The Digital Yoknapatawpha Project

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).

On the fourth day of his flight 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).

An elder of the Negro church that Joe Christmas invades, Vines tells one of the parishioners to ride for the sheriff and tell him "'just what you seen'" (324).

It's not clear how many people are in the "negro church" that Christmas enters during his flight across the county, but "the congregation" includes the women who "shriek" at his abrupt entrance (one of whom identifies him as "the devil!" 322), the "deacons" who go up to him and try to talk with him (323), and the "men" who, believing that Christmas is white, hold back Pappy Thompson's grandson Roz to keep him from attacking Christmas after he has struck the seventy-year-old man down (323).

The grandson of Pappy Thompson, Roz is there when Joe Christmas disrupts the church service and knocks the old man down. The "six foot tall" Roz is so furious that he pulls out his razor hollering "I'll kill him" (323). The Negroes in the church think Joe is 'white,' and they try to restrain Roz, but according to a member of the congregation, he didn't "care much who he had to cut to carve his path . . . to where that white man was" (324). Joe defeats his attack, however, by knocking him down too, with a bench, and fracturing his skull.