Samuel Worsham Beauchamp

Submitted by sfr on Mon, 2020-02-17 14:10
Character Key Number: 
2677
Display Name: 
Samuel Worsham Beauchamp
Sort Name: 
Samuel Worsham Beauchamp
Ever Present in Yoknapatawpha?: 
Yes
Biography: 

In both "Go Down, Moses" and the chapter with that title in Go Down, Moses, Samuel is the grandson of Lucas and Molly Beauchamp. As he tells the census taker, to whom he identifies himself by his real name, Samuel Worsham Beauchamp was "born in the country near Jefferson, Mississippi" (351). Like well over a million rural black southerners by the 1930s, he has relocated to the urban north. According to him, his "occupation" in Chicago before he shot and killed a policeman was "getting rich too fast" (352); according to Gavin Stevens, he was a criminal involved in the numbers racket. Gavin calls him "Butch Beauchamp" (354). According to the narrator, in the brief firsthand account he provides of the character, Beauchamp is a flamboyant dresser (his "Hollywood clothes" are probably a zoot suit), with "treated" hair, eyes that "had seen too much" and a voice that was "deliberately and consistently not Southern" (351).