The account of Joe's flight across the landscape of Yoknapatawpha in Light in August is alternately vivid and vague, making his route impossible to establish with any certainty. This cabin, for example, only exists in a memory Joe has sometime after he stopped there: "house or cabin, white or black: he could not remember which" until the "smell" of "negro" and "negro food" brings it back to him (334-35). In this memory it consists of people who flee "suddenly and in fear," a "table" and "food before him, appearing suddenly between long, limber black hands" (335).
This entry represents "several negro cabins" in Light in August (257), though it's not certain how many. Joanna Burden's house stands in what is called "a region of negro cabins and gutted and outworn fields" (287). Before the Burden family moved into the house it was a plantation, and some of these may be former slave cabins like the one Joe Christmas moves into. But as a group the cabins can be found on both sides "up and down the road" past the big house and along the paths "which radiate from [her] house like wheelspokes" (257).
In Light in August sometime between 1863 and 1866 Calvin Burden decides to move his family "a hundred miles further west" than the place they moved to when they left St. Louis (245). It seems that they go back to Kansas, where Burden had fought as an abolitionist in the 1850s and which was admitted to the U.S. as a non-slave state in 1861. Calvin's son Nathaniel "rides back and forth across Kansas and Missouri" for two months (245) before he "finally caught up" with them in what Joanna refers to as "that time back in Kansas" (250).
Submitted by chlester0@gmail.com on Mon, 2014-07-14 17:44
When Christmas disrupts the revival meeting in the black church, this woman, "already in a semihysterical state" from the service, calls him "the devil!" and "Satan himself!" before running straight at him (322). He knocks her down. (A regular feature at revival meetings, the 'mourner's bench' is set in front of the pulpit for repentant sinners to occupy.)
Submitted by chlester0@gmail.com on Mon, 2014-07-14 17:39
The narrator identifies the black man who rides to the Sheriff's house in Jefferson "on a saddleless mule" to report Christmas' violent disruption of the "revival meeting" at "the negro church" only as "the messenger" (322, 323). He is anxious to convince the Sheriff that the blacks had not been "bothering" Christmas beforehand (324).
