The Digital Yoknapatawpha Project

He lives in a cabin "on the edge of town immediately behind" Hightower's house, and when his wife goes into labor he seeks help from Hightower (73). The narrative suggests that he is afraid to approach a white woman to ask for help: "Hightower knew that the man would walk all the way to town . . . instead of asking some white woman to telephone for him" (74).

This is the man Hightower hires to cook for him after the "masked men" scare off his woman cook (71); he quits after "some men, not masked either," take him out and whip him (72). Apparently the men think there is a perverse sexual relationship between HIghtower and both cooks, though there is no evidence of that in either case.

This entry supplements the "Unnamed Jefferson Townspeople" entry. It is necessary because, in addition to the major role that the white population as an aggregate plays in Light in August, the narrative identifies a number of behaviors specifically with the town's population of white males.

The first of the two Negroes who cook for Hightower is a woman who is described as a "high brown" (72). She quits after Mrs. Hightower's suicide, when her presence as a woman in his house makes her and Reverend Hightower vulnerable to gossip and vigilante violence (72).

After Hightower refuses to resign from his pulpit in the Presbyterian church, members of other churches in Jefferson come to see him "out of curiosity for a time" (69). The other main denominations in Jefferson are Episcopalian, Baptist and Methodist.

The minister takes the hymn book from Hightower and conducts Mrs. Hightower's funeral.

Along with the "Memphis reporters taking pictures" who swarm around Hightower and his church the day after his wife's death (67), the narrative mentions "some photographers" who set up their cameras in front of the church (68), including one "cameraman" who catches Hightower grimacing behind his hymn book "as though he were smiling" (69). It's not clear if the "reporters taking pictures" and the "photographers" are two different sets of people.

On the "Sunday morning" after Mrs. Hightower's scandalous death in the city, Hightower's church is beset by swarm of "Memphis reporters taking pictures" (67). They even "follow him into the church" (68).

The police in Memphis arrest the drunken man they find in Mrs. Hightower's hotel room after her death; there they also find the pieces of paper on which she wrote and tore up her "rightful name" (67).

This man is drunk when he registers under a fictitious name as Mrs. Hightower's husband at the Memphis hotel. It is not clear if she had ever met him on any of her earlier trips to Memphis, nor what role he might have played in her death there, but the narrative says that "he was arrested" (67).