The Digital Yoknapatawpha Project

The Memphis lawyer with an office on Beale Street who conducts Joanna Burden's business affairs is named Peebles. He is also the trustee of one of the Negro colleges she aids, and one of the very few black professionals in the Yoknapatawpha fictions who is not a minister. He does not appear directly in the novel.

Joanna Burden conducts a steady and voluminous correspondence with "the presidents and faculties and trustees" and "young girl students and even alumnae" of various southern Negro schools and colleges. In her replies Joanna sends them "advice, business, financial and religions" and "advice personal and practical" (233).

These officials and board members of Negro schools and colleges in the South regularly correspond with Joanna Burden, from whom they seek and receive business, financial, and religious advice. Joanna assumes that any of them would admit Joe Christmas to their school on her account.

When Christmas first arrives in Yoknapatawha, he runs into this boy, "swinging a tin bucket," "barefoot," and wearing "faded, patched, scant overalls" (227, 228) He answers Christmas' questions by telling him "where Miz Burden stay at" and that "colored folks around here looks after her" (227). As he walks away, he sings a risque song.

This icon represents the various "white men" whom Christmas tricks into "calling him a negro" so that he can fight them (225). The narrative locates him "in the north" at this time (225).

In an unidentified northern city or town, these "two policemen" subdue Christmas after he nearly beats a prostitute to death (225).

This prostitute somewhere in the North has just had sex with a black patron before Joe's "turn," so she responds with indifference when Christmas tries to provoke her by saying "that he is a negro" (225). In response, he beats her so badly that "at first they thought that the woman was dead" (225).

The woman, who resembles "an ebony carving," lives with Christmas as man and wife in Chicago or Detroit (225). Since she is the only Negro woman whom the narrative mentions Joe living with, it seems likely that she is the woman Joe is remembering when he thinks about the possibility that Joanna might reject him: "'No white woman ever did that. Only a nigger woman ever give me the air, turned me out' (236).

In its summary description of the fifteen years Joe Christmas spends on "the street" (223), the narrative mentions all the rides that he begs on "country wagons" with the "driver of the wagon not knowing who or what the passenger was and not daring to ask" (224).