Character Keys

In Intruder in the Dust one of the "long-haul" truck drivers who patronize the all-night cafe in Jefferson can, at least hypothetically, let the the town's night marshal know whenever his phone is ringing (206).

One of Nathaniel Burden's adventures in the West in Light in August involves "helping some Rangers" clean up "some kind of a mess" with "some folks" and a deputy who is "treed in a dance hall" (247). The law enforcement group commonly referred to as the "Texas Rangers" has been in existence since well before Texas became a state in 1845.

One of Nathaniel Burden's adventures in the West in Light in August involves "some folks" in Texas who have a "deputy treed in a dance hall" (247).

Over the course of several pages in one of the chapters he narrates in The Mansion, Ratliff imagines how the unconventionally triangular relationship among Charles Mallison as an adolescent, Gavin Stevens and Linda Snopes might look to "a stranger that never happened to be living in Jefferson or Yoknapatawpha County ten or twelve years ago" (123).

"The proprietor" of the "small tight neatly-cluttered store" where Mink buys his first food after leaving prison in The Mansion takes advantage of Mink's ignorance about prices (286-86).

In Light in August the railroad agent in Mottstown tries to talk Mrs. Hines into renting a car rather than waiting for the "two oclock in the morning" train to Jefferson (360).

When describing the people who gather to stare at Joanna's murdered body and her burning house, the narrator of Light in August refers, briefly but very specifically, to three categories of people who are not just from the county or the "immediate neighborhood" or from town (287): one of these categories consists of "southerners who had lived for a while in the north" who, like "the poor whites" and "the casual Yankees," identify the crime as the work of "Negro" and actually "hope" that Joanna had been "ravished" as well as murdered (288).

This boy is born in Joe Christmas' cabin on Joanna Burden's property on the same day that Christmas is lynched in Jefferson in Light in August. When Hightower asks his name, Lena says "I aint named him yet" (410). Joe's grandmother, who is there at his birth, calls him "Joey," confusing him with the child who was born to her daughter Milly, whom she has not seen since he was a baby over thirty-six years ago (397). Lena's baby's father has abandoned him, but at the end of the novel Lena is taking him with her as she resumes her travels.

In his hunt for Joe Christmas across the Yoknapatawpha countryside in Light in August Sheriff Kennedy is joined by a large posse. There are "thirty or forty" white men waiting for the bloodhounds who arrive on the train the day after Joanna's body is discovered (296), and the narrative suggests this same group remains on the trail through the following week.

According to the story Joanna tells about her family in Light in August, when her father married his first wife, Juana, this saloon keeper lent some mosquito netting to Nathaniel's sisters to use for making a wedding veil.

Hightower's wife in Light in August is the only child of "one of the ministers, the teachers" in the seminary he attends (479), but this icon represents the imaginary "family" that Hightower invents to explain his wife's periodical absences in Memphis. He tells the congregation she has gone to visit them "downstate somewhere" (63).

In Light in August this "college professor" from "the neighboring State University" north of Jefferson arrives in town to spend a "few days" of the summer vacation with Gavin Stevens, his friend and former schoolmate at Harvard (444). He arrives just after Christmas is killed, and listens silently while Gavin provides his explanation of Christmas' behavior.

In Light in August the Catholic priests at the monastery in California teach Calvin Burden I to read the bible in Spanish and to sign his name; Nathaniel mentions other priests in the country where he and Juana met (presumably Old Mexico).

As a group the men who work at the planing mill in Light in August observe and comment on the appearance and behavior of Joe Christmas and Joe Brown during and after the nearly three years these two outsiders work there too. On the Saturday Lena arrives in Jefferson, they see the smoke of the fire and joke about it - and about the Burdens, who they see as outsiders too.

Cinthy, the former slave in Light in August from whom Hightower hears the story of his grandfather's death that he in turn tells his wife, says that it was never known who fired the shot that killed him. Hightower, however, speculates that the shooter "may have been a woman, likely enough the wife of a Confederate soldier" (485). While Hightower says "I like to think so. It's fine so," the uncertainties about his grandfather's death challenge his recurrent heroic image of the man.

Like the "people of Jefferson" in Light in August, the collective "people of Mottstown," where Christmas' grandparents live for thirty years and where he himself is finally captured, play two roles in the novel: audience and narrator. As spectators, they are suspicious of newcomers - again like the people of Jefferson. When the Hineses first move to Mottstown, "the town" wonders about them but eventually comes to take their presence for granted (341).

On the last day of his flight in Light in August Christmas wakes up beside a quiet country road just in time to see a wagon speeding away, "its occupants looking back at him over their shoulders" and its driver urging the horses or mules onward with a whip (337).

During the first "five or six years" that the Hineses live in Mottstown in Light in August, "people" hire Doc "to do various odd jobs which they considered within his strength" (341). These "people" are distinguished by the narrative from "the town," which wonders how the Hineses will live once Doc stops doing these jobs (341). They are also not "the people of Mottstown" who have their own entry, and who as an entity play a different and much larger role in the novel.

In Light in August, when Doc Hines disrupts a prayer meeting by "yelling" for "white folks to turn out and kill" all the blacks, the "folks in the church" make him come down from the pulpit (378). When he threatens them with a pistol, they call the law.

These are the people in Light in August who, Lena says, "have been right kind" to her during her travels on foot from Alabama to Yoknapatawpha. The narrative implies a difference between the way men and women judge Lena when it describes Mrs. Beard looking at her "once, completely, as strange women had been doing for four weeks now" (85). Nonetheless the narrative does confirm Lena's assertion that everyone is "kind." When she inquires for Lucas Burch, people send her along to the next town, often finding her a ride in the process.

In Light in August these children in the Memphis orphanage wear "identical and uniform blue denim" (119). Joe seems to live apart from most of them, except a few of the older girls who show him some maternal kindess. According to Hines and the dietitian, at least some of these children call Joe "Nigger" (127).

This prostitute in Light in August has just had sex with a black patron before Joe's "turn," so she responds with indifference when Christmas tries to provoke her by saying "that he is a negro" (225). In response, he beats her so badly that "at first they thought that the woman was dead" (225).

Part of the time Christmas is on "the street which was to run for fifteen years" in Light in August he spends in Chicago and Detroit, living and eating "with negroes" (225) as a Negro himself. He fights with any of the black men "who call him white" (225).

According to Joanna in Light in August, many members of the Burrington family she descends from still live in New Hampshire, although she has only seen these relatives "perhaps three times in her life" (241).

In a cabin that he enters during his flight in Light in August, Christmas "sees negro dishes, negro food," and feels the presence of "flight and abrupt consternation" (335). From these details we can construct the blacks who live in the cabin, but in fact they never appear except as the "long, limber black hands" that put the food in front of him. And they are only heard in the "wails of terror and distress" that Christmas "hears without hearing them" (335). As he eats, Christmas registers their fear and calls himself "their brother" (335).

In Light in August these Negroes live in Freedman Town, the specifically black section of Jefferson. Though they are described as "invisible" to Joe, as he walks past their cabins he is very conscious of the way they and their "negro smell" seem to enclose him, "like bodiless voices murmuring talking laughing in a language not his" (114). He is particularly conscious of the murmuring "bodiless fecundmellow voices of [the] negro women" there (115).

While walking along a Jefferson street in Light in August, this "negro youth" is so frightened by the "still and baleful" look on Christmas' face as he stares through the barbershop window at Brown that he carefully "edges away" from him (113).

This is the woman in Light in August who trades "a pair of her husband's brogans" to Joe Christmas in return for his shoes (329). She is 'captured' anticlimactically when the Sheriff's dogs follow the scent of the shoes to the cabin next to a corn field where she and her family live; when the armed posse kicks open the door she drops the iron skillet she was holding.

She and her husband live in a cabin "immediately behind" Hightower's house in Light in August (73). Her husband leaves her to get help in the middle of her labor; when Hightower arrives in response, he finds her "on her hands and knees on the floor, trying to get back into bed, screaming and wailing" (74). With Hightower's help she delivers the baby, but it is "already dead" - "doubtless injured when she left the bed" (74).

Light in August does not identify the sex of the baby that Hightower delivers in the cabin behind his house, saying only that "it was already dead" before it was born (74).

According to the narrator of Light in August, "few of the townspeople" take any notice of the sign in front of Hightower's house (58), but "now and then" an "idle and illiterate" "negro nursemaid with her white charges would loiter" and spell out the letters on it (59).

In Light in August Joanna Burden conducts a steady and voluminous correspondence with "the presidents and faculties and trustees" and "young girl students and even alumnae" of various southern Negro schools and colleges. In her replies Joanna sends them "advice, business, financial and religions" and "advice personal and practical" (233).

This is the man in Light in August who lives in a cabin "on the edge of town immediately behind" Hightower's house, and who seeks help from Hightower when his wife goes into labor (73). The narrative suggests that he is afraid to approach a white woman to ask for help: "Hightower knew that the man would walk all the way to town . . . instead of asking some white woman to telephone for him" (74).

The posse chasing Christmas in Light in August finds this child, "stark naked" and "sitting in the cold ashes on the hearth" beside his mother, when they kick open the door to her cabin (329). There is no indication of the child's gender.

The Negro who gives Christmas a ride into Mottstown in Light in August tells him that he is going there to pick up "a yellin calf" that "pappy bought" (339). "Yellin" almost certainly means 'yearling,' and "pappy" presumably means 'father.'

In Light in August Joe Christmas and Joe Brown make enough money selling illegal whiskey in Jefferson to quit their jobs at the planing mill and buy a car. The narrative refers several times to the men who buy from them, but the closest it ever comes to individualizing these customers is when it says that the "young men and even boys" in town all know that they can purchase whiskey "from Brown almost on sight" (46).

In Light in August this man is killed by Nathaniel Burden, after claiming that Nathaniel stole his horse. The messenger who reports this event to Nathaniel's family says that "Folks claim the Mexican never owned no horse" (244).

The "clump of men" sitting in Max's restaurant the first time Christmas goes there in Light in August are described as "not farmers and not townsmen either"; with "their tilted hats and their cigarettes and their odor of barbershops," they look like they "had just got off a train," "would be gone tomorrow," and do "not have any address" (178, 174).

On the fourth day of his flight in Light in August Christmas smells breakfast cooking at a farm house, but waits to approach it until he sees "the men" of the farm finish eating and "go to the field" (332).

After Hightower refuses to resign from his pulpit in the Presbyterian church in Light in August, members of other churches in Jefferson come to see him "out of curiosity for a time" (69). The other main denominations in Jefferson are Episcopalian, Baptist and Methodist.

The phrase "Grand Jury" suggests "something" "secret" and "of a hidden and unsleeping and omnipotent eye" to Percy Grimm's platoon of peace-keepers (456). In Light in August the "Grand Jury" that is empaneled to consider the charges against Joe Christmas does remain mysterious. The narrator, for example, says that "the Grand Jury . . .

In Light in August the matron of the (all-white) orphanage in Memphis is "past fifty, flabby faced, with weak, kind, frustrated eyes" (133). When she hears that Joe Christmas is being called a Negro, she decides to place him with a family as quickly as possible. She seems to have the child's interests at heart, both in making sure Christmas doesn't have to go to the "colored" orphanage, and in keeping the rumors about his race from McEachern, the white man who adopts him.

This is the "man" in Light in August who finds Hightower in the woods about a mile from town, tied to a tree and beaten unconscious (72).

This is the "second man" who is at Max's house when Joe arrives there looking for Bobbie in Light in August; Joe had "never seen" him before, but he is obviously a kind of partner in Max and Mame's prostitution racket (214). He certainly dresses the part of a gangster from this era: "His hat was tipped forward so that the shadow of the brim fell across his mouth" (214). He assists Max and Mame's hasty departure from town. He beats Joe into insensibility.

In Light in August the lawyer McEachern visits in the town that is five miles from his farm to do "business" with has an office near the courthouse there (173).

In one of the many scenes of pursuit in Light in August, Nathaniel and Juana spend several years searching for a "white preacher" (as opposed to a "priest") to marry them suggests how scarce the Protestant preachers were in the novel's vision of the frontier (247). It's not said where the "preacher" who does marry them in Kansas is from, but on the "Saturday night" before the Sunday wedding he arrives at the Burden home from somewhere else (250).

This is the "Jefferson woman shopping in Memphis" in Light in August who sees Mrs. Hightower going into a hotel when she is supposed to be visiting her family in Mississippi (64). When this woman returns home, she tells others what she saw.

In a strange anticipation of its own narrative, Light in August introduces this "acquaintance" who lives "in the town" and who tells the "stranger" who has noticed the sign in front of Hightower's house a very abbreviated version of the story of Reverend Hightower, his wife, and his twenty-five years in Jefferson (59-60). Two pages later the part of the stranger new to Jefferson will be played by Byron Bunch and the same story will be told to him in greater detail by "them," a collective town-as-narrator (60-73).

In Light of August this group of five or six Negroes encounters Christmas on his way back to the Burden place. When they see him, they cross "to one side of the road, the voices ceasing" (117). One of them is named Jupe.