Lucas Beauchamp

Lucas is the last child of Tomey's Turl and Tennie Beauchamp, and the grandson (and great-grandson) of the white patriarch Lucius Quintus Carothers McCaslin. When Lucas married Molly Worsham in 1896, he lit a fire in the hearth on their wedding night, where it burned for the duration of their long marriage. As in other Faulkner texts, in boyhood Lucas was raised alongside his cousin Zack Edmonds, the child of the white family that now owns the plantation. (Lucas' and Zack's sons have the same relationship in their childhood.) As adults, however, Lucas' relations with Zack and Zack's son Roth are strained, at least once almost to the point of murder. Faulkner first wrote about Lucas in earlier, comic short stories, where there is no hint of his McCaslin ancestry, and his portrayal in the novel is at times in that vein, but at other times, in new material written for Go Down, Moses, Faulkner uses Lucas' experiences to explore the issue of race and racism in new ways. He remains on the McCaslin plantation, working as a tenant farmer for the Edmonses, and in a bank account has the $1000 legacy that had been set aside from Carothers McCaslin's estate for his black descendants, but while Ike McCaslin struggles with the guilt that attaches to his inheritance, Lucas - at least at moments in the novel - reflects the difficulties of being a black man in the 'white' South. He is a major character in Faulkner's next novel, Intruder in the Dust, and one of the most impressive and complex black characters in Faulkner's fiction.