They Endured.

William Faulkner’s Go Down, Moses analyzes the relationship between Issac McCaslin, or Ike, and his family's land, wealth, and legacy. From a young age, Ike looks up to and admires one of his family’s slaves, Sam Fathers. Sam is the son of a quadroon mother and an Indian chief, but, despite his race, serves as a father figure during Ike’s childhood. Sam teaches Ike how and what it means to be a man, and Ike trusts the idea that it takes strength and intelligence over race or culture to be a man. As Ike grows older, he begins to understand the world from a perspective that differs from his family’s traditional ideals, and he instead chooses to focus on prioritizing community and empowerment. This does not discount other traditionally Southern beliefs regarding gender or law, but by shifting his attention from that of such trivial matters to one which values practicality, Ike is able to eventually come into himself and realize what his future holds. Instead of merely enduring the shame of his family’s dishonorable past and continuing his family’s legacy, Ike surrenders his family’s inheritance and plantation, showing that he has chosen to embrace the part of himself that doesn’t reflect race or power but rather, pride and integrity.

“The Old People” takes place prior to the events of “The Bear” on a hunting trip where Sam is teaching Ike how to hunt. This event marks a pivotal moment in Ike’s growth into manhood. Sam takes him into the woods and instructs Ike to kill a buck in order to prove himself. This tradition is clearly one of importance to Sam and in turn, Ike. Once Ike finally proves his manhood and kills his buck, “Sam Fathers marked his face with the hot blood which he had spilled and he ceased to be a child and became a hunter and a man.” (169) The grotesque image of Sam wiping hot red blood on the face of Ike is Faulkner’s way of showing the reader the change in mentality Ike possessed by Sam’s approval. The transition into manhood is portrayed as a visceral, animal, violent rebirth. The image of wiping blood onto Ike mirrors how one is covered in blood when one is born. Through violence, Ike is reborn into the next stage in his life. By contrast, this ritualized violent conquering of nature reminds Sam of his own past in which he was sold into slavery, “He was born in the cage, and had been in it all his life; he knows nothing else. Then he smells something. It might be anything, any breeze blowing past, anything and then into his nostrils. [...] But that’s not what he smells then. It was the cage he smelled.” (159) While Ike views Sam as a powerful, revered father figure, in reality, Sam struggles with his own feelings of subjugation and inferiority. While Ike is now seen as a man, he still lacks self-awareness and insight into his family’s role in the enslavement and exploitation of others, including Sam. 

By the time Ike has reached 21, he has had the time to grow as an adult and uncover the true meaning of his legacy. Upon returning to his family’s plantation to claim his inheritance, he discovers his family’s old ledgers, and pieces together the story of mistreatment and torture that had taken place on the plantation. It is at this point he chooses to renounce his family's plantation and inheritance in order to achieve a simpler life with “humility and pity and sufferance and pride” (245). In his eyes, the land that the plantation was built on was never his or his family’s, “Carothers McCaslin, knowing better, could raise his children, his descendants and heirs, to believe the land was his to hold and bequeath since the strong and ruthless man has a cynical foreknowledge of his own vanity and pride and strength” (241). By acknowledging his family’s dark history, he comes to realize that not only does the land and plantation not belong to him but also that by inheriting his family’s plantation, he would be complicit in continuing a legacy that was never actually meant to be. By stating “I can’t repudiate it. It was never mine to repudiate,” (243) he makes it clear that because his family never truly owned the land, he can never rightfully claim or renounce claims to the land, for it does not belong to him. He connects his childhood experience of the hunt and his acceptance into manhood to his decision to renounce his inheritance and ties to his family. Just like he had to kill the buck to be reborn as a man, he now has to kill his past and the awful legacy it left behind in order to become reborn into the man he wants to be. 

Faulkner often creates characters that are marked by their stubbornness and arrogance rather than by their individuality and self-introspection. Ike stands out as one of the only characters that acknowledges and chooses to end his suffering and regret. Even though his family was considered successful and honorable according to Southern values, they were enduring a lie that was destroying their legacy and future without them even knowing it. “Dont 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?” (265) Because the family’s prosperity directly came from the suffering of others, their history and legacy is forever tainted with the blood of the injustices they perpetrated. The land is portrayed as cursed, with the family choosing to shift all blame for their misfortune and misery on forces outside of their control that they can only endure, “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.” (265) Ike is the first person in his family to have the realization that this endurance is just a state of suffering and joylessness that needs to be overcome, and that his choice matters. Instead of being powerless and just passively waiting for life to get better, Ike has chosen to take things into his own hands and change his own legacy. This act of agency is what sets him free from the “curse” of his family. In The Sound and the Fury, Faulkner portrays the different ways in which the Compson family is coping with Caddy’s promiscuity and their fall from honor within the community. Jason Compson is a perfect example of giving into habit and dwelling on his failures rather than trying to improve his circumstances. He blames his sister for his failed attempts at trying to start a new life for himself and losing his job at the bank. He is left in a state of suspension, enduring the misery of his life, yet stubbornly powerless to change anything. Quentin Compson, on the other hand, is only able to endure the shame and dishonor Caddy’s promiscuity bestows upon the family for a short time before it breaks him. Instead of fighting the shame, he ultimately surrenders to the pain and discomfort by taking his own life. Ike could do what neither Jason or even Quentin could do when everything was taken away from them. He learned that “the long chronicle of a people who had learned humility through suffering and learned pride through the endurance which survived the suffering” (281) and those who pushed past their suffering were those who were prideful and honest. Rather than just endure suffering, Ike is able to take his suffering and transform it into hope. 

Dilsey’s concise summary of the Compson legacy and the powerful last lines of The Sound and the Fury, “They endured,” (343) reflect a central theme in all of Faulkner’s work: the will to endure and the skill to prevail. All of the other characters in Faulkner’s novels—the Compsons, Sutpens, and Coldfields—are so stubborn in their views of what has led to their circumstances and what they need to accomplish to be happy, whether it’s the conquering of land, the seizure of power, or the cultivation of respect. Issac McCaslin emerges as one of Faulkner’s only characters to show flexibility of perspective. In “The Old People” we see Ike as a young boy, naive and innocent to the true nature of the world, still believing he needs to conquer the natural world to be a man. In “The Bear” Ike has transitioned into a skillful young hunter, intelligent and forward thinking. It was Sam who influenced him into trusting his instincts, and the yellow page ledgers serve as the catalyst for his self-revelation. Everything he had seen and learned from his time as a hunter and a young man ultimately pushed him to make the right decision by renouncing his family’s inheritance. Despite his father’s attempts to make Ike cherish masculinity and white strength, it was Sam who shifted this perspective to become one that values endurance and patience. Ike finally achieves a sense of self-worth and independence because he is able to let go of these fixed, rigid notions of what legacy and manhood are and be open to new ideas. Endurance is a state of hardening, and the misery and suffering Faulkner’s characters have endured has made most of them cruel and incapable of change and compassion. In this sense, the phrase “they endured” carries new meaning, showing that mere endurance is not meant to be accepted as an end to itself, but rather taken as a step and eventually overcome so one can truly prevail.