Quarters on McCaslin-Edmonds Plantation (Location Key)

The group of cabins that form "the quarters" on the McCaslin plantation (161) is not described in any of the stories that are part of the Go Down, Moses cluster - but the abiding existence of the cabins that were originally built to house slaves is acknowledged. In the novel, the original slave quarters is implicitly there (though no longer in use) when after the death their father, Uncle Buck and Uncle Buddy McCaslin move all the slaves into the big house their father built for himself. If this represents a form of progress, however, it is temporary. After Emancipation the quarters are occupied again by the Negro tenant farmers who continue to work on the plantation into the 20th century. In "Pantaloon in Black" the cabin Rider rents from Roth Edmonds is "the last one in the lane" (131) - a phrase that clearly implies the grouping of cabins that is made explicit in the next chapter, "The Old People," which notes that Sam Fathers lives for years "among the negroes" in "a cabin among the other cabins in the quarters" (161). Faulkner had already written a version of this last line twice before, in "A Justice," where Sam lives in the "quarters" on the Compson farm, and in "The Old People" as a short story, which does not give a name to the white family that Sam and the other people in the "quarters" work for. These Locations have separate entries in the index.