While walking along a Jefferson street in Light in August, 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).
When McEachern tells him about "work" in Light in August, Joe understands what it means by remembering that "he had seen work going on in the person of men with rakes and shovels about the playground [of the Memphis orphanage] six days each week" (144). Based on the kind of work these men are doing, and the patterns of the Yoknapatawpha fictions as a group, it seems very likely that these men are black.
This is the woman in Light in August who trades "a pair of her husband's brogans" to Joe Christmas in return for his shoes (329). She is 'captured' anticlimactically when the Sheriff's dogs follow the scent of the shoes to the cabin next to a corn field where she and her family live; when the armed posse kicks open the door she drops the iron skillet she was holding.
This woman is mentioned by Byron in Light in August, who tells Hightower that there is "a nigger woman, old enough to be sensible, that dont live over two hundred yards away" from the cabin on the Burden place where he has moved Lena (314). He says she can help Lena when she goes into labor.
She and her husband live in a cabin "immediately behind" Hightower's house in Light in August (73). Her husband leaves her to get help in the middle of her labor; when Hightower arrives in response, he finds her "on her hands and knees on the floor, trying to get back into bed, screaming and wailing" (74). With Hightower's help she delivers the baby, but it is "already dead" - "doubtless injured when she left the bed" (74).
This character in Light in August is enigmatic. He is mentioned by the "old negro woman" whom Joe Brown asks to take a message to the Sheriff for him (433-34). She refuses, citing the case of this man as her reason: "I done had one nigger that thought he knowed a sheriff well enough to go and visit with him. He aint never come back, neither" (434).
Light in August does not identify the sex of the baby that Hightower delivers in the cabin behind his house, saying only that "it was already dead" before it was born (74).
Light in August never explicitly identifies the "fellows" who are shoveling sawdust at the planing mill when Christmas is hired and told to "get a scoop and help them fellows move that sawdust" (33). But the narrator calls the work Joe is doing a "negro's job" (36), and "Joe Brown," who shovels sawdust alongside Christmas, calls it "doing the work of a nigger slave" (96). So that's the logic behind our decision to add this Character to the database: the job is associated with blacks, and so the "fellows" doing it when Christmas starts work are presumably black.
According to the narrator of Light in August, "few of the townspeople" take any notice of the sign in front of Hightower's house (58), but "now and then" an "idle and illiterate" "negro nursemaid with her white charges would loiter" and spell out the letters on it (59).
Although the white people of Jefferson shun Joanna Burden in Light in August, the people of the local black community have close ties with her, as indicated by the footpaths from their cabins to her big house, paths which "radiate from her house like wheelspokes" (257). She "visits them when they are sick," Byron tells Lena, "like they was white" (53).
