On the last day of his flight in Light in August Christmas wakes up beside a quiet country road just in time to see a wagon speeding away, "its occupants looking back at him over their shoulders" and its driver urging the horses or mules onward with a whip (337).
When the Hineses are waiting for the northbound train from Mottstown to Jefferson in Light in August, they are joined by "drummers and loafers and such" who buy tickets for the southbound train (359). 'Drummer' was a well-known term for traveling salesman at the time the novel was published.
During the first "five or six years" that the Hineses live in Mottstown in Light in August, "people" hire Doc "to do various odd jobs which they considered within his strength" (341). These "people" are distinguished by the narrative from "the town," which wonders how the Hineses will live once Doc stops doing these jobs (341). They are also not "the people of Mottstown" who have their own entry, and who as an entity play a different and much larger role in the novel.
The country people at what Bobbie calls "the clodhopper dance" in Light in August (218) are described as "girls in stiff offcolors and mailorder stockings and heels" and "young men in illcut and boardlike garments" (206). Among this group are the two men who restrain Bobbie after Joe strikes McEachern down.
In Light in August, when Doc Hines disrupts a prayer meeting by "yelling" for "white folks to turn out and kill" all the blacks, the "folks in the church" make him come down from the pulpit (378). When he threatens them with a pistol, they call the law.
One story that is told in Light in August about the first Gail Hightower concerns the time he invaded an "al fresco church revival" and "turned it into a week of amateur horse racing" while a "dwindling congregation" listened to the "gaunt, fanaticfaced country preachers" (472) condemn him.
These are the people in Light in August who, Lena says, "have been right kind" to her during her travels on foot from Alabama to Yoknapatawpha. The narrative implies a difference between the way men and women judge Lena when it describes Mrs. Beard looking at her "once, completely, as strange women had been doing for four weeks now" (85). Nonetheless the narrative does confirm Lena's assertion that everyone is "kind." When she inquires for Lucas Burch, people send her along to the next town, often finding her a ride in the process.
Light in August never gives Reverend Hightower's mother a first name, much less a maiden one. But it does tell us that "she was one of many children of a genteel couple who had never got ahead and who seemed to find in the church some substitute for that which lacked upon the dinnertable" (472).
In Light in August these children in the Memphis orphanage wear "identical and uniform blue denim" (119). Joe seems to live apart from most of them, except a few of the older girls who show him some maternal kindess. According to Hines and the dietitian, at least some of these children call Joe "Nigger" (127).
The women who work at the Memphis orphanage where Christmas lives in Light in August 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). Five years later two young women clean and dress Joe Christmas before he leaves the orphanage with Simon McEachern.
