Character Analysis
Cass Edmonds is the great-grandson of old Carothers McCaslin but down the female line of the family, a fact that keeps getting rubbed in his face. He's raised by his uncles Buck and Buddy. When Isaac's parents and Uncle Buddy die within a short time of each other, he becomes Isaac's caretaker.
McCaslin is sixteen years older than Isaac, so he was born into a different world. He remembers slavery and lynchings. He tells these stories to young Isaac. He's the one who tells Isaac the story in "Was" about the runaway slave Tomey's Turl. He's really Isaac's second cousin, but Isaac reveres him as a father.
When McCaslin is a boy, Sam Fathers teaches him how to hunt. He and Isaac share the respect for the wilderness that Sam taught them.
Until Isaac turns twenty-one, McCaslin handles the McCaslin plantation's affairs. Isaac's from the male line of the McCaslin family, so he's supposed to inherit the plantation and not Cass. However, Isaac relinquishes his inheritance, and it passes along to Cass even though Cass tries mightily to convince Isaac to accept it.
"[…] while I am not only four generations from old Carothers, I derived through a woman and the very McCaslin in my name is mine only by sufferance and courtesy and my grandmother's pride in what that man accomplished whose legacy and monument you think you can repudiate." ( 5.4.4)
McCaslin isn't the idealist Isaac is. He can't understand why a rightful heir to a plantation would repudiate it just on principal. It's through a lengthy discussion with McCaslin that Isaac works out his ideas about the land and its legacy of slavery and destruction. Isaac repudiates his legacy because he doesn't think anyone really can own land—it belongs to everyone. McCaslin thinks that's just plain crazy:
So let me say it: that nevertheless and notwithstanding old Carothers did own it. Bought it, got it, no matter' kept it, held it, no matter; bequeathed it: else why do you stand here relinquishing and repudiating?" (5.4.8)
Cass marries Alice and has a son, Zack, who inherits the plantation.