McCaslin-Edmonds Place in Intruder in the Dust (Location)

The "place" where Lucas Beauchamp lives was originally part of the McCaslin plantation, one of Yoknapatawpha's original slave plantations built on the rich bottom land north of Jefferson (3). It is a large property: its two thousand acres include a drive from the main road "through the park" to the big house that is "almost a mile" long (7). Now it is owned by Carothers Edmunds, though blacks continue to work its cotton fields as tenant farmers and to live in cabins that the narrative refers to as the "servant and tenant quarters" (8). Both Lucas and Carothers Edmunds are descendants of the original planter, Carothers McCaslin. How the Edmondses came into possession of the McCaslin plantation is one of the main story lines in the novel Go Down, Moses (1942). In other fictions, including the first Yoknapatawpha novel Flags in the Dust (1929), the same site is occupied by the MacCallum family.