In Light in August this "college professor" from "the neighboring State University" north of Jefferson arrives in town to spend a "few days" of the summer vacation with Gavin Stevens, his friend and former schoolmate at Harvard (444). He arrives just after Christmas is killed, and listens silently while Gavin provides his explanation of Christmas' behavior.
These are the "other prisoners" in the jail in Light in August at the same time that Lucas Burch (Joe Brown) is there (303). They are only referred to by Buck Conner when he orders Burch to stop talking.
In Light in August the Catholic priests at the monastery in California teach Calvin Burden I to read the bible in Spanish and to sign his name; Nathaniel mentions other priests in the country where he and Juana met (presumably Old Mexico).
When describing the people who gather to stare at Joanna's murdered body and her burning house, the narrator of Light in August refers, briefly but very specifically, to three categories of people who are not just from the county or the "immediate neighborhood" or from town (287): one of these categories consists of "poor whites" who, like "the casual Yankees" and "the southerners who had lived for a while in the north," identify the crime as the work of "Negro" and actually "hope" that Joanna had been "ravished" as well as murdered (288).
As a group the men who work at the planing mill in Light in August observe and comment on the appearance and behavior of Joe Christmas and Joe Brown during and after the nearly three years these two outsiders work there too. On the Saturday Lena arrives in Jefferson, they see the smoke of the fire and joke about it - and about the Burdens, who they see as outsiders too.
Along with the "Memphis reporters taking pictures" who swarm around Hightower and his church the day after his wife's death (67), Light in August 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.
Cinthy, the former slave in Light in August from whom Hightower hears the story of his grandfather's death that he in turn tells his wife, says that it was never known who fired the shot that killed him. Hightower, however, speculates that the shooter "may have been a woman, likely enough the wife of a Confederate soldier" (485). While Hightower says "I like to think so. It's fine so," the uncertainties about his grandfather's death challenge his recurrent heroic image of the man.
In Light in August, the narrator's vision of Doane's Mill in the future includes the "hookwormridden" people in that area who, without knowing anything about the hamlet, would pull down the mill buildings to "burn in cookstoves and winter grates" (5).
Like the "people of Jefferson" in Light in August, the collective "people of Mottstown," where Christmas' grandparents live for thirty years and where he himself is finally captured, play two roles in the novel: audience and narrator. As spectators, they are suspicious of newcomers - again like the people of Jefferson. When the Hineses first move to Mottstown, "the town" wonders about them but eventually comes to take their presence for granted (341).
The first time we see the town that the narrator of Light in August describes as a "railroad division point," the town's "whole air" is "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.
