Nat Beauchamp Wilkins

Lucas and Molly's daughter Nat is described in "A Point of Law" and again in Go Down, Moses as "small, thin as a lath, young; she was their youngest and last - seventeen" (71). She struggles against her domineering father and with her lazy husband, determined to get what she deserves. Despite her shrewdness as a bargainer, she can't ultimately overcome her circumstances. The troubles depicted in those texts are kept in a comic context, and never involve her relationship to the white social system outside her domestic life, but interestingly, the last time she is mentioned is in Intruder in the Dust; there, after her mother's death, she moves with her husband to Detroit. The novel doesn't say any more, either about what made her want to leave or what she found in the city, but her action makes her part of what social historians have called the Great Migration, the 20th century movement of six million African Americans from the South to the cities of the North and West.