Go Down, Moses

  He never asked for it. He died. Then his first son, James, fled, quitted the cabin he had been born in, the plantation, Mississippi itself, by night and with nothing save the clothes he walked in. When Isaac McCaslin heard about it in town he drew a third of the money, the legacy, with its accumulated interest, in cash and departed also and was gone a week and returned and put the money back into the bank. Then the daughter, Fonsiba, married and moved to Arkansas. This time Isaac went with them and transferred a third of the legacy to a local Arkansas bank and arranged for Fonsiba to draw three dollars of it each week, no more and no less, and returned home. Then one morning Isaac was at home, looking at a newspaper, not reading it, looking at it, when he realised what it was and why. It was the date. It’s somebody’s birthday, he thought. He said aloud, “It’s Lucas’s. He’s twenty-one today,” as his wife entered. She was a young woman then; they had been married only a few years but he had already come to know the expression which her face wore, looking at it always as he did now: peacefully and with pity for her and regret too, for her, for both of them, knowing the tense bitter indomitable voice as well as he did the expression:

  “Lucas Beauchamp is in the kitchen. He wants to see you. Maybe your cousin has sent you word he has decided to stop even that fifty dollars a month he swapped you for your father’s farm.” But it was all right. It didn’t matter. He could ask her forgiveness as loudly thus as if he had shouted, express his pity and grief; husband and wife did not need to speak words to one another, not just from the old habit of living together but because in that one long-ago instant at least out of the long and shabby stretch of their human lives, even though they knew at the time it wouldn’t and couldn’t last, they had touched and become as God when they voluntarily and in advance forgave one another for all that each knew the other could never be. Then Lucas was in the room, standing just inside the door, his hat in one hand against his leg—the face the color of a used saddle, the features Syriac, not in a racial sense but as the heir to ten centuries of desert horsemen. It was not at all the face of their grandfather, Carothers McCaslin. It was the face of the generation which had just preceded them: the composite tintype face of ten thousand undefeated Confederate soldiers almost indistinguishably caricatured, composed, cold, colder than his, more ruthless than his, with more bottom than he had.

  “Many happy returns!” Isaac said. “I godfrey, I was just about——”

  “Yes,” Lucas said. “The rest of that money. I wants it.”

  “Money?” Isaac said. “Money?”

  “That Old Marster left for pappy. If it’s still ourn. If you’re going to give it to us.”

  “It’s not mine to give or withhold either. It was your father’s. All any of you had to do was to ask for it. I tried to find Jim after he——”

  “I’m asking now,” Lucas said.

  “All of it? Half of it is Jim’s.”

  “I can keep it for him same as you been doing.”

  “Yes,” Isaac said. “You’re going too,” he said. “You’re leaving too.”

  “I aint decided yet,” Lucas said. “I might. I’m a man now. I can do what I want. I want to know I can go when I decide to.”

  “You could have done that at any time. Even if grandpa hadn’t left money for Tomey’s Turl. All you, any of you, would have had to do would be to come to me.…” His voice died. He thought, Fifty dollars a month. He knows that’s all. That I reneged, cried calf-rope, sold my birthright, betrayed my blood, for what he too calls not peace but obliteration, and a little food. “It’s in the bank,” he said. “We’ll go and get it.”

  Only Zachary Edmonds and, in his time, his son Carothers knew that part of it. But what followed most of the town of Jefferson knew, so that the anecdote not only took its place in the Edmonds family annals, but in the minor annals of the town too:—how the white and the negro cousins went side by side to the bank that morning and Lucas said, “Wait. It’s a heap of money.”

  “It’s too much,” the white man said. “Too much to keep hidden under a break in a hearth. Let me keep it for you. Let me keep it.”

  “Wait,” Lucas said. “Will the bank keep it for a black man same as for a white?”

  “Yes,” the white man said. “I will ask them to.”

  “How can I get it back?” Lucas said. The white man explained about the check. “All right,” Lucas said. They stood side by side at the window while the white man had the account transferred and the new pass-book filled out; again Lucas said “Wait” and then they stood side by side at the ink-splashed wooden shelf while Lucas wrote out the check, writing it steadily under the white man’s direction in the cramped though quite legible hand which the white man’s mother had taught him and his brother and sister too. Then they stood again at the grille while the teller cashed the check and Lucas, still blocking the single window, counted the money tediously and deliberately through twice and pushed it back to the teller beyond the grille. “Now you can put it back,” he said. “And gimme my paper.”

  But he didn’t leave. Within the year he married, not a country woman, a farm woman, but a town woman, and McCaslin Edmonds built a house for them and allotted Lucas a specific acreage to be farmed as he saw fit as long as he lived or remained on the place. Then McCaslin Edmonds died and his son married and on that spring night of flood and isolation the boy Carothers was born. Still in infancy, he had already accepted the black man as an adjunct to the woman who was the only mother he would remember, as simply as he accepted his black foster-brother, as simply as he accepted his father as an adjunct to his existence. Even before he was out of infancy, the two houses had become interchangeable: himself and his foster-brother sleeping on the same pallet in the white man’s house or in the same bed in the negro’s and eating of the same food at the same table in either, actually preferring the negro house, the hearth on which even in summer a little fire always burned, centering the life in it, to his own. It did not even need to come to him as a part of his family’s chronicle that his white father and his foster-brother’s black one had done the same; it never even occurred to him that they in their turn and simultaneously had not had the first of remembering projected upon a single woman whose skin was likewise dark. One day he knew, without wondering or remembering when or how he had learned that either, that the black woman was not his mother, and did not regret it; he knew that his own mother was dead and did not grieve. There was still the black woman, constant, steadfast, and the black man of whom he saw as much and even more than of his own father, and the negro’s house, the strong warm negro smell, the night-time hearth and the fire even in summer on it, which he still preferred to his own. And besides, he was no longer an infant. He and his foster-brother rode the plantation horses and mules, they had a pack of small hounds to hunt with and promise of a gun in another year or so; they were sufficient, complete, wanting, as all children do, not to be understood, leaping in mutual embattlement before any threat to privacy, but only to love, to question and examine unchallenged, and to be let alone.

  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. He did not recognise it then. He and his foster-brother, Henry, were seven years old. They had finished supper at Henry’s house and Molly was just sending them to bed in the room across the hall where they slept when there, when suddenly he said, “I’m going home.”

  “Les stay here,” Henry said. “I thought we was going to get up when pappy did and go hunting.”

  “You can,” he said. He was already moving toward the door. “I’m going home.”

  “All right,” Henry said, following him. And he remembered how they walked that half mile to his house in the first summer dark, himself walking just fast enough that the negro boy never quite came up beside him, entering the house in single file and up the stairs and into the room with the bed and the pallet on the floor which they
slept on when they passed the night here, and how he undressed just slow enough for Henry to beat him to the pallet and lie down. Then he went to the bed and lay down on it, rigid, staring up at the dark ceiling even after he heard Henry raise onto one elbow, looking toward the bed with slow and equable astonishment. “Are you going to sleep up there?” Henry said. “Well, all right. This here pallet sleeps all right to me, but I reckon I just as lief to if you wants to,” and rose and approached the bed and stood over the white boy, waiting for him to move over and make room until the boy said, harsh and violent though not loud:

  “No!”

  Henry didn’t move. “You mean you dont want me to sleep in the bed?” Nor did the boy move. He didn’t answer, rigid on his back, staring upward. “All right,” Henry said quietly and went back to the pallet and lay down again. The boy heard him, listened to him; he couldn’t help it, lying clenched and rigid and open-eyed, hearing the slow equable voice: “I reckon on a hot night like tonight we will sleep cooler if we——”

  “Shut up!” the boy said. “How’m I or you neither going to sleep if you keep on talking?” Henry hushed then. But the boy didn’t sleep, long after Henry’s quiet and untroubled breathing had begun, lying in a rigid fury of the grief he could not explain, the shame he would not admit. Then he slept and it seemed to him he was still awake, waked and did not know he had slept until he saw in the gray of dawn the empty pallet on the floor. They did not hunt that morning. They never slept in the same room again and never again ate at the same table because he admitted to himself it was shame now and he did not go to Henry’s house and for a month he only saw Henry at a distance, with Lucas in the field, walking beside his father and holding the reins of the team while Lucas plowed. Then one day he knew it was grief and was ready to admit it was shame also, wanted to admit it only it was too late then, forever and forever too late. He went to Molly’s house. It was already late afternoon; Henry and Lucas would be coming up from the field at any time now. Molly was there, looking at him from the kitchen door as he crossed the yard. There was nothing in her face; he said it the best he could for that moment, because later he would be able to say it all right, say it once and forever so that it would be gone forever, facing her before he entered her house yet, stopping, his feet slightly apart, trembling a little, lordly, peremptory: “I’m going to eat supper with you all tonight.”

  It was all right. There was nothing in her face. He could say it almost any time now, when the time came. “Course you is,” she said. “I’ll cook you a chicken.”

  Then it was as if it had never happened at all. Henry came almost at once; he must have seen him from the field, and he and Henry killed and dressed the chicken. Then Lucas came and he went to the barn with Henry and Lucas while Henry milked. Then they were busy in the yard in the dusk, smelling the cooking chicken, until Molly called Henry and then a little later himself, the voice as it had always been, peaceful and steadfast: “Come and eat your supper.”

  But it was too late. The table was set in the kitchen where it always was and Molly stood at the stove drawing the biscuit out as she always stood, but Lucas was not there and there was just one chair, one plate, his glass of milk beside it, the platter heaped with untouched chicken, and even as he sprang back, gasping, for an instant blind as the room rushed and swam, Henry was turning toward the door to go out of it.

  “Are you ashamed to eat when I eat?” he cried.

  Henry paused, turning his head a little to speak in the voice slow and without heat: “I aint shamed of nobody,” he said peacefully. “Not even me.”

  So he entered his heritage. He ate its bitter fruit. He listened as Lucas referred to his father as Mr Edmonds, never as Mister Zack; he watched him avoid having to address the white man directly by any name at all with a calculation so coldly and constantly alert, a finesse so deliberate and unflagging, that for a time he could not tell if even his father knew that the negro was refusing to call him mister. At last he spoke to his father about it. The other listened gravely, with something in his face which the boy could not read and which at the moment he paid little attention to since he was still young then, still a child; he had not yet divined that there was something between his father and Lucas, something more than difference in race could account for since it did not exist between Lucas and any other white man, something more than the white blood, even the McCaslin blood, could account for since it was not there between his uncle Isaac McCaslin and Lucas. “You think that because Lucas is older than I am, old enough even to remember Uncle Buck and Uncle Buddy a little, and is a descendant of the people who lived on this place where we Edmonds are usurpers, yesterday’s mushrooms, is not reason enough for him not to want to say mister to me?” his father said. “We grew up together, we ate and slept together and hunted and fished together, like you and Henry. We did it until we were grown men. Except that I always beat him shooting except one time. And as it turned out, I even beat him then. You think that’s not reason enough?”

  “We’re not usurpers,” the boy said, cried almost. “Our grandmother McCaslin was as much kin to old Carothers as Uncle Buck and Buddy. Uncle Isaac himself gave—Uncle Isaac himself says …” He ceased. His father watched him. “No, sir,” he said harshly. “That’s not enough.”

  “Ah,” his father said. Then the boy could read what was in his face. He had seen it before, as all children had—that moment when, enveloped and surrounded still by the warmth and confidence, he discovers that the reserve which he had thought to have passed had merely retreated and set up a new barrier, still impregnable;—that instant when the child realises with both grief and outrage that the parent antedates it, has experienced things, shames and triumphs both, in which it can have no part. “I’ll make a trade with you. You let me and Lucas settle how he is to treat me, and I’ll let you and him settle how he is to treat you.”

  Then, in adolescence, he knew what he had seen in his father’s face that morning, what shadow, what stain, what mark—something which had happened between Lucas and his father, which nobody but they knew and would ever know if the telling depended on them—something which had happened because they were themselves, men, not stemming from any difference of race nor because one blood strain ran in them both. Then, in his late teens, almost a man, he even knew what it had been. It was a woman, he thought. My father and a nigger, over a woman. My father and a nigger man over a nigger woman, because he simply declined even to realise that he had even refused to think a white woman. He didn’t even think Molly’s name. That didn’t matter. And by God Lucas beat him, he thought. Edmonds, he thought, harshly and viciously. Edmonds. Even a nigger McCaslin is a better man, better than all of us. Old Carothers got his nigger bastards right in his back yard and I would like to have seen the husband or anybody else that said him nay.—Yes, Lucas beat him, else Lucas wouldn’t be here. If father had beat Lucas, he couldn’t have let Lucas stay here even to forgive him. It will only be Lucas who could have stayed because Lucas is impervious to anybody, even to forgiving them, even to having to harm them.

  Impervious to time too. Zachary Edmonds died, and in his turn he inherited the plantation the true heir to which, by male descent and certainly morally and, if the truth were known, probably legally too, was still alive, living on the doled pittance which his great-nephew now in his turn sent him each month. For twenty years now he had run it, tried to even with the changed times, as his father and grandfather and great-grandfather had done before him. Yet when he looked back over those twenty years, they seemed to him one long and unbroken course of outrageous trouble and conflict, not with the land or weather (or even lately, with the federal government) but with the old negro who in his case did not even bother to remember not to call him mister, who called him Mr Edmonds and Mister Carothers or Carothers or Roth or son or spoke to him in a group of younger negroes, lumping them all together, as “you boys.” There were the years during which Lucas had continued to farm his acreage in the same clumsy old fashion which Car
others McCaslin himself had probably followed, declining advice, refusing to use improved implements, refusing to let a tractor so much as cross the land which his McCaslin forbears had given him without recourse for life, refusing even to allow the pilot who dusted the rest of the cotton with weevil poison, even fly his laden aeroplane through the air above it, yet drawing supplies from the commissary as if he farmed, and at an outrageous and incredible profit, a thousand acres, having on the commissary books an account dating thirty years back which Edmonds knew he would never pay for the good and simple reason that Lucas would not only outlive the present Edmonds as he had outlived the two preceding him, but would probably outlast the very ledgers which held the account. Then the still which Lucas had run almost in his, Edmonds’, back yard for at least twenty years, according to his daughter, until his own avarice exposed him, and the three-hundred-dollar mule which he had stolen from not only his business partner and guarantor but actually from his own blood relation and swapped for a machine for divining the hiding-place of buried money; and now this: breaking up after forty-five years the home of the woman who had been the only mother he, Edmonds, ever knew, who had raised him, fed him from her own breast as she was actually doing her own child, who had surrounded him always with care for his physical body and for his spirit too, teaching him his manners, behavior—to be gentle with his inferiors, honorable with his equals, generous to the weak and considerate of the aged, courteous, truthful and brave to all—who had given him, the motherless, without stint or expectation of reward that constant and abiding devotion and love which existed nowhere else in this world for him;—breaking up her home who had no other kin save an old brother in Jefferson whom she had not even seen in ten years, and the eighteen-year-old married daughter with whom she would doubtless refuse to live since the daughter’s husband likewise had lain himself liable to the curse which she believed her own husband had incurred.