The Digital Yoknapatawpha Project

This is the man who sells Joe Christmas the "stale and flyspecked box of candy" he had won "for ten cents on a punching board in a store" (191).

A boyhood friend upsets Christmas when he tells him and the other boys who hunt and fish together on Saturday afternoons about sexual intercourse, female desire, and menstruation. He also arranges the meeting in the shed with the Negro girl.

Max maintains discipline in the small restaurant he runs and acts as pimp in the brothel he manages.

The "clump of men" sitting in Max's restaurant the first time Christmas goes there are described as "not farmers and not townsmen either"; with "their tilted hats and their cigarettes and their odor of barbershops," they look like they "had just got off a train," "would be gone tomorrow," and do "not have any address" (178, 174).

The lawyer McEachern visits in the town that is five miles from his farm to do "business" with has an office near the courthouse there (173).

Bobbie comes from a brothel in Memphis to the railroad town, where she works for Max and Mame by day as a waitress "in a small, dingy, back street restaurant" and by night as a prostitute. She responds to the romantic advances of 18-year old Joe Christmas, even though "she would never see thirty again" (172).

She is induced to have sex with a group of five white country boys in a deserted sawmill shed. When it is Joe's turn, he sees "something, prone, abject; in her eyes perhaps" (156), and his response is to beat her until the other boys restrain him.

These "boys in identical overalls, who live within a three mile radius" of the McEachern farm," are "fourteen and fifteen" years old when, with Joe, they arrange to have sex with a Negro girl in a deserted sawmill shed (156). When Joe's "turn" comes, however, and he begins to beat her instead, the "other four" fight him to make him stop (157). Joe is presumably with the same "four or five" boys later in the novel when one of them describes menstruation (184).

Mrs. McEachern is a small, timid woman, a "patient, beaten creature without sex demarcation," who looks fifteen years older than her husband and who has been hammered "into an attenuation of dumb hopes and frustrated desires now faint and pale as dead ashes" (147, 165). She tries without success or acknowledgement to provide what she thinks Joe wants and needs.

Simon McEachern is more than forty years old when he adopts the five-year-old Joe Christmas from the Memphis orphanage and takes him to the farm where he and his wife live. The narrative describes him as "somehow rocklike, indomitable, not so much ungentle as ruthless" (143-44). His voice is that "of a man who demanded that he be listened to not so much with attention but in silence" (142). A Calvinist for whom the Bible and the catechism define reality, he plans to "learn" Joe that "'the two abominations are sloth and idle thinking, the two virtues are work and the fear of God'" (144).