Character Keys

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).

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).

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).

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).

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).

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.

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).

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).

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).

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).

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).

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).

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).

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, 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.

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.

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).

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).

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.

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.

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).

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.

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).

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.

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.

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.

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).

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).

"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).

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).

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).

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.

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).

After Doc Hines tries to incite the people of Mottstown to kill Christmas in Light in August, these "two men" bring him "home in a car"; one drives while the other "holds Hines up in the back seat" (345). At his house they "lift him" from the car and "carry him through the gate" (345). They would have carried him into the house, but after they tell Mrs. Hines about the capture of Christmas, she insists on taking her husband inside herself.

One of the hypothetical characters in Light in August, this "undercover man" does not actually appear in Jefferson, but he is fairly vividly conjured up in the imagination of "the town," which is "just waiting" this man to arrest Brown for selling moonshine whiskey (46). At the time the novel takes place, Prohibition made it illegal to sell alcohol anywhere in the U.S. But Yoknapatawpha is 'dry' throughout its imaginative history, meaning that it was always illegal to sell alcohol there. The federal agents who enforced this law were colloquially called 'revenuers.'

The "town" of Jefferson plays a prominent and pervasive role in Light in August, but the only time the narrative refers to the town's children is when it describes the occasional "negro nursemaid" who would pass Hightower's "with her white charges" (59).

In Light in August this "gaunt, leatherhard woman" recognizes Joe Christmas when he comes to her door for food; when he asks "what day this is," she tells him it is Tuesday, and threatens to call her man if he doesn't go away (332).

In Light in August, this man is mentioned by one of the workers at the planing mill, who says his "pappy" told him how "folks" in Jefferson felt the Burden place "ought to be burned, with a little human fat meat to start it good" (49).

In Light in August Reverend Hightower's father learns how to practice medicine during the Civil War by helping the Confederate doctors work on the "bodies of friends and foe alike" (473).

Although Yankee soldiers do not appear directly in Light in August, according to the account of Van Dorn's cavalry raid that Hightower tells his wife Jefferson was "a garrisoned town," meaning that Union soldiers were stationed there, and to attack it the troop with which his grandfather rode had to travel "for a hundred miles through a country where every grove and hamlet had its Yankee bivouac" (483).

The Federal Bureau of Investigation did not begin investigating bank robberies until the Depression, a decade after the Sartoris bank was robbed. But Faulkner is almost certainly thinking of the F.B.I. in "There Was a Queen" when he has Narcissa identify the man with whom she has sex as "a Federal agent" who came into possession of the letters she is anxious to get back while pursuing "the man who had robbed the bank" (740).

Judge Howard Allison's only son and namesake in "Beyond" is, as the Judge puts it, "the last of my name and race" (789). Young Howard loved riding his pony: "they were inseparable," the Judge says, and he carries a picture of the two of them (790). They boy was killed at the age of ten, found "dragging from the stirrup" of the pony (789). Although he does not appear in the story, one of the inhabitants of Beyond reports seeing him ride by on his pony "every day" (794).

The wife of Judge Allison in "Beyond" is a rather vague character; the only things we know about her are that the Judge was twenty-eight when they married and she bore a son in 1903.

Judge Allison's father-in-law in "Beyond" was "a Republican" with whose politics the Judge agrees (789). Politically, Allison and his father-in-law are very much in the minority in Yoknapatawpha.

Historically, Robert Ingersoll was a late 19th-century orator and philosopher nicknamed "The Great Agnostic," whose rejection of Christianity was widely discussed in his day and in Faulkner's. In "Beyond," Faulkner locates Ingersoll in the story's version of heaven, and gives him the role of interlocutor to the protagonist's doubts about God and the afterlife; Ingersoll listens to what Judge Allison says about his life and ideas, but he doesn't offer any solutions or answers.

In "Beyond" these two women live with Howard Allison and his mother during Howard's boyhood; they run the house, rigidly control Howard's life, and patronize his mother.

The hands and feet of this child whom the Judge meets in "Beyond" have been scarred by "the other children . . . one day when they were playing" (794). He likes to play with his toy soldiers, one of which is named Pilate, given to him by "an old gentleman who has lived here a long time" (793). A querulous little boy, he seems at the moment mostly "tired of his toys" (793). Like his mother, he evokes the story of Christ, with which the judge has struggled during his adult life.

When the Judge enters and again when he leaves Beyond, he encounters a "throng" of people "clotting" through the "narrow entrance" to the place (783, 795). He doesn't like crowds, so the fact that he is in one is "definitely unpleasant," "quite unpleasant" (783, 795). However, in both instances the crowd itself seems quite orderly and calm.

In "Beyond" Judge Allison mentions the "extra groom" who went with the Allison family when they rode to church in order to tend his son's pony while they were in services (790). "Groom" here means a person employed to take care of horses.