The Digital Yoknapatawpha Project

A group of five or six Negroes encounters Christmas on his way back to the Burden place. When they see him, they cross "to one side of the road, the voices ceasing" (117). One of them is named Jupe.

These Negroes live in Freedman Town, the specifically black section of Jefferson. Though they are described as "invisible" to Joe, as he walks past their cabins he is very conscious of the way they and their "negro smell" seem to enclose him, "like bodiless voices murmuring talking laughing in a language not his" (114). He is particularly conscious of the murmuring "bodiless fecundmellow voices of [the] negro women" there (115).

While walking along the street in Jefferson, this "negro youth" is so frightened by the "still and baleful" look on Christmas' face as he stares through the barbershop window at Brown that he carefully "edges away" from him (113).

This woman shrieks in a "shrill voice" when the car in which she is riding passes Joe Christmas standing naked at the side of the road (108).