Unnamed Slaves on McCaslin Plantation

Carothers McCaslin owned a number of slaves, including the ones he brought with him from Carolina and the ones he fathered; those named slaves have their own entries. This entry represents the rest of the enslaved people on the McCaslin plantation. Old Carothers' sons Buck and Buddy, are reluctant to buy Tennie from Hubert Beauchamp because they "had so many niggers already" (7), but their reluctance extends to other aspects of slave-owning as well. As soon as their father was buried, the two men moved out of the big house he was building into "a oneroom log cabin which the two of them built themselves" (248), and kept the slaves in the big house. In what the novel describes as a kind of comedy of manners, the masters locked the front door and the slaves came and went freely out the back.