1942 Originally appearing as Go Down, Moses, and other Stories, the book would be described more accurately as a novel in seven movements. Spanning roughly 70 years from just before the Civil War to 1940, the stories trace the life of Isaac (Ike) McCaslin. A central narrative strand is Ike’s initiation into the mysteries of hunting by Sam Fathers, son of a Native American father and slave mother. In the two chapters, ‘The Old People’ and ‘The Bear’ (often read and studied apart as Faulkner’s most admired short story), Ike learns not just how to hunt, but to respect the wilderness as a spiritual as well as physical place.
The book’s title comes from another kind of spiritual:
Go down, Moses,
Way down in Egypt land,
Tell old Pharaoh,
Let my people go.
So a crucial element in the book’s historical register is the blacks’ emancipation from slavery, while remaining in effect captive to that form of indentured servitude called share-cropping. The whites are similarly resistant to change in their attitude to the blacks. They no longer treat them as animals, but maintain a paternalistic stance towards them, amounting almost to condescension.
The irony underlying all this superiority is that Lucius Quintus Carothers, the original McCaslin, had an alliance with a slave woman that produced an alternative offspring to his white family. Yet not even Lucius’s great, great, great grandson (and Ike’s cousin) Roth Edmunds can escape the fateful legacy of racial bias. Until he is seven, he plays, eats and even sleeps with his black relative Henry Beauchamp:
Then one day the old curse of his fathers, the old haughty ancestral pride based not on any value but on an accident of geography, stemmed not from courage and honor but from wrong and shame, descended to him.