The Digital Yoknapatawpha Project

The women who work at the Memphis orphanage where Christmas lives include the ones who find him "on that doorstep that Christmas night" and so decide to give him the last name of "Christmas" (383-84). And five years later two young women clean and dress Joe Christmas before he leaves the orphanage with Simon McEachern.

A girl of twelve, Alice mothers three-year-old Joe Christmas in the orphanage until she is adopted and leaves in the middle of the night. Hence, the narrative refers to the other girls who mother Joe in the orphanage as "occasional Alices" (166).

These policemen, from Little Rock or Memphis or perhaps some from each, come and get Joe Christmas and Doc Hines from the Little Rock orphanage and escort Joe by train back to the Memphis orphanage.

The staff at the orphanage in Little Rock call the police when Doc Hines tries to have Joe admitted.

The matron of the (segregated, all-white) orphanage in Memphis is "past fifty, flabby faced, with weak, kind, frustrated eyes" (133). When she hears that Joe Christmas is being called a Negro, she decides to place him with a family as quickly as possible. She seems to have the child's interests at heart, both in making sure Christmas doesn't have to go to the "colored" orphanage, and in keeping the rumors about his race from McEachern, the white man who adopts him.

At one time a railroad brakeman and at another a sawmill foreman, Doc Hines is a man "whom time, circumstance, something, had betrayed" (127). A belligerent and violent religious fanatic, misogynist and white supremacist, he murders the man with whom his daughter Milly tries to run away and lets his daughter die in childbirth as punishment for her "womansinning and bitchery." Later, believing Milly's illegitimate son is a Negro, he kidnaps it and takes him to an orphanage, where he has gotten a job to watch in secret while waiting to see what God will do with the child.

"Charley" is "a young interne from the county hospital" who is a doctor's assistant (124) at the Memphis orphanage where an infant is left "on the doorstep" (133). This young man is the person who decides they should name the child "Joe Christmas." He is still working there as an intern five years later, when Joe overhears him having sex with the "dietitian" (120). ("Interne" and "dietitian" are the novel's spellings.)

The dietitian, "young, a little fullbodied, smooth, pink-and-white," believes the five-year-old Joe Christmas is "going to tell" of her sexual episode with the young intern (120, 124). She calls Joe a "little nigger bastard" and raises questions with the matron about his racial identity so that he will be removed from the orphanage before exposing her (122).

These children in the Memphis orphanage wear "identical and uniform blue denim" (119). Joe seems to have little intimacy with any of them, except a few of the older girls who show him so maternal kindress. According to Hines and the dietitian, at least some of these children call Joe "Nigger" (127).

One of the men in the group of "five or six" Negroes who encounter Christmas at night on his way back to the Burden place is called "Jupe" (117). He identifies Christmas as "a white man" and in a voice that is neither "threatful" nor "servile" asks him who he is looking for (117).