Lucas Beauchamp

Lucas Beauchamp says, proudly, "I am a McCaslin" (19). His white grandfather was a powerful planter, the first Yoknapatawpha McCaslin, who fathered a son with one of his slaves who in turn fathered Lucas. The McCaslin wealth has descended to the Edmondses, one of whom deeds Lucas ten acres of land in the middle of the plantation; on this land Lucas lives as a man who refuses to accept the racist terms laid down by the Jim Crow society around him despite the longing of "every white man" in Beat Four (as Chick puts it with a crudeness that reminds us of how demeaning those terms were) "to make a nigger out of him" (18, 31). The novel describes him with adjectives like "friendless opinionated arrogant hardheaded intractable independent" (76) "damned highnosed [and] impudent" (148). In jail and on the verge of being lynched for a murder he didn't commit, he finds a way to save himself and to get the mystery solved. Although offstage for most of the narrative, he is probably Faulkner's most impressive African American character.