The Digital Yoknapatawpha Project

After Doc Hines tries to incite the people of Mottstown to kill Christmas, 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.

These people in "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).

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).

During the first "five or six years" that the Hineses live in Mottstown, "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.

During the thirty years that the Hineses live in Mottstown, 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).

Mrs. Hines, the mother of Milly and grandmother of Joe Christmas, is described as "a dumpy, fat little woman with a round face like dirty and unovened dough, and a tight screw of scant hair" (346). Early on, she is a much less vivid character than her dominating husband, whose religious fanaticism seems to control them both. Later, after she realizes that Joe Christmas is the grandson whom her husband had taken from her thirty-five years earlier, she takes charge of her husband, manages to visit Joe in jail, and seeks assistance on Joe's behalf.

The Negro who gives Christmas a ride into Mottstown 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.'