The Digital Yoknapatawpha Project

After Christmas is jailed in Jefferson, Grimm recruits members of the local American Legion from "the stores and offices where the legion members worked" and organizes them into a "platoon" to preserve the peace (453). This man asks what the sheriff will say about them carrying pistols.

After Christmas is jailed in Jefferson, Grimm recruits members of the local American Legion from "the stores and offices where the legion members worked" and organizes them into a "platoon" to preserve the peace (453). This man objects to Grimm's rhetoric and argues that this "is Jefferson's trouble, not Washington's" (454).

The flagman who helps Doc and Mrs. Hines into the vestibule at the railroad station is not described. Our decision to identify him as "White" is based on two extra-textual factors: when one of his characters is not white, Faulkner usually specifies race, and the only black railroad employees in his fictions are the porters.

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.

The Stevenses are one of the older Yoknapatawpha families. The novel's narrator introduces Gavin Stevens into the narrative by way of this "grandfather," who "owned slaves" before the Civil War and who "publicly congratulated" Colonel Sartoris for killing the Bundrens during Reconstruction (444).

This is the man whom Byron meets on the road coming from Jefferson. Complaining about his "luck" because the "excitement" kept him in town longer than he wanted, he tells Byron that that "'they killed'" Christmas (442).

The old Negro woman who lives near the railroad track tells Burch that this "inscrutable" man - "either a grown imbecile or a hulking youth" (435) - will deliver his note to the sheriff. A bit later, this man points Byron Bunch toward Burch.

On the last day of his flight 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).

He is eager to move his mule-drawn wagon along when Joe hails him on a quiet country road to ask "what day of the week" it is (337).

These "two negro children" who approach Joe Christmas near the end of his flight across Yoknapatawpha "look at him with white-rolling eyes" when he asks what day it is; when he tells them to "go on," he stares at the spot "where they had stood" as they run away (336). Their gender is not specified in the narrative.