Waves of time in Faulkner's Go Down, Moses

Studies in Short Fiction, Fall, 1996 by Dara Llewellyn

Roth, like Isaac before him, is allowed to participate in the annual hunting trips. But unlike Isaac, his ownership of the land exercises too great a bondage over Roth. The hunting trips never become the renewal for him they are for Isaac and Sam Fathers. Roth's role as landowner leaves him restricted and confined. He appears to have no friends or loving relationships for much of the collection. The narrator in "The Fire and the Hearth" describes him as a young man "possessing already something of that almost choleric shortness of temper which Lucas remembered in old Cass Edmonds" and finds him "a lesser man" than Lucas (59).

Roth submits to the onus of ownership and passes on his bondage at the end of the collection, making a woman of mixed race pregnant and then abandoning her because of his position as landowner. Roth is firmly fixed in time and space, bound in his role as inheritor and confined to the plantation, a being of boundaries and bondage. While Isaac diffracts his energies and escapes the boundaries, Roth does not.

In significant contrast to the emphasis on heritage and lineage, the theme of denial of ownership is also introduced on the first page of the collection. Isaac McCaslin is described as having "owned no property and [having] never desired to since the earth was no man's but all men's" (3). With this theme of ownership denial, a different lineage must be traced from the McCaslin heritage. Within that first short section of the opening story in the collection, the reader is introduced to "the old time, the old days" (4). It is from this old time that the second, or perhaps I should say, the first lineage flows. This lineage is best represented in the character of Sam Fathers, the old Chickasaw chief who becomes Isaac McCaslin's mentor, introduced most fully in the story "The Old People."

Sam Father's lineage is important for his ancestor who lived on the land before it was sold to Carrothers McCaslin. Sam Fathers is the son of Ikkemotubbe, a Chickasaw Chief known as Doom, though his mother was later married off to a slave. Sam Fathers, this son of a Chickasaw chief and a slave, is sold into slavery to Carrothers McCaslin. But Sam Fathers, by virtue of his double heritage, escapes the role of bondage, never becoming the victim of ownership. He retains his spiritual ties to the land and thus avoids bondage. Even when he lives on Cass McCaslin's land, Sam Fathers "never performed his field-work for daily wages as the younger and newer Negroes did ..." and he "bore himself ... toward all white men, with gravity and dignity and without servility" (167, 179). When Sam decides he wants to leave the McCaslin plantation and go live in the wilderness area, Cass doesn't dream of refusing him.

Sam Father's life follows a quintessential wave pattern, unfixed in time, flowing outward and back, bending around obstacles, reflecting, diffracting, moving away from bondage to freedom. The endlessly renewing wave of Sam Father's life is continued in the life of Isaac whom he teaches to become "one with the wilderness" (178). Time behaves differently in the wilderness around Sam Fathers, and, consequently, for Isaac too. When they go into the wilderness area looking for the large buck in "'The Old People," the image of time as synonymous with breathing its evoked again: "But the solitude did not breathe again. It should have suspired again then but it did not" (183). Time is stopped. Even Isaac realizes that he was "not breathing himself" (183). In this transcendent moment, outside of time, Isaac sees the buck, whom Sam Fathers salutes as Grandfather, thus connecting the spiritual lineage that he and now Isaac share, back before his Indian ancestors, to the very land itself, so that the animals are their ancestors. All creatures, human and animal, share the land, an ecological view ahead of its time.