Character Keys

Displaying 1501 - 1600 of 3748

Add a new Character Key

Code title biography
2208 Unnamed Two Men 1

In Light in August Reverend Hightower's father returns home from the Civil War in a wagon; when it stops in front of his house, these "two men lift him down and carry him into the house" and to his bed (468).

2207 Unnamed Truck Driver 2

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).

2206 Unnamed Truck Driver 1

In Light in August the driver of the truck that arrives at the planing mill "loaded with logs" tells the men working there the latest news from the fire at the Burden place (49).

2205 Unnamed Texas Rangers

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.

2204 Unnamed Texas Deputy

This lawman appears in the account of Nathaniel Burden's adventures on the frontier before the Civil War in Light in August. Some men have him "treed in a dance hall" in Texas (247).

2203 Unnamed Texans

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).

2202 Unnamed Negro Children 3

These "two negro children" who approach Joe Christmas near the end of his flight across Yoknapatawpha in Light in August "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). The narrative does not say if they are male, female or one of each.

2201 Unnamed Stranger 2

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).

2200 Unnamed Stranger 1

This "stranger" in Light in August is a hypothetical figure, offered by the narrator as an example of the type of person who might pay attention to the sign in front of Hightower's house, which over the years the townspeople have come to ignore, and then mention it to "some acquaintance in the town" (59).

2199 Unnamed Store Proprietor 2

"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).

2198 Unnamed Store Proprietor 1

The man who owns the "odorous and cluttered store" where Hightower shops in Light in August claims to have known "all the time" that Joe Christmas "wasn't a white man" (308) - but he does not say how he knew.

2197 Unnamed Station Agent 2

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).

2196 Unnamed Staff of Little Rock Orphanage

In Light in August the staff at the orphanage in Little Rock call the police when Doc Hines tries to have Joe admitted.

2195 Unnamed Southerners Who Lived in North

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).

2194 Unnamed Southern Prostitutes and Madams

During his fifteen years on the road, Joe has sex with many prostitutes. In what the narrative calls "the (comparatively speaking) south," whenever he doesn't have money to pay them, he tells them afterward that he is "a negro" - a kind of race card that apparently puts the transaction so far outside the bounds that all Joe risks by asserting it is a cursing from "the woman and the matron of the house" (224).

2193 Unnamed Son of Lena Grove

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.

2192 Unnamed Slaves at Burden Place

When he returns to the Burden place after Lena's baby is born in Light in August, Hightower has a brief vision of the antebellum plantation that it once was, and in particular of "the rich fecund black life of the quarters," the "fecund [enslaved] women" and their "prolific naked children" (407).

2191 Unnamed Members of Posse 1

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.

2190 Unnamed Minister in Santa Fe

In Light in August, this is 'the white minister in Santa Fe" - in other words, he's a Protestant from the U.S. rather than a Catholic priest from Mexico - whom Nathaniel Burden hears about. Nathaniel and Juana hope he will marry them, but as they arrive in Santa Fe they see "the dust of the stage" that was carrying him away (247). The fact that he had been there inspires them to live in Santa Fe "a couple more years," hoping he will return (247). He never does.

2189 Unnamed Saloon Keeper

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.

2188 Unnamed Residents of Doane's Mill

The people of Doane's Mill in Light in August only there temporarily. A few of them, including Lucas Burch, are "young bachelors" (6), but there are also "perhaps five families" living there and working "in the mill or for it" when Lena comes to live with McKinley and his family (4). One of these people is the "foreman" who serves as Lucas Burch's pretext for abandoning Lena Grove in Doane's Mill; another may be this foreman's "cousin," or he may be a figment of Burch's imagination (19).

2187 Unnamed Relatives of Mrs. Hightower

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).

2186 Unnamed Prostitutes in Max's Restaurant

While spending time with Bobbie in Light in August, Joe sometimes meets "another woman or two" who, like Bobbie, work for Max and Mame as both waitresses and prostitutes. The narrative says they are "sometimes from the town," but are "usually strangers who would come in from Memphis and stay a week or a month" (199).

2185 Unnamed College Professor

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.

2184 Unnamed Inmates 1

These are the "other prisoners" in the jail in Light in August at the same time that Lucas Burch (Joe Brown) is there (303). They are only referred to by Buck Conner when he orders Burch to stop talking.

2183 Unnamed Priests

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).

2182 Unnamed Poor Whites in Crowd

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 "poor whites" who, like "the casual Yankees" and "the southerners who had lived for a while in the north," identify the crime as the work of "Negro" and actually "hope" that Joanna had been "ravished" as well as murdered (288).

2181 Unnamed Workers at Planing Mill

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.

2180 Unnamed Photographers

Along with the "Memphis reporters taking pictures" who swarm around Hightower and his church the day after his wife's death (67), Light in August mentions "some photographers" who set up their cameras in front of the church (68), including one "cameraman" who catches Hightower grimacing behind his hymn book "as though he were smiling" (69). It's not clear if the "reporters taking pictures" and the "photographers" are two different sets of people.

2179 Unnamed Person Who Shot Hightower's Grandfather

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.

2178 Unnamed People of South Alabama

In Light in August, the narrator's vision of Doane's Mill in the future includes the "hookwormridden" people in that area who, without knowing anything about the hamlet, would pull down the mill buildings to "burn in cookstoves and winter grates" (5).

2177 Unnamed People of Mottstown

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).

2176 Unnamed People of Railroad Division Point

The first time we see the town that the narrator of Light in August describes as a "railroad division point," the town's "whole air" is "masculine, transient" (173). On Christmas' last trip the narrator describes "the small, random, new, terrible little houses in which people who came yesterday from nowhere and tomorrow will be gone wherenot" live (211). In between the narrative refers specifically to only a few of these people, including some salesmen and the lawyer McEachern consults.

2175 Unnamed People in Wagon

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).

2174 Unnamed People in Mottstown Station

When the Hineses are waiting for the northbound train from Mottstown to Jefferson in Light in August, they are joined by "drummers and loafers and such" who buy tickets for the southbound train (359). 'Drummer' was a well-known term for traveling salesman at the time the novel was published.

2173 Unnamed People in Mottstown 2

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.

2172 Unnamed People at the Dance

The country people at what Bobbie calls "the clodhopper dance" in Light in August (218) are described as "girls in stiff offcolors and mailorder stockings and heels" and "young men in illcut and boardlike garments" (206). Among this group are the two men who restrain Bobbie after Joe strikes McEachern down.

2171 Unnamed People at Prayer Meeting

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.

2170 Unnamed People at Church Revival

One story that is told in Light in August about the first Gail Hightower concerns the time he invaded an "al fresco church revival" and "turned it into a week of amateur horse racing" while a "dwindling congregation" listened to the "gaunt, fanaticfaced country preachers" (472) condemn him.

2169 Unnamed People along Lena's Way

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.

2168 Unnamed Parents of Hightower's Mother

Light in August never gives Reverend Hightower's mother a first name, much less a maiden one. But it does tell us that "she was one of many children of a genteel couple who had never got ahead and who seemed to find in the church some substitute for that which lacked upon the dinnertable" (472).

2167 Unnamed Orphans

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).

2166 Unnamed Orphanage Workers

The women who work at the Memphis orphanage where Christmas lives in Light in August include the ones who find him "on that doorstep that Christmas night" and so decide to give him the last name of "Christmas" (383-84). Five years later two young women clean and dress Joe Christmas before he leaves the orphanage with Simon McEachern.

2165 Unnamed Northern Prostitute

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).

2164 Unnamed Northern Policemen

In an unidentified northern city or town in Light in August, these "two policemen" subdue Christmas after he nearly beats a prostitute to death (225).

2163 Unnamed Negroes in the North

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).

2162 Unnamed Negro Woman in the North

In Light in August Joe Christmas and this woman lives "as man and wife" in Chicago or Detroit (225). According to the narrator, , she resembles "an ebony carving," and as Joe lies in bed with her he "tries to breathe into himself the dark odor, the dark and inscrutable thinking and being of negroes" (225-26). Since she is the only Negro woman whom the narrative mentions Joe living with, it seems likely that she is the woman Joe is remembering when he thinks about the possibility that Joanna might reject him: "No white woman ever did that.

2161 Burringtons in New Hampshire

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).

2160 Unnamed Neighbor of McEachern

In Light in August this "neighbor" pays Christmas two dollars for chopping wood (197).

2159 Unnamed Negroes Who Flee Christmas

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).

2158 Unnamed Negroes in Mottstown

During the thirty years that the Hineses live in Mottstown in Light in August, they depend largely on the charity of the Negroes who live in their neighborhood, despite Doc's racist sermons and overall belligerence. In particular the narrative mentions "the negro women" of Mottstown, who bring dishes of food, possibly from the white kitchens where they cook, to the Hineses at their house (341).

2157 Unnamed Negroes in Freedman Town

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).

2156 Unnamed Negroes in Country Churches

In Light in August these members of "remote negro churches" "about the county" listen to Doc Hines when he interrupts their services to commandeer the pulpit and preach to them about "the superiority of the white race" (343). The narrator says that they "believed that he was crazy, touched by God," or "perhaps" even "God himself," "since God to them was a white man too and His doings also a little inexplicable" (344).

2155 Unnamed Negro Youth in Jefferson

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).

2154 Unnamed Negro Yardmen 2

When McEachern tells him about "work" in Light in August, Joe understands what it means by remembering that "he had seen work going on in the person of men with rakes and shovels about the playground [of the Memphis orphanage] six days each week" (144). Based on the kind of work these men are doing, and the patterns of the Yoknapatawpha fictions as a group, it seems very likely that these men are black.

2153 Unnamed Negro Woman Wearing Christmas' Shoes

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.

2152 Unnamed Negro Woman Near Burden Place

This woman is mentioned by Byron in Light in August, who tells Hightower that there is "a nigger woman, old enough to be sensible, that dont live over two hundred yards away" from the cabin on the Burden place where he has moved Lena (314). He says she can help Lena when she goes into labor.

2151 Unnamed Negro Woman in Labor

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).

2150 Unnamed Negro Who Disappeared

This character in Light in August is enigmatic. He is mentioned by the "old negro woman" whom Joe Brown asks to take a message to the Sheriff for him (433-34). She refuses, citing the case of this man as her reason: "I done had one nigger that thought he knowed a sheriff well enough to go and visit with him. He aint never come back, neither" (434).

2149 Unnamed Stillborn Negro Baby

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).

2148 Unnamed Negro Planing Mill Workers

Light in August never explicitly identifies the "fellows" who are shoveling sawdust at the planing mill when Christmas is hired and told to "get a scoop and help them fellows move that sawdust" (33). But the narrator calls the work Joe is doing a "negro's job" (36), and "Joe Brown," who shovels sawdust alongside Christmas, calls it "doing the work of a nigger slave" (96). So that's the logic behind our decision to add this Character to the database: the job is associated with blacks, and so the "fellows" doing it when Christmas starts work are presumably black.

2147 Unnamed Negro Nursemaids

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).

2146 Unnamed Negro Neighbors of Joanna Burden

Although the white people of Jefferson shun Joanna Burden in Light in August, the people of the local black community have close ties with her, as indicated by the footpaths from their cabins to her big house, paths which "radiate from her house like wheelspokes" (257). She "visits them when they are sick," Byron tells Lena, "like they was white" (53).

2145 Unnamed Negro Letter Writers

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).

2144 Unnamed Negro Husband 2

This man never appears in Light in August; he loses his shoes when his wife swaps "her husband's brogans which she was wearing at the time" for the shoes Joe Christmas is wearing (329).

2143 Unnamed Negro Husband 1

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).

2142 Unnamed Negro College Teachers and Students

In Light in August Joanna Burden leaves Jefferson several times a year, for "three and four days," during which she visits the various "negro schools and colleges through the south" that she supports (233). There she meets with "the teachers and the students" (234).

2141 Unnamed Negro Child 4

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.

2140 Unnamed Negro Bootblack in Mottstown

In Light in August this bootblack works in the Mottstown barber shop where Christmas gets a shave. The barbershop is identified as "a white barbership," but in that context the adjective refers to the patrons it serves (349). The race of the bootblack is not specified, but since the job he performs, shining shoes, is typically done in Faulkner's fiction by blacks, we have identified his race as "Black." This bootblack notices that Joe is wearing "second hand brogans that are too big for him" (349).

2139 Unnamed Negro "Pappy"

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.'

2138 Unnamed Cafe Employee in Mottstown

At the "little cafe down by the depot" in Mottstown in Light in August, this "cafe man" serves dinner to Doc and Mrs. Hines and suggests they hire a car to take them to Jefferson rather than wait for the train (359).

2137 Unnamed Moonshine Buyers 1

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).

2136 Unnamed Ministers at the Seminary

The men who are Hightower's teachers at the seminary in Light in August are also Presbyterian ministers. Hightower's decision to marry is based in part on the fact that "most of the faculty were married" (480).

2135 Unnamed Mexican Man

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).

2134 Unnamed Men Who Chase Christmas

After Joe Christmas escapes from the deputy outside the courthouse, his pursuers include "three men" in a car. They follow Christmas and Grimm into Hightower's house and watch as Grimm castrates Christmas. One of them vomits at the sight. The narrator of Light in August says that these men "are not to lose it," will never be able to forget what they saw (465).

2133 Unnamed Men in Max's Restaurant

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).

2132 Unnamed Men at Varner's Store 3

The group of men at Varner's store in Light in August are there on Saturday morning to watch as the pregnant Lena Grove descends from Armstid's wagon. They are described as "squatting" and "already spitting across the heelgnawed porch" (25). They "listen quietly" as the tells her story, and are all sure she will never again see the father of the child she carries (26).

2131 Unnamed Men at Farm House

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).

2130 Unnamed Memphis Reporters

On the "Sunday morning" after Mrs. Hightower's scandalous death in Light in August, Hightower's church is beset by swarm of "Memphis reporters taking pictures" (67). They even "follow him into the church" (68).

2129 Unnamed Members of Other Congregations

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.

2128 Unnamed Members of Hightower's Congregation

In Light in August the old men and women, pillars of the church, are among the first to "astonished and dubious" about Reverend Hightower's obsessions (61). Others increasingly view his behavior and preaching with suspicion, and gossip about him and his wife - though they also raise funds to pay for Mrs. Hightower's treatment in a sanatorium and cook meals for him during her absence.

2127 Unnamed Jurors 3

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 . . .

2126 Unnamed Member of the Posse

When the men chasing Christmas in Light in August are led by the dogs to the Negro woman "wearing a pair of man's shoes," one "member of the posse" identifies the shoes as the fugitive's (329).

2125 Unnamed Matron of Memphis Orphanage

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.

2124 Unnamed Man with Candy

This is the man in Light in August who sells Joe Christmas the "stale and flyspecked box of candy" he had won "for ten cents on a punching board in a store" (191).

2123 Unnamed Man Who Finds Hightower

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).

2122 Unnamed Man Killed by Calvin Burden

All Light in August says about this man is that he was killed in St. Louis by Calvin Burden I "in an argument about slavery" (242) - though since Calvin is a fierce abolitionist, we can assume this man is pro-slavery.

2121 Unnamed Man at Max's

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.

2120 Unnamed Sexual Partner of Mrs. Hightower

The man whom Mrs. Hightower meets in a Memphis hotel in Light in August is drunk when he registers under a fictitious name as her husband. It is not clear if she had ever met him on any of her earlier trips to Memphis, nor what role he might have played in her death there, but the narrative says that "he was arrested" (67).

2119 Unnamed Lawyer 3

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).

2118 Unnamed Ladies in Hightower's Congregation

These women in Light in August observe and talk about the conduct and behavior of other women. At church on Sundays, they talk quietly and nod "to arriving friends as they pass in the aisle" (366). When the Hightowers arrive, they watch and worry about Mrs. Hightower; they bring food to the Reverend when she goes to a sanitorium.

2117 Unnamed Kansas Preacher

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).

2116 Unnamed Johns in Southern Brothels

These men in Light in August are the white customers of various unspecified brothels "in the (comparatively speaking) south" (225) who beat Christmas when, after "bedding" one of the white prostitutes, he identifies himself as a Negro (224).

2115 Unnamed Jefferson Woman in Memphis

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.

2114 Unnamed Jefferson Townsmen 2

This entry supplements the "Unnamed Jefferson Townspeople" entry. It is necessary because, in addition to the major role that the white population as an aggregate plays in Light in August, the narrative identifies a number of behaviors specifically with the town's population of white males.

2113 Unnamed Jefferson Townsman

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).

2112 Unnamed Jefferson Driver

This is "the man behind the wheel" of the car in which Christmas is driven from Mottstown to Jefferson in Light in August; he keeps the engine running while the officers go into the jail to get him (356).

2111 Unnamed Group of Negroes 2

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.

2110 Unnamed Girl in Arkansas

This is the "girl that lived about six miles away" from the Hineses in Light in August at whose house Milly says she will be spending the night (375). Since that is the ruse that allows her to ride off with the circus worker, the girl may not actually exist.

2109 Unnamed Furniture Repairer and Dealer's Wife

Like her husband, this woman is "not old" (494). In Light in August, she listens and asks questions as her husband tells the story of meeting Lena and Byron on the road to Tennessee. Also like her husband, she seems to enjoy their intimacy and the comedy of Byron's attempted intimacies with Lena.

Pages