The story “The Fire and the Hearth” in Go Down, Moses explores Lucas Beauchamp’s complex feelings regarding the interconnections of racism and sexism as he confronts the temporary loss of his wife Molly, both at the time of this loss and years later. Lucas describes the moments that precipitate Molly’s departure, during which he risks his life crossing a creek swollen with rain in order to bring back the doctor for Zack Edmonds’s wife, only to find upon his return that he is too late: Zack’s wife has died in childbirth. “It was as though on that louring and driving day he had crossed and then recrossed a kind of Lethe, emerging, being permitted to escape, buying as the price of life a world outwardly the same yet subtly and irrevocably altered” (46). Zack reacts immediately, essentially slotting Molly into her place for the purpose of child rearing, and perhaps sexual purposes as well, as if the two women are interchangeable objects. Despite his great love for his wife, Lucas’s struggles with this situation are contradictory and thorny, involving a flawed view of masculinity and womanhood.
Lucas is a concerned and angered observer of the subjugation to which Molly, as well as Zack’s deceased wife, have endured. Regarding Zack’s wife, he remarks,
It was as though the white woman not only had never quitted the house, she had never existed–the object which they buried in the orchard two days later … a thing of no moment, unsanctified, nothing; his own wife, the black woman, now living alone in the house which old Cass had built for them when they married. (46)
Upon Molly’s eventual return to him, Lucas notices further evidence of Zack’s callous behavior: she is wearing Zack’s wife’s shoes. Lucas notes that “They had belonged to the white woman who had not died, who had not even ever existed” (51).
However, Lucas seems unable to disconnect himself entirely from the sexist strains of the racism driving Zack’s behavior. This incapacity seems to be filtered through Lucas’s anxieties regarding the social gaze, which is apparent in his focus on the state of his masculinity in light of the situation in which he and Molly have become ensnared. Upon Molly’s return, Lucas concludes that “Yes … I got to kill him or I got to leave here” (48). Although he says “He could not have said why,” Lucas waits until daybreak to approach Zack (51). Lucas perhaps wishes to take the more brazen, and thus, more manly route, but a desire to shine a spotlight on Zack’s reprehensible actions may also be at play, despite the unlikelihood that the society surrounding them would take notice of what was sadly routine conduct. Adding a further wrinkle to the situation is Lucas’s analysis of the implications of the timing of the confrontation. Lucas evaluates the following possibility: “He keeps her in the house with him six months and I don’t do nothing: he sends her back to me and I kills him. It would be like I had done said aloud to the whole world that he never sent her back because I told him to but he give her back to me because he was tired of her,” revealing a concern over Molly’s perhaps evolving reputation resulting from her mistreatment as well (48). This fixation on masculinity is perhaps mixed in with his undoubtedly complex feelings regarding his inability from his place within a racist system to prevent Zack’s actions and confront this power structure.
This inability to completely disengage from the complicated structure of oppression that surrounds him and Molly is also wrapped up in his views of his and Zack’s shared yet distinct heritage. Lucas paradoxically contends with the violence haunting his racial heritage, the same lurking menace that victimizes Molly, by disparaging women. He refers to Zack and the other men on the Edmonds branch of the family as “woman-made” since they are descended from Carothers McCaslin through the female line, in contrast to Lucas (51). As he says, “what you and your pa got from old Carothers had to come to you through a woman–a critter not responsible like men are responsible, not to be held like men are held” (52).
