How we cite our quotes: (Chapter.[Part].Section.Paragraph)
Quote #1
Tomey's Turl would go [to Mr. Hubert's plantation] to hang around Mr Hubert's girl, Tennie, until somebody came and got him. They couldn't keep him at home by buying Tennie from Mr Hubert because Uncle Buck said he and Uncle Buddy had so many n*****s already that they could hardly walk around on their own land for them, and they couldn't sell Tomey's Turl to Mr Hubert because Mr Hubert said he not only wouldn't buy Tomey's Turl, he wouldn't have that damn white half-McCaslin on his place even as a free gift, not even if Uncle Buck and Uncle Buddy were to pay board and keep for him. (1.2.4)
The book opens with a story set during slavery, and very bluntly at that, by dropping the n-word and showing how Turl and Tennie are treated as property. And remember, Turl was a half-brother to Buddy and Buck, a son of old Carothers, just like them.
Quote #2
"One hand," he said. "Draw. You shuffle, I cut, this boy deals. Five hundred dollars against Sibbey. And we'll settle this n***** business once and for all too. If you win, you buy Tennie; if I win, I buy that boy of yours. The price will be the same for each one: three hundred dollars." (1.3.20)
Another stark description about how human beings were bought and sold—in this case, traded on a bet, like poker chips. $300 was a lot of money back then (about $7000 in today's dollars), and a little below the average price for an adult male slave around that time. As cotton farming became more and more important in the Southern states, the South became completely dependent on slave labor to support its economy; that's why slaves were so valuable. After the Civil War and Abolition, the South's economy fell apart.
Quote #3
There had been three of them once: children of Aunt Tomey's Turl, old Carothers McCaslin's son, and Tennie Beauchamp, whom Edmonds's great-uncle Amodeus McCaslin won from a neighbor in a poker game in 1859. […] But James, the eldest, ran away before he became of age and didn't stop until he had crossed the Ohio River and then never heard from or of him again at all--that is, his white kindred ever knew. […] shaking from his feet forever the very dust of the land where his white ancestor could acknowledge or repudiate him from one day to another, according to his whim, but where he dared not even repudiate the white ancestor save when it met the white man's humor of the moment. (2.3.1.28)
A quick look at the McCaslin Family tree shows us that James was born the year before Abolition. But even as a free man, James would rather leave the place he was born than put up with a society, including members of his own family, who still treated him as a slave.