The Digital Yoknapatawpha Project

This is the choir that Byron Bunch leads on Sunday mornings in the country church "thirty miles" from Jefferson (48).

In Light in August, this man is mentioned by one of the workers at the planing mill, who says his "pappy" told him how "folks" in Jefferson felt the Burden place "ought to be burned, with a little human fat meat to start it good" (49).

One of the hypothetical characters in this novel. This "undercover man" does not actually appear in Jefferson, but he is fairly vividly conjured up in the imagination of "the town," which is "just waiting" for him to arrest Brown for selling moonshine whiskey (46). At the time the novel takes place, Prohibition made it illegal to sell alcohol anywhere in the U.S. But Yoknapatawpha is 'dry' throughout its imaginative history, meaning that it was always illegal to sell alcohol there. The federal agents who enforced this law were colloquially called 'revenuers.'

This "neighbor" pays Christmas two dollars for chopping wood (197).

A big, brass-haired woman, in the daytime she sits "like a carved lioness guarding a portal, presenting respectability like a shield," behind a cigar case near the front of the dingy restaurant where Christmas meets Bobbie (175). At night she is the madam of the small town brothel which she runs with her husband.

This is the "second man" who is at Max's house when Joe arrives there looking for Bobbie; Joe had "never seen" him before, but he is obviously a kind of partner in Max and Mame's prostitution racket (214). He certainly dresses the part of a gangster from this era: "His hat was tipped forward so that the shadow of the brim fell across his mouth" (214). He assists Max and Mame's hasty departure from town. He beats Joe into insensibility.

The first time we see the town that the narrator of Light in August describes as a "railroad division point," its "whole air" is characterized as "masculine, transient" (173). On Christmas' last trip the narrator describes "the small, random, new, terrible little houses in which people who came yesterday from nowhere and tomorrow will be gone wherenot" live (211). In between the narrative refers specifically to only a few of these people, including some salesmen and the lawyer McEachern consults.

At the country dance, these two men restrain Bobbie from physically attacking the fallen McEachern.

The country people at what Bobbie calls "the clodhopper dance" (218) in the one room school house are described as "girls in stiff offcolors and mailorder stockings and heels" and "young men in illcut and boardlike garments" (206). Among this group are the two men who restrain Bobbie after Joe strikes McEachern down.

This "man" never quite appears in the narrative. One night, when Joe goes to Max's looking for Bobbie, he gets as far as her window and somehow "knows that there was a man in the room with her" (198). If he is there, the man must be one of her johns, the men who pay her for sex.