This is the "Jefferson woman shopping in Memphis" in Light in August who sees Mrs. Hightower going into a hotel when she is supposed to be visiting her family in Mississippi (64). When this woman returns home, she tells others what she saw.
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.
In a strange anticipation of its own narrative, Light in August introduces this "acquaintance" who lives "in the town" and who tells the "stranger" who has noticed the sign in front of Hightower's house a very abbreviated version of the story of Reverend Hightower, his wife, and his twenty-five years in Jefferson (59-60). Two pages later the part of the stranger new to Jefferson will be played by Byron Bunch and the same story will be told to him in greater detail by "them," a collective town-as-narrator (60-73).
This is "the man behind the wheel" of the car in which Christmas is driven from Mottstown to Jefferson in Light in August; he keeps the engine running while the officers go into the jail to get him (356).
In Light of August this 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.
This is the "girl that lived about six miles away" from the Hineses in Light in August at whose house Milly says she will be spending the night (375). Since that is the ruse that allows her to ride off with the circus worker, the girl may not actually exist.
Like her husband, this woman is "not old" (494). In Light in August, she listens and asks questions as her husband tells the story of meeting Lena and Byron on the road to Tennessee. Also like her husband, she seems to enjoy their intimacy and the comedy of Byron's attempted intimacies with Lena.
This man "from the eastern part of the state" narrates the last chapter of Light in August, telling his wife the story of his encounter with Lena and Byron during his trip to Tennessee (494). He and his wife are in bed, and both seem comfortable with each other and with sex.
In Light in August these "boys in identical overalls, who live within a three mile radius" of the McEachern farm," are "fourteen and fifteen" years old when, with Joe, they arrange to have sex with a Negro girl in a deserted sawmill shed (156). When Joe's "turn" comes, however, and he begins to beat her instead, the "other four" fight him to make him stop (157). Joe is presumably with the same "four or five" boys later in the novel when one of them describes menstruation (184).
These "folks" appear in Light in August only at second hand, when the man who tells Nathaniel Burden's family in Missouri about him mentions the trouble he got into in Mexico for killing a man who called him a horse thief. According to the messenger, "folks claim it wasn't the Mexican's horse noways," because, they say, the Mexican "never owned no horse" (244). It's not made clear whether these "folks" are Mexicans too, or as seems more likely are among the "Easterners" who have recently come west (244).
