Mottstown|Mottson in Light in August (Location)

Spelled "Mottson" in several other fictions, Mottstown is "twenty miles" south of Jefferson (339), and the seat of the county next to Yoknapatawpha in that direction. In Light in August it appears as both a physical place and as a kind of narrator. In both these contexts it has a lot of similarities with Jefferson. The physical place has a courthouse and a square, a cafe near the railroad station, even a black residential district called "Niggertown," next to which the Hineses, Christmas' grandparents, have lived for 25 years (351). And just as "the town" of Jefferson tells the story of Hightower's arrival and disgrace to Byron Bunch in Chapter 3, so in Chapter 15 the people of Mottstown and the surrounding countryside, speaking as a single voice inside quotation marks, narrates the capture of Christmas after his arrival there "in broad daylight" (349). (The Mottstown train station has its own entry in the index.)