Unnamed Slaves of McCaslins

The McCaslin place is a slave plantation, and Buck and Buddy inherit a large number of enslaved people from their father. But as Bayard explains in the narrative, the twins' treatment of their slaves is extremely atypical. They move out of the "big colonial house which their father had built" (46), and use it instead to house the slaves; as long as they do so surreptitiously, these slaves are allowed to leave every night. And the white men "had some kind of a system of book-keeping" by which the slaves were given credit for their labor, so that they could in time "earn" their freedom by their "work on the plantation" (48). The narrative suggests the slaves respect these arrangements, although none of them appears in the story as a character.