“The Old People” (Go Down, Moses. Chapter 4)
by William Faulkner
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“At first there was nothing”
With this almost messianic and forceful genesis – like phrase, we are introduced into the chapter of “The Old People” in Faulkner’s “Go Down, Moses” The pristine nature of the land and its spiritual meaning are already captured in this sentencious bang. The chapter revolves around young Isaac McCaslin’s rite of passage led by the hand of Sam Fathers who will initiate him into adulthood by the hunting of deer and the subsequent anointment with its blood. This is a coming-of-age ritual that will presuppose not only a physical journey but also a spiritual one.
Whereas Cass McCaslin, cousin to Isaac, 16 years his older, more a brother than a cousin, and more a cousin than a brother, is in charge of the material legacy, Sam Fathers blazes the trail for spiritual values. Sam Fathers will indeed pass onto Isaac the legacy of a land that needs healing and redeeming from the destructive, plundering and dehumanizing action of the past forbearers. Sam Fathers represents "the Old People." Isaac remains forefront, carefully watched by Sam Fathers.
Sam Fathers has been fathered biologically by Ikkemotube, a Chickasaw Indian Chief, nicknamed “The Man” / “Du Homme” / “Doom” and , by Carothers McCaslin, surrogate father, to whom his own father has sold: “two years later sold the man and woman and the child who was his own son to his white neighbor, Carothers McCaslin” (158)
Sam Fathers gets precisely sold at the age (10 years old ) that Isaac McCaslin gets initiated into this passage from childhood to manhood: “That was seventy years ago. The Sam Fathers whom the boy knew was already sixty” (page 158). Isaac is the beacon bearer of the foreknowledge that Sam, embodiment of all the races, will pass onto him.
“with hair like a horse’s mane which even at seventy showed no trace of white and a face which showed no age until he smiled, whose only visible trace of negro blood was a slight dullness of gthe hair and the finger nails…”
Indeed, from this chapter, onto the next, the racial conflict almost remains on the background to give way to a primeval sense of belonging, when “man” was “man,” nor “white” nor“black”: the individual alone will face the impenetrable mysteries of the land in its most fierce and ominous aspects.
After the first anointment and the rite of passage, Sam and Isaac encounter a second deer, a 14 spike antlered buck, which Walter, Boon and Major de Spain miss and to whom Sam refers to as “grandfather” (175). The spikes in its horns indicate its times- of- lore vagrancy in the wilderness: “the eye of the ancient immortal Umpire” (172) . Tone-deaf and in the wilderness, young Isaac only hears his own blood, fear, and breathing. Something overpowering and ominous preceeds them:
“Then it saw them. And still it did not begin to run. It just stopped for an instant, taller than any man, looking at them; then its muscles suplpled, gathered. It did not even alter its course, not fleeing, not even running, just moving with that winged and effortless ease with which deer move, passing within twenty feet of them, its head high and the eye not proud nor haughty but just full and wild and unafraid” (175)
Both Sam and Isaac spare the buck: unearthly, immortal, defiant.
“And the earth is shallow; there is not a great deal of it before you come to the rock. And the earth dont want to just keep things, hoard them; it wants to use them again. Look at the seed, the acorns, at what happens even to carrion when you try to bury it; it refuses too, seethes, and struggles too until it reaches light and air again, hunting the sun still” (McCaslin to Isaac, page 177)
