Go Down, Moses

The McCaslin Family

Go Down, Moses is structured as seven interconnected stories, published in 1942, that together span roughly a century of the McCaslin family’s history in Yoknapatawpha County, Mississippi. The McCaslin family has two branches: the white branch, descended from old Lucius Quintus Carothers McCaslin, and the Black branch, descended from the enslaved people Carothers McCaslin owned and, in at least one case, fathered children by. Faulkner does not present these as separate families—they are the same family, divided by law and race and the specific violence of slavery, and the novel’s project is to insist on that unity against every social force that works to deny it.

The connecting figure across the seven stories is Isaac “Ike” McCaslin, who appears as a child in some stories and as an old man in others. The first stories establish the McCaslin world before the Civil War: the land, the enslaved people, the hunting culture, the complex web of obligation and exploitation that bound the white South together. The middle stories track the transition after emancipation—how little changed, how much the same structures of ownership and contempt reproduced themselves in new legal forms. The later stories follow Ike into the twentieth century, an old man who repudiated his inheritance and gained nothing by it, watching the world he tried to refuse continue anyway.

The McCaslin genealogy is genuinely complex, and Faulkner’s habit of referring to characters by multiple names or nicknames makes the first reading challenging. A family tree, whether in an appendix or self-constructed, repays the effort.

The Bear

The fourth and longest story, “The Bear,” is by common consent one of the greatest long stories in American fiction, and it is the moral and formal center of the book. It has two distinct registers: the first is one of the finest pieces of nature writing in American literature—the annual November hunting trip to the big woods, the shrinking wilderness, the pursuit of Old Ben, a legendary bear too large and too old to be killed by normal means, and Sam Fathers, the old man of mixed Chickasaw and Black ancestry who teaches Ike to hunt and to read the forest.

Ike McCaslin at sixteen kills his first buck and earns his place among the hunters. He also comes to love the wilderness as a place outside human commerce and human sin, a space that exists before the arrangements of ownership that have made his family’s history possible. The wilderness’s own destruction—the logging that will follow the bear’s death—is present throughout as a melancholy frame.

The story’s moral center is Ike’s descent, as a young man of twenty-one, into the old plantation ledgers kept by his father and uncle. What he reads there is a record of his grandfather’s crimes: the rape of an enslaved woman, the fathering of a child by that rape, and then the fathering of another child by that child. The crimes are recorded in the dry accounting language of the ledgers, which makes them more devastating than any explicit condemnation. Ike repudiates his inheritance—refuses the land, refuses the money—and spends the rest of his life as a carpenter. It is a genuine moral act. It changes nothing.

Faulkner’s Moral Novel

Go Down, Moses is Faulkner’s most explicitly moral work, his most direct engagement with the specific crime at the center of Southern history. The title comes from the African American spiritual “Go Down, Moses”—“Let my people go”—and the reference is not decorative. Faulkner is situating the McCaslin family history within the biblical narrative of captivity and liberation, and what the novel shows is that liberation is not what happened. The enslaved people were freed into a system designed to reproduce their subjugation without the legal name of slavery.

Ike McCaslin’s repudiation of his inheritance is Faulkner’s most sustained attempt to imagine a white Southern response to that history. That repudiation is presented with full respect for its moral seriousness and full clarity about its inadequacy: Ike refuses the land, but the land is still there, still worked by the descendants of the people his grandfather enslaved, still generating wealth for the McCaslins who do not refuse. The gesture is not nothing, but it is not enough, and Faulkner does not let it be enough.

Reading Go Down, Moses after Absalom, Absalom! and Light in August is to see Faulkner approaching the same central subject—race, inheritance, the impossibility of Southern innocence—from three different formal angles. The Nobel Prize committee in 1949 was honoring this body of work: the most sustained fictional examination of American original sin produced by any single writer.

Rating: 4.2/5 — Faulkner’s most morally serious work and the essential companion to Absalom, Absalom!, Go Down, Moses centers on a white man’s discovery of his family’s crimes and his inadequate response to them—a novel that refuses every comfortable resolution while insisting on the full weight of inherited sin.