McCaslinsInDEL

This is the last story Faulkner wrote before beginning to pull eight short stories together into the novel Go Down, Moses. Ike's character is firmly associated again with the wilderness and hunting. But how far Faulkner still is from the novel's representation of the McCaslins is made clear by two things. First, the story refers, briefly but unambiguously, to Ike's "children" (274) - the very first sentence of the novel notes that Ike is "father to no one." Faulkner eliminated Ike's children when he revised the story for the novel. The most important change, however, was to rewrite the story to bring together a (white) Edmonds and a (mulatto) Beauchamp member of the McCaslin genealogy, in an affair that produces the youngest member of the family. When Ike disowns this infant, he becomes an accomplice in the 20th century iteration of the racial injustice that, in the novel, defines the McCaslin story from the family's earliest history in Yoknapatawpha. Miscegenation and racism are already there in this story, but not as a family affair.