How we cite our quotes: (Chapter.[Part].Section.Paragraph)
Quote #1
Tomey's Turl would go [to Mr. Hubert's plantation] to hang around Mr Hubert's girl, Tennie, until somebody came and got him. They couldn't keep him at home by buying Tennie from Mr Hubert because Uncle Buck said he and Uncle Buddy had so many n*****s already that they could hardly walk around on their own land for them, and they couldn't sell Tomey's Turl to Mr Hubert because Mr Hubert said he not only wouldn't buy Tomey's Turl, he wouldn't have that damn white half-McCaslin on his place even as a free gift, not even if Uncle Buck and Uncle Buddy were to pay board and keep for him. (1.2.4)
The book opens with a story set during slavery, and very bluntly at that, by dropping the n-word and showing how Turl and Tennie are treated as property. And remember, Turl was a half-brother to Buddy and Buck, a son of old Carothers, just like them.
Quote #2
"One hand," he said. "Draw. You shuffle, I cut, this boy deals. Five hundred dollars against Sibbey. And we'll settle this n***** business once and for all too. If you win, you buy Tennie; if I win, I buy that boy of yours. The price will be the same for each one: three hundred dollars." (1.3.20)
Another stark description about how human beings were bought and sold—in this case, traded on a bet, like poker chips. $300 was a lot of money back then (about $7000 in today's dollars), and a little below the average price for an adult male slave around that time. As cotton farming became more and more important in the Southern states, the South became completely dependent on slave labor to support its economy; that's why slaves were so valuable. After the Civil War and Abolition, the South's economy fell apart.
Quote #3
There had been three of them once: children of Aunt Tomey's Turl, old Carothers McCaslin's son, and Tennie Beauchamp, whom Edmonds's great-uncle Amodeus McCaslin won from a neighbor in a poker game in 1859. […] But James, the eldest, ran away before he became of age and didn't stop until he had crossed the Ohio River and then never heard from or of him again at all--that is, his white kindred ever knew. […] shaking from his feet forever the very dust of the land where his white ancestor could acknowledge or repudiate him from one day to another, according to his whim, but where he dared not even repudiate the white ancestor save when it met the white man's humor of the moment. (2.3.1.28)
A quick look at the McCaslin Family tree shows us that James was born the year before Abolition. But even as a free man, James would rather leave the place he was born than put up with a society, including members of his own family, who still treated him as a slave.
Quote #4
It was known father to son to son among the Edmondses until it came to Carothers in his turn, how when in the early fifties old Carothers McCaslin's twin sons, Amodeus and Theophilus, first put into operation their scheme for the manumission of their father's slaves, there was made an especial provision (hence a formal acknowledgment, even though only by inference and only from his white half-brothers) for their father's negro son. (2.3.1.29)
By making the characters Amodeus and Theophilus McCaslin free their slaves before Abolition, Faulkner makes the slave-owning McCaslin family somewhat exceptional. The same goes for the fact that the white family members indirectly acknowledge their black relatives by leaving them money. Isaac later comments that it will take a lot more Bucks and Buddys to end the outrage of racial hatred.
Quote #5
[…] Doom pronounced a marriage between the pregnant quadroon and one of the slave men he had just inherited […] and two years later sold the man and woman and the child that was his own son to his white neighbor, Carothers McCaslin. (4.1.9)
This is Sam Father's lineage—son of a Chickasaw chief and a quadroon mother. Did you know that the Chickasaws owned slaves? Don't feel bad—neither did Don Cheadle or Dr. Henry Louis Gates.
Quote #6
[…] the square, galleried, wooden building squatting like a portent above the fields whose laborers it still held in thrall '65 or no […] the very race which for two hundred years had held them in bondage and from which for another hundred years not even a bloody civil war would have set them free. (5.4.2)
Isaac's describing the commissary building, which held the purchase records of the slaves on the McCaslin plantation. Even though slavery as an institution is finished, Isaac must repudiate his inheritance because he knows that it still oppresses the blacks that work there, even after '65 (Abolition). The system that replaced slavery—sharecropping and tenant farming—wasn't all that great a deal for the freed African Americans.
Quote #7
"Don't you see?" he cried. "Don't you see? This whole land, the whole South, is cursed, and all of us who derive from it, whom it ever suckled, white and black both, lie under the curse? Granted that my people brought the curse onto the land: maybe for that reason their descendants alone can—not resist it, not combat it—maybe just endure and outlast it until the curse is lifted." (5.4.113)
Isaac sees the curse of slavery as more than a metaphor. Later, he expresses the idea that the despoliation of the land and destruction of the wilderness is the result of the curse of slavery. Subjugating the land or subjugating people—same thing.
Quote #8
"Fonsiba," he said. "Fonsiba. Are you all right?"
"I'm free," she said. (5.4.124-5)
Fonsiba was born free, but she still hasn't forgotten that she could have been born a slave. Even in the impoverished circumstances Isaac finds her, she's grateful for that.
Quote #9
[…] so that even in escaping he was taking with him more of that evil and regenerate old man who could summon, because she was his property, a human being because she was old enough and female, to his widower's house and get a child on her and then dismiss her because she was of an inferior race. (5.4.148)
Isaac realizes he can never really escape the evil of old Carothers. This is as stark a statement about the horrors of slavery as you'll ever find.
Quote #10
[…] his kinsman, his father almost, who had been born too late into the old time and too soon for the new, the two of them juxtaposed and alien now to each other against their ravaged patrimony, the dark and ravaged fatherland still prone and panting from its etherless operation. (5.4.160)
Isaac's referring to his older cousin McCaslin, born around 1850 and having grown up with slavery. He sees that this will always be an unbridgeable gap between them, even though they both have to deal with their destroyed country, still recovering twenty-five years after the Civil War that tore it apart. Whew—that "etherless operation" metaphor. Gets us every time we read it.
Quote #11
"And what have you got left?" the other said. "Half the people without jobs and half the factories closed by strikes. Half the people on public dole that wont work and half that couldn't work even if they would. Too much cotton and corn and hogs, and not enough for people to eat and wear. The country full of people to tell a man he cant raise his own cotton whether he will or wont […].(6.16)
We couldn't leave the topic of slavery without hearing Roth Edmonds's cynical take on the Civil War and Abolition. In his opinion, he can't see that anything good came from it, never mind that it was two generations before his time.