Amodeus (Buddy) McCaslin

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. But a passage that Faulkner wrote for the novel and interpolated into the "Retreat" chapter describes in some detail the "ideas about social relationships" between classes and races that shows how both brothers were "ahead of their time" (48). Buddy appears most vividly in the "Was" chapter of Go Down, Moses, where his poker prowess is again called upon. As Old Carothers' sons and Ike McCaslin's immediate ancestors (Buddy is his uncle, Buck his father) they maintain the plantation ledgers where in the fourth section of "The Bear" chapter, the adolescent Ike hopes to learn more about "his own flesh and blood" (254). What he finds is a terrible truth about his family past, and it seems potentially significant that he learns to distinguish Buddy's handwriting from Buck's just at the moment when he first begins to realize that truth (253). Apparently Buddy is the first brother to realize what their father has done to his own (enslaved) daughter. However, the elliptical notes the twins write each other in that ledger give readers a lot of interpretive room to decide how either brother feels about their father's monstrous actions.