Go Down, Moses Abandonment Quotes

Even Buddy and Buck, pretty enlightened guys who release their slaves even before Abolition, treat Turl like a slave and not a half-brother. Turl's more than half-white. No matter; he lives with the slaves on the plantation and can be thought about like something that can be bought and sold. This "half-white McCaslin" comment is the first hint we get that something's up racially with this family.

We don't know how long Molly would have stayed at Zack's Edmonds's house taking care of Baby Ruth—er, Baby Roth—but Lucas definitely saw this as an abandonment by Molly. He risked his life by trying to kill Zack for stealing Molly. For her part, Molly refused to abandon Zack's infant son, so she agreed to come home but brought the baby with her and nursed him along with her own baby Henry. So Molly wasn't so much abandoning Lucas as she was absorbing Zack and the baby into her family.

Mollie means "divorce" here. Fortunately for Lucas, Molly decides to stay with him. This is one situation where a threatened split in a relationship wasn't permanent and didn't end in disaster.

So how does Roth pay back Molly for raising him from infancy as her own son? He repudiates her son Henry—his foster brother, really—once he's old enough to realize that he's too good for his black bestie. They never slept in the same bed or had meals together after that.

Sam's father, the Chickasaw chief, sold Sam and his mother into slavery. McCaslin thinks that Sam felt the betrayal wasn't being sold, but having his Chickasaw chief's blood betrayed by his mother's black blood. But really, selling your own son? We're guessing that even the Chickasaw chief didn't want a part-black son.

McCaslin thinks Isaac's making a big mistake in abandoning the family business to save himself. Isaac sees this as the only righteous thing to do, but we wonder if things might have been better for everyone if he had stuck around. Look who eventually got the plantation—Roth Edmonds. And he's the worst of the lot.

Abandonment Exhibit A is old Carothers, who refused to acknowledge his slave children and preferred to let his sons deal with them. Nothing but destruction comes out of this. His slave Eunice drowns herself when she realizes he's committed incest with their daughter Tomey, and Tomey dies giving birth to Turl. Old Carothers is alive when Turl's born, but he won't even handle that legacy himself. He leaves it to his sons to do it after his death.

In a major act of cowardliness, Roth refuses to tell the mother of his child face-to-face that he won't marry her and makes Isaac do the dirty work. He must have asked himself, "What would my great-great-great-grandfather have done in this situation? I know—throw them out." Things have come full circle—Roth didn't want to acknowledge his mixed-race child either.

In the last story, we learn that Roth's done it again. He threw young Samuel Beauchamp (who was already deserted by his father) off the plantation for stealing. Mollie believes this was tantamount to selling him right into Egypt, since once Samuel was away from the protection of his family, he was lured into the evil ways of the world. Even Gavin Stevens, who doesn't understand "them," sees how bad this was. Roth didn't call the police, he just sent Samuel away. Once Samuel left the country and came to town, his life fell apart.