Submitted by chlester0@gmail.com on Tue, 2014-07-29 14:17
A "Harvard graduate, a Phi Beta Kappa: a tall loosejointed man with a constant cob pipe" (444), Gavin Stevens descends from one of the old Yoknapatawpha slaveholding families and is District Attorney of Yoknapatawpha County. He becomes one of the most important figures in Faulkner's later, post-1942 fiction. In Light in August his main role is to provide a racial explanation for Joe Christmas' behavior.
Submitted by chlester0@gmail.com on Tue, 2014-07-29 14:15
Twenty-five year old Grimm, a captain in the state national guard, organizes American Legion members to patrol Jefferson even though both the Legion commander and the sheriff refuse to give him permission. When he insists on carrying a gun, the sheriff makes him a special deputy (455).
Submitted by chlester0@gmail.com on Tue, 2014-07-29 14:10
Joe's biological father is called "a fellow with the circus" who tries to ride off with Milly Hines on a dark rainy night, but is shot and killed by Milly's father (374). He and Milly are together long enough for her to get pregnant. His legacy to his son, who is given the name Joe Christmas in the Memphis orphanage, is the mystery of his own racial identity. Doc Hines is convinced he is a Negro, i.e. in the racist world of segregation, has "nigger blood" (374). Milly apparently tries to tell her parents "the man is a Mexican" (374).
There are a great many cemeteries in Yoknapatawpha. The site that Dilsey and Luster both refer to as Benjy's "graveyard" is among the most unusual (55, 56). It is under "a clump of cedar trees near the fence" (314). Benjy visits it in both the first and fourth sections of the novel, and probably on most other days as well. In the novel's fourth section the narrator provides this description: Luster "came upon Ben squatting before a small mound of earth. At either end of it a small container of blue glass that once contained poison was fixed in the ground.
As was once typical in the homes of white southerners with black servants, the Compsons' kitchen is almost a separate structure: only one story high and built directly out from the back of the main house. This design helped keep the heat and odor of cooking out of the "big house," and at the same time provided the black servants with a place indoors where they could meet away from white eyes and talk with each other. Throughout the Yoknapatawpha fictions, Faulkner sets scenes with blacks in kitchens far more often than in fields.
