“He stopped breathing then; there was only his heart, his blood, and in the following silence the wilderness ceased to breathe also, leaning, stooping overhead with its breath held, tremendous and impartial and waiting.”
With a title alluding to the Old Testament, William Faulkner’s Go Down, Moses collects seven short stories told from various perspectives and concerning several complex dichotomies—black and white; young and old; male and female; man and beast. The loosely connected narrative is a sad story of pride, degradation, corruption, and man’s will to dominate. Its exposition on black and white relations in the American South is buoyed by Faulkner’s superlative prose as the stories touch on the convoluted relationships between descendents of former slaves and their owners, the development and ever-increasing invasion of industrialization, the consequences of hubris, the shortness of life, and an individual man’s meager contributions to humanity and nature.
The first story, “Was” is a dark comedy. A young McCaslin Edmonds rides with his Uncle Buck to the neighbor’s farm in search of an escaped slave. Tomey’s Turl runs off frequently, and he always goes to Hubert Beauchamp’s to visit Beauchamp’s slave girl named Tennie. They place bets on whether they will find him outside of Tennie’s cabin that night; they do, but he eludes them, and they are forced to spend the night. When Uncle Buck and McCaslin accidentally enter the quarters of Hubert’s unmarried sister, Sophonsiba, Hubert tries to force the old bachelor Uncle Buck into marrying her. The story culminates in a high stakes poker game—on the line are Sophonsiba’s hand and the inseparable slaves. Uncle Buck sends McCaslin home to fetch Uncle Buddy—a legendary poker player—who comes to Beauchamp’s and wins the game. While the story is amusing on its own it also helps illuminate the McCaslin genealogy and the way women and slaves were viewed in this era; the story is remembered by Isaac McCaslin, the most featured character in Go Down, Moses. Though the story happened before Isaac was born, he had heard it from his cousin McCaslin, and is telling it as he nears eighty years old.
Faulkner likes to throw the reader into a story in such a way that the initial episodes don’t reveal their full significance until later on. Theophilus and Amodeus (known as Uncles Buck and Buddy, respectively) are the sons of Carothers McCaslin, the patriarch of the McCaslin family. But the McCaslin family tree is divided. Carothers had also fathered the child of one of his slave girls, namely Tomey—meaning the slave that Uncle Buck was chasing was his half-brother; the narrator, meanwhile, is the son of Uncle Buck and Sophonsiba.
“The Fire and the Hearth” is a funny story of a bootlegger, Lucas Beauchamp, the youngest son of Tennie and Tomey’s Turl. When he is camouflaging his illegal still, he finds a single gold coin on the plantation—now owned by Carothers “Roth” Edmonds, grandson of McCaslin Edmonds—and becomes convinced that there is a large treasure buried somewhere on the property. He is also adamant that his daughter, Nat, refuse to marry a young bootlegger named George Wilkins, so he asks Roth to tip off the authorities to Wilkins’s bootlegging. But when they arrive to speak with Lucas, Wilkins has placed jugs of whiskey on Lucas’s porch and Nat has moved the still into his backyard. Nat is unable to testify against him due to their kinship, but he is forced to allow Wilkins to marry his daughter in order to avoid Wilkin’s testimony against him. Lucas becomes obsessed with finding the hidden gold, and cons a salesman in order to procure a bulky metal detector.
“Pantaloon in Black” is one of the least connected stories of the bunch. It concerns a strong young black man named Rider whose behavior is unpredictable and erratic as he processes the death of his wife. It’s only real connection to the rest of the stories is the time and location—it takes place on Roth McCaslin’s land—however, the story does fit well thematically. Faulkner is often very far into the minds of his characters (much of The Sound and the Fury is written in stream-of-consciousness style), but this is one of only a handful of times where the visions he describes border on the transcendental and non-physical (another of them being the vision of Revered Gail Hightower in Light in August); Rider believes he sees his wife’s ghost after digging her grave himself. The next day he leaves his job, gets drunk, and slits the throat of a man who had been cheating black men at dice for several years.
She was standing in the kitchen door, looking at him. He didn’t move. He didn’t breathe nor speak until he knew his voice would be all right, his face fixed too not alarm her. “Mannie,” he said. “Hit’s awright. Ah aint afraid.” Then he took a step toward her, slow, not even raising his hand yet, and stopped. Then he took another step. But this time as soon as he moved she began to fade. He stopped at once, not breathing again, motionless, willing his eyes to see that she had stopped too. But she had not stopped. She was fading, going. “Wait,” he said, talking as sweet as he had ever heard his voice speak to a woman: “Den lemme go wid you, honey.” But she was going. She was going fast now, he could actually feel between them the insuperable barrier of that very strength which could handle alone a log which would have taken any two other men to handle, of the blood and bones and flesh too strong, invincible for life, having learned at least once with his own eyes how tough, even in sudden and violent death, not a young man’s bones and flesh perhaps but the will of that bone and flesh to remain alive, actually was.
Then she was gone.
“The Old People” is a kind of prelude to the next story (“The Bear”), as young Isaac McCaslin is taught to hunt by Sam Fathers once he is deemed old enough to tag along on the yearly hunting expedition. When he kills his first deer, Sam Fathers ritualistically anoints him with its blood. We are given a brief biography of Sam Fathers—his father was Ikkemotubbe, the Machiavellian Native American chief whose ruthless rise to power is the subject of the story “A Justice” in The Portable Faulkner. Sam’s mother was a slave, who Ikkemotubbe sold along with Sam to Isaac’s great-grandfather before selling the Yoknapatawpha land to white men. Sam now looks after the hunting camp owned by Major de Spain and McCaslin Edmonds. Their quest demonstrates a great level of respect for nature and for the creatures they hunt and there is some beautiful writing as Isaac describes a magnificent and elusive buck that appeared almost as a ghost to them. McCaslin speculates that the buck is composed of some kind of mythical primordial energy grown up out of the earth from all of the blood that has soaked into it and all of the lives it has absorbed.
“Think of all that has happened here, on this earth. All the blood hot and strong for living, pleasuring, that has soaked back into it. For grieving and suffering too, of course, but still getting something out of it for all that, getting a lot out of it, because after all you dont have to continue to bear what you believe is suffering; you can always choose to stop that, put an end to that. And even suffering and grieving is better than nothing; there is only one thing worse than not being alive, and that’s shame. But you cant be alive forever, and you always wear out life long before you have exhausted the possibilities of living. And all that must be somewhere; all that could not have been invented and created just to be thrown away. And the earth is shallow; there is not a great deal of it before you come to the rock. And the earth dont want to just keep things, hoard them; it wants to use them again. Look at the seed, the acorns, at what happens even to carrion when you try to bury it: it refuses too, seeths and struggles to until it reaches light and air again, hunting the sun still. And they”—the boy saw his hand in silhouette for a moment against the window beyond which, accustomed to the darkness now, he could see sky where the scoured and icy stars glittered “—they dont want it, need it. Besides, what would it want, itself, knocking around out there, when it never had enough time about the earth as it was, when there is plenty of room about the earth, plenty of places still unchanged from what they were when the blood used and pleasured in them while it was still blood?”
“The Bear” is the centerpiece here. As Isaac grows into an expert hunter and outdoorsman, the gang’s hunting expeditions become evermore focused on hunting Old Ben, a monstrous bear who seems to be undeterred by the weapons that the men use against him; he has been riddled by bullets and had a foot mangled in a trap, leaving his print crooked. His longevity has engendered a certain admiration in the hunters; like they don’t actually want to kill him, they just want to hunt him.
The story follows Isaac as he grows older and each year spends a few weeks trying to conquer Old Ben. The opening chapter is brilliant in its characterization of the ten year old boy who had been imagining what the camp was like throughout his early years—he likens his experience to being born, describing himself as only one week old when he finally sees a deer running through the woods from the stand. He is excited that he even gets to hear the pack of hunting dogs running through the woods, content just to be part of the thing. Then, the dogs catch wind of Old Ben.
The boy listened, to no ringing chorus strong and fast on a free scent but a moiling yapping an octave too high and with something more than indecision and even abjectness in it which he could not yet recognise, reluctant, not even moving very fast, taking a long time to pass out of hearing, leaving even then in the air that echo of thin and almost human hysteria, abject, almost humanly grieving, with this time nothing ahead of it, no sense of a fleeing unseen smoke-colored shape.
Later, after Old Ben has left the pack of hunting dogs battered and bloody, Isaac understands what he is up against. He understands why the dogs had been afraid of the bear, and begins to grasp the complex relationship that the hunters have with him.
It was in him too, a little different because they were brute beasts and he was not, but only a little different—an eagerness, passive; an abjectness, a sense of his own fragility and impotence against the timeless woods, yet without doubt or dread; a flavor like brass in the sudden run of saliva in his mouth, a hard sharp constriction either in his brain or his stomach, he could not tell which and it did not matter; he knew only that for the first time he realised that the bear which had run in his listening and loomed in his dreams since before he could remember and which therefore must have existed in the listening and the dreams of his cousin and Major de Spain and even old General Compson before they began to remember in their turn, was a mortal animal and that they had departed for the camp each November with no actual intention of slaying it, not because it could not be slain but because so far they had no actual hope of being able to.
Isaac sees Old Ben several times throughout the years, but it isn’t until they find a savage and fearless Airedale Terrier that they feel confident they can bring down the bear. Lion, the terrier, has to be starved by Sam Fathers before he will let anyone touch him, and is only semi-tame. Boon Haggendock becomes attached to Lion, even allowing him to sleep in bed with him; but when Lion confronts old Ben, Boon misses five point-blank shots, though General Compson is able to wound him. The next day brings death, as Lion, Old Ben, and Sam Fathers all meet their ends.
The narrative jumps ahead to Isaac’s twenty-first year, when Isaac refuses to accept the plantation as inheritance, declaring that land cannot be owned, and describing the evils that have come as a result of man’s desire to claim land. He spends the rest of his days trying to do right by the descendants of the slaves which his family had kept. He returns once to the woods to visit the graves of Sam and Lion, and laments on the encroaching train tracks and the impending destruction of the forest as Major de Spain had sold the land to a logging company. This latter section of “The Bear” seems not to fit with the rest of the story, but it fits into Faulkner’s commentary on man’s self-inflicted misery via his will to dominate—the land, the wildlife, other people. Having been raised on lessons taught him by Sam Fathers and the wilderness, Isaac feels that the black descendants of Carothers McCaslin have just as much right to the land as he does. As Sam Fathers taught him respect for the majestic buck and he is deemed worthy through his initiation by blood, Isaac is similarly unwilling to assert dominance over other humans.
“Delta Autumn” is a kind of coda to “The Bear,” as Isaac (now Uncle Ike), an old man now, embarks on what he believes will be his last hunting trip. He begrudgingly bounces around in a car where he would have ridden a horse before, and he stays in bed pretending to sleep when the rest of the party heads out to the woods. A large portion of this story is a conversation Ike has with a visitor who arrives at their camp when he is there by himself: a young woman who Roth Edmonds had impregnated and then abandoned. Ike is dismayed to learn that the young lady is actually a distant Beauchamp cousin, and betrays a sense of shock at mixing of black and white blood. It is really impressive how quickly and effectively we have transitioned from Isaac as a young man smearing the blood of his first buck on his face to him as an old man uncertain of the future of humanity but knowing his time to affect it is nearly gone.
“Go Down, Moses” is a very short story. Mollie Beauchamp, the wife of Lucas (the bootlegger in “The Fire and the Hearth”) requests that Gavin Stevens, a local attorney and biblical scholar, determine the whereabouts of her grandson, whom she has a premonition about. Gavin Stevens obliges her and quickly discovers that the young man is scheduled to be executed in Illinois that day. An educated white man, Gavin has a paternalistic view of the black community and he is compelled to collect enough money to have the body sent home and his viewpoint is changed during the process. Stevens and the Beauchamp family also interact in the novel Intruders in the Dust, in which Stevens helps Lucas avoid being lynched.
Taken as a whole, Go Down, Moses ends up with a somewhat disjointed narrative, though it is tied together in various other ways—the presence of Ike, the overarching themes of wilderness and slavery, and the spiritual connection to our ancestors. Faulkner’s reputation gives the impression that his work is hard to comprehend and digest, owing to his diverse sentence structures and fragmented plotlines. In Go Down, Moses, Faulkner is willfully difficult. He tells the stories in a strange order, gives multiple characters the same name, decides to withhold key information, and uses his patented run-on prose to convey parts of the narrative. He does, however, refrain from utilizing the stream-of-consciousness styles which makes his most famous works (As I Lay Dying and The Sound and the Fury) especially impenetrable. But, the difficulty is obviously intentional, or to put it another way, not exactly a failure to execute on Faulkner’s part. Perhaps he wishes the reader to learn the same lesson as Isaac: he must slowly come to know the terrain through fragmented stories and repeated exposure, and only the truly invested reader will be gratified; and just like the hunter who finds solace in solitude and does not need to kill for the hunt to be a success, there is enjoyment to be had simply being “in the woods” with Faulkner’s work. It is purposefully not an easy read, but it is rewarding for those who put in the effort. That being said, even on the initial, unfamiliar reading, Faulkner’s visceral imagery and abiding respect for nature and humanity make his writing compelling and heartfelt.