on. It seems that by detailing the slaves’ daily lives and activities, Faulkner bears witness to their plantation lives and memorializes these forgotten, unnoticed black people.
In Go Down, Moses, Faulkner actually not only puts emphasis on slave life and history, but also portrays Native American life in the wilderness. In the novel, Sam Fathers is presented as a slave with the ethnicity of African American, Native
American and Caucasian heritage, who shares the similar physical feature and slave heritage with the slave Sam working on the farm of Francis Leak, and, more importantly, Sam Fathers becomes Isaac’s mentor by ushering the boy into a spiritual relation to the wilderness. Faulkner’s Sam Fathers represents American dispossession of Native American land and heritage the same as black people undergoing the transaction into slavery in white plantation society. Faulkner’s most history-haunted protagonist, Isaac McCaslin, mirrors the “southern biblical naming tradition” (Wolff 32), and through Isaac as an evocative figure of the southern past, Faulkner’s efforts intend to “bestow [his] powerful vision to understand the sins of the past” (32) in order to restore and represent southern slave experience.
Faulkner’s personal response and commentary on slavery can also be seen through his management of the plots in the novel. In foregrounding the repression and circumstances of female slave life, Faulkner brings the enormity of slavery to the fore by crafting incest and miscegenation into the stories of the white McCaslin family as the effect and legacy of slavery in the Deep South. He “fuels the complexity of the owner/slave relationship with incest and miscegenation” (Wolff 35) to draw on both the white patriarchal power, which takes absolute domination over his slaves on the plantation, and the interracial force of black and mulatto figures often presented in the Southern texts. For instance, Faulkner’s fictional slave Thomasina, nicknamed Tomey, led a tragic life of racial and sexual exploitation and died in childbirth. As a counterpoint to the factual female slave Toney, Tomey embodies the racial transgression and sexual appropriation made by the white, patriarchal progenitor. And Tomey’s Turl, the son of the white patriarch Carothers McCaslin and his own daughter Tomey, illuminates the effect of racial intersection which characterizes the Southern text.
Yet not simply as a typical Southern text, Faulkner’s Go Down, Moses is added
with more emotional response to the characters. Seeing the names of the slaves in the Leak Diary, Faulkner “weaves not only their names but many of the situations of their lives into his novels and stories suggests his deep empathy for their plight” (Wolff 31).
Faulkner charges affective scenes to depict slave’s grief and despondency under slavery. He slightly modifies the historical accounts and intertwines the details together to represent the lives of slaves. Taking the female slave Eunice for instance, by mixing a story up together with the fragments of a factual ice pond in the plantation and a drowned slave, Faulkner with affection edits Eunice’s life through a suicide with a devastated body and mind in reflection to the cruelty of slavery as a slave and a mother exploited by her white master. While a slave-owning planter obtains absolute control over his land and slaves, Faulkner gives voices and personalities to his characters, both the whites and the plantation slaves, as Lucas Beauchamp claimed himself of being the founder’s descendant, if only through the unrecognized black line. Lucas dwelled on a parcel of land set aside for him at the center of the plantation, and regarded it as his own land. Living on the private property, Lucas farmed the land intermittently, and failed to meet Roth Edmonds’
agricultural demand for cotton on his plantation, since he stole Roth’s mule to purchase a metal detector and even risked his marriage of forty-five years for his gold-hunting dream. Lucas’s gold-hunting scheme characterizes his personality as a black McCaslin with resilient and courageous determination. Not only the whites but also the blacks on the plantation are shaped by Faulkner into lifelike people in contrast to Leak’s lifeless and emotionless accounts of his slaves.
As a slave-owning plantation elite, Francis Leak usually “efficiently and without apparent emotion maintained the accounts for the buying and selling of slaves to work his plantation” (42); however, Faulkner’s representation of slave life with alterations departs from this factual, lifeless records on the real ledgers by providing his
protagonists with personalities and spirits. Buck and Buddy McCaslin are the two among the main characters with their own spirits and thoughts. As opponents of slavery in the South, the white twins Buck and Buddy refused to face a slave suicide under the paternalism of the South’s entrenched white family, neither did they openly discuss the patrimony bequeathed by their father to a “slave” Tomey’s Turl on the ledger. They allowed the slaves to pay for their freedom and only pretended to “play”
the chasing game to seize the runaway slaves as fugitive slaves like Turl who escaped to meet his lover each time. In the chasing scene of the prelude story “Was,” Tomey’s Turl outwitted his white owners by “successfully influencing a hand of poker” (44). In characterizing slave’s personality, Faulkner again gives the slave courage, wisdom and endurance to outwit his masters, which is unseen through the runaway slaves recorded in the Leak Diary. The abolitionist twins, unlike their father, did not attempt to take control over the slaves on their plantation as to depart from their roles as plantation heirs and slave owners.
In the pages of the familial ledgers, the twins carried on conversations with each other while accounting the slaves. This is similar to the Leak plantation ledger, in which “Leak wrote some of his entries to someone in particular, or so that someone else (not named), would read them. He [used] the word ‘you’ on numerous occasions”
(44). In Go Down, Moses, Faulkner keeps this form of conversations between the ledger-writers, Buck and Buddy. Their communicative style identifies the way they record and what happens on the plantation yet with disfiguration or abbreviation so as to be ignored and unnoticed. The entries below illustrate their communications with different handwritings recognizable by Isaac. Buddy wrote: