Images of capital and capitalist process abound in “The Fire and the Hearth.” Moving beyond the title itself, which introduces items that both nourish and produce (within spaces both domestic and industrial), the opening passages present images of capital (in the key item of the still), competition (both within the illicit industry of making alcohol as well as within the theme of social/familial/racial competition), labor, and industry.

A diagram of a North Georgian moonshine still.

Yet these aspects of capitalist industry and production are not delineated separately from the home, but complicated and enmeshed within it. For Lucas Beauchamp, the two are in and of themselves inseparable because of the space in which they are bounded: “the section where he had lived for going on seventy years […] the very place he had been born on and set up competition in a business which he had established and nursed carefully and discreetly […]—secretly indeed, for no man needed to tell him what Zack Edmonds or his son, Carothers (or old Cass Edmonds either, for that matter), would do about it if they ever found it out” (35). In this description, Lucas is implicated within a series of different power positions with respect to labor: while the text implies he is subordinate in position to the Edmonds through the vague threat of consequence should they ever find out, Lucas is also acknowledged as a capitalist operator in his own right, one who establishes and runs a business. What power industry accords Lucas, however, is troubled by the issue of his race—a problem which the story explores along multiple levels. (Consider, for example, that the site of Lucas’ own birth is also the site of his capitalist production; he, as a labor-product, emerges out of the same physical space as the alcoholic product he produces to sell.)

Within the Marxian definition, capital represents both (1) “governing power over labour and its products” specifically through ownership as well as (2) “stored-up labour” (“Profit of Capital” 1). While the text continually positions Lucas as capital (2) in conjunction with his labor, both with the still and with the agricultural upkeep of the farm, he seeks to become a capitalist through obtaining capital (1)—this concerns the gold as well as his family inheritance, but within a wider consideration may also bracket his own self-possession. As Lucas himself verbalizes, “I aint got any fine big McCaslin farm to give up. All I got to give up is McCaslin blood that rightfully aint even mine or at least aint worth much since old Carothers never seemed to miss much what he give to Tomey that night that made my father” (56, emphasis mine). Despite the acknowledged whiteness that Lucas contains within him, it remains a kind of economic artificial scarcity: the McCaslin blood he “owns” does not “rightfully” belong to him, or is valued differently. The prestige and status it affords is not extended to him. He is unable to make “capital of his white or even his McCaslin blood,” and is rather “impervious to that blood…indifferent to it” (101). Lucas’ white blood, contained within his (part-)black body, becomes inert, stripped of its power as social capital. For example, when Lucas attempts to speak his desires in court, he is ignored and chided (as “uppity”) by the white court until Roth Edmonds speaks on his behalf. What social capital Lucas has attempted to obtain and hoard for himself throughout the story remains, like the gold he attempts to locate, elusive. What little he is able to obtain only whets his appetite for more—an appetite he struggles to satisfy and ultimately surrenders.

In Richard Godden’s exploration of the role of labor within Absalom, Absalom!, he emphasizes the role of “personal dependency” within the paternalistic relationship between a white master and his black slaves (Godden 74). In particular, paternalism proves unpalatable for Sutpen, who rejects the system in part due to its implication of filial rights for black people within that system (75). It is this sense of inheritance that Lucas Beauchamp speaks to. In attempting to seize and retain economic capital, Lucas seeks to maintain a position of power along one axis—by managing production—while he is restrained from obtaining it along another (the social-racial). Despite his position as “not only the oldest man but the oldest living person on the Edmonds plantation, the oldest McCaslin descendant,” Lucas is aware that “in the world’s eye he descended not from McCaslins but from McCaslin slaves…supported by what Roth Edmonds chose to give him, who would own the land and all on it if his just rights were only known, if people just knew how old Cass Edmonds…had beat him out of his patrimony” (36). Lucas, fathered by the McCaslins and situated as the “oldest McCaslin descendant,” positions himself within the McCaslin lineage, a placement he believes makes him eligible for inheritance; however, this position is ultimately rejected and denied because of his race. Yet this denial, within the narration, is not presented unilaterally as a straightforward denial or exclusion, but implies the presence of competition. In Lucas’ view, he is “beat…out of his patrimony.” In response to this denial, he then becomes embroiled in plots centered around capital: he produces alcohol (illicitly) and is provoked into competition with his future son-in-law, is motivated on an obsessive quest to locate gold, and fights to restore his wife from working in the white man’s house (as a wife/mother/nursemaid) back into his own. As Lucas asks, “What’s ourn?…What’s mine?” (Faulkner 49). Like any good capitalist seeks to do, Lucas hunts for his own stake in the economic game, for capital to manage and oversee, which is his entirely.

Within the story’s resolution, social and real capital are intertwined and interconnected. When Lucas surrenders the “polished [divining machine], at once compact and complex and efficient-looking with its bright cryptic dials and gleaming knobs,” he “stood looking down on it” until he decides to turn away and never looks on it again. The device that was key to his quest for capital and his discovery of it is surrendered to Edmonds. When Edmonds offers Lucas use of it a few times a month, he is flatly rejected in a kind of final grasp at recovering social capital (through his refusal, a minor recovery of personhood and agency). Yet this is simultaneously colored by Lucas’ awareness that, despite his desires and his drive, “[he] reckon[s]…that money aint for [him]” (127). Whatever twenty-two thousand dollars was lying hidden and discovered by “two white men” is, for Lucas, elusive and unrecoverable, and made deliberately so by a system of factors around him, which includes both the professional space of the court and the salesman but also the domestic space of his white relations. Despite the money he has in the bank, he is isolated from the capital he desperately seeks—his rightful position within the lineage of the McCaslin line, and the social powers it conveys.