In her "terror and . . . ratlike desperation," the girl riding in the car that Christmas flags down in Light in August tries to defend herself against him with the threat of her "pappy and brothers" who live "right up yonder!" (285). She seems too frightened to be making them up.
This "man" never quite appears in Light in August. One night, when Joe goes to Max's looking for Bobbie, he gets as far as her window and somehow "knows that there was a man in the room with her" (198). If he is there, the man must be one of her johns, the men who pay her for sex.
In Light in August Mrs. Waller reports the fire at the Burden place to the sheriff after she and her husband discover the burning house and Joanna's murdered body.
Identified in Light in August as a "countryman" - i.e. a farmer from the county of Yoknapatawpha not the town of Jefferson (90) - Hamp Waller is the first person on the scene of Joanna's murder. Riding to town in a wagon with his family, he finds Joe Brown in the burning house. He also goes inside the house, where he finds Joanna Burden's body and brings it outside.
An elder of the Negro church that Joe Christmas invades in Light in August, Vines tells one of the parishioners to ride for the sheriff and tell him "'just what you seen'" (324).
In Light in August Roz is the grandson of Pappy Thompson; he is there when Joe Christmas disrupts the church service and knocks the old man down. The "six foot tall" Roz is so furious that he pulls out his razor hollering "I'll kill him" (323). The Negroes in the church think Joe is 'white,' and they try to restrain Roz, but according to a member of the congregation, he didn't "care much who he had to cut to carve his path . . . to where that white man was" (324). Joe defeats his attack, however, by knocking him down too, with a bench, and fracturing his skull.
In Light in August Simms may be the owner of Jefferson's planing mill; he is definitely the man in charge of it. He hires Christmas and Brown (aka Burch) at the planing mill.
Salmon is the owner of a garage in Mottstown in Light in August. He offers to rent a car to Doc and Mrs. Hines for three dollars but also tells them they can take the train "for fiftytwo cents apiece" (358).
