There had been three of them once: James, then a sister named Fonsiba, then Lucas, children of Aunt Tomey's Turl, old Carother McCaslin's son, and Tennie Beauchamp, whom Edmonds' 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 they never heard from or of him again at all——that is, that his white kindred ever knew. It was as though he had not only.put running water between himself and the land of his grandmother's betrayal and his father's nameless birth, but he had interposed latitude and geography too, 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. . William Faulkner
About This Quote

This quote is about the distance between the living and the dead. The children of Aunt Tomey's Turl are considered ancestors of the McCaslin family. However, James has no memory of these people and therefore does not consider them to be real family. The distance between a person and their ancestors is vast and in this case it is a distance that James chooses to ignore or even to avoid.

Source: Go Down, Moses

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