"Father to no one": gender, genealogy, and storytelling in go down, Moses

Resumo

"Was", the first story of Go Down, Moses, opens with the disclaimer that the protagonist Isaac McCaslin is "father to no one" and that the story to follow: was not something participated in or even seen by himself, but by his elder cousin, McCaslin Edmonds, grandson of Isaac's father's sister and so descended by the distaff, yet notwithstanding the inheritor, and in his time the bequestor, of that which some had thought then and some still thought should have been Isaac's, since his was the name in which the title to the land had first been granted from the Indian patent and which some of the descendants of his father's slaves still bore in the land. But Isaac was not one of these... (3). What is almost immediately clear is that the hook opens with issues of gender, genealogy, and inheritance foregrounded, and that these issues concern not merely the transmission of land from generation to generation but the transmission of stories, a kind of "naming" of one's relationship to the past that echoes the assigning of family names in the above passage.