the McCaslin plantation—Tennie and Tomey's Turl will be married. Themes Faulkner's technique in Go Down, Moses is to present stories whose full significance in the overall history of his characters is not apparent until later in the book. The book explores the history and development of the McCaslin family, descended from Lucius Quintus Carothers McCaslin ("Carothers McCaslin") and occupies the plantation he founded. Faulkner incorporates into the McCaslin family many of the characteristics he viewed as essential to an understanding of the South as a whole, including the painful racial divide between whites and blacks that defined Southern history in the decades before and after the Civil War. He does this by splitting the McCaslin family tree into two branches, one white and the other black. The white branch, obviously, descends from Carothers McCaslin and his wife; the black branch descends from Carothers McCaslin and the slave-girl Tomey, with whom McCaslin had a sexual relationship. "Was", which appears at first to be simply an innocuous and amusing story (if one historically appalling in its treatment of blacks and women as things to be gambled over) about the marital maneuverings between a spinster and an affirmed bachelor, is actually the story of the origin of the black branch of the McCaslin family tree. Tomey's Turl is Carothers McCaslin's son, Buck and Buddy's half-brother, by the slave girl Tomey. Turl and his own wife, Tennie, will continue the black McCaslin branch into the future. On its own terms, "Was" is a brilliant set-piece, a probing look at the past and a handy opportunity for Faulkner to establish some of the important McCaslins—Buck and Buddy, the old bachelor twins, and the young McCaslin Edmonds. With the brief introduction to the story, Faulkner also creates a presence for old Isaac McCaslin and indicates a distant future in which this story is simply a memory of something overheard, a "was" instead of an "is." Isaac McCaslin will prove to be the central character in Go Down, Moses, and Faulkner helps build his stature in the reader's mind by introducing him in advance in the first two stories of the book. "The Fire and the Hearth" Summary Many years later (around 1941) Lucas Beauchamp, the son of Tomey's Turl and Tennie, lives and works on the McCaslin plantation, now owned by Carothers "Roth" Edmonds, the grandson of Carothers McCaslin "Cass" Edmonds (Isaac and Lucas' elder cousin).