Where It All Goes Down
Yoknapatawpha County, Mississippi, 1856-1940
Yoknapatawpha County might just be the only fictional county with its own website. You can listen on the internet to Faulkner pronouncing and defining its name correctly. You might not be able to visit it, but you can travel to conferences where people discuss its significance.
Yes, this is the famous Yoknapatawpha County, where most of Faulkner's fiction (including all of the stories in Go Down, Moses) is set. You can check out that little map on the YouTube segment above, made by Faulkner himself (no, no, the map, not the YouTube segment), to see where exactly the stories are supposed to be taking place. The main town in the county is Jefferson and our characters go there to buy supplies, argue their cases in the courthouse and do their banking.
Otherwise, though, most of the stories take place on either the McCaslin or Beauchamp plantations or in the rapidly disappearing wilderness in the county. In fact the wilderness disappears to the point where, in "Delta Autumn," the hunters need to ride a car two hundred miles away to the Mississippi Delta to find any game to hunt. The changes in Yoknapatawpha County mirror changes happening in many parts of the U.S. during the time period spanned in the book. Rapid industrialization after the Civil War led to vanishing wilderness and pollution, as man-made "progress" crowded out the natural world revered by Isaac McCaslin.
The stories in Go Down, Moses span about a hundred years. The earliest events, in "Was," take place in 1856. The latest, in "The Fire and the Hearth," "Pantaloon in Black," "Delta Autumn" and "Go Down, Moses," take place around 1940-1941.
It doesn't take more than a high-school class in U.S. History to know how the country was transformed during that time period. These probably sound familiar: Dred Scott, The Civil War, Abolition, Reconstruction, Jim Crow, World War I, the Great Depression, World War II. (If these don't sound familiar, go to Shmoop's U.S. History Learning guide this minute. We said this minute, young man!)
Superimposing the McCaslin family tree in our "Websites" section over a U.S. history timeline can give you a good idea about what the various characters in the story lived through in their lifetimes. For example, Isaac McCaslin was born after the Civil War and lived with free blacks who were the children of slaves. The story about the hunt for the slave Turl was something that he had to be told about by his elder cousin Cass Edmonds, who knew both the Old and New South. Lucas Beauchamp was born a free man and therefore was able to earn money and have some financial security.