In Light in August Pomp (presumably short for 'Pompey') is Cinthy's husband and the first Gail Hightower's slave. Though called "boy," he is older than his master, and is completely bald (471). He follows his master to war and refuses to believe that he could have been killed in the cavalry raid in Jefferson. Pomp himself is reportedly killed after attacking "a Yankee officer with a shovel" in an attempt to see or perhaps rescue "Marse Gail" (476-77).
The Memphis lawyer with an office on Beale Street who conducts Joanna Burden's business affairs in Light in August is named Peebles. He is also the trustee of one of the Negro colleges she aids, and one of the very few black professionals in the Yoknapatawpha fictions who is not a minister. He does not appear directly in the novel.
Mooney is the foreman at the planing mill where, for varying lengths of time, Bryon Bunch, Joe Christmas and 'Joe Brown' (i.e. Lucas Burch) all work in Light in August.
In Light in August Simon McEachern is more than forty years old when he adopts the five-year-old Joe Christmas from the Memphis orphanage and takes him to the farm where he and his wife live. The narrative describes him as "somehow rocklike, indomitable, not so much ungentle as ruthless" (143-44). His voice is that "of a man who demanded that he be listened to not so much with attention but in silence" (142).
Joe Christmas' foster-mother in Light in August, Mrs. McEachern, is a small, timid woman, a "patient, beaten creature without sex demarcation," who looks fifteen years older than her husband and who has been hammered "into an attenuation of dumb hopes and frustrated desires now faint and pale as dead ashes" (147, 165). She tries without success or acknowledgement to provide what she thinks Joe wants and needs.
The county sheriff in Light in August is named Watt Kennedy. Described as a "fat, comfortable man" (287), "with little wise eyes like bits of mica embedded in his fat, still face" (420), he investigates the murder of Joanna Burden and pursues Joe Christmas across the countryside (287). Like so many other characters in this novel, he never appears elsewhere in the Yoknapatawpha fictions.
One of the men in the group of "five or six" Negroes in Light in August who encounter Christmas at night on his way back to the Burden place is called "Jupe" (117). He identifies Christmas as "a white man" and in a voice that is neither "threatful" nor "servile" asks him who he is looking for (117).
Reverend Gail Hightower's story is one of the three principal plot lines in Light in August. After seminary, he worked hard to secure the position of minister to the Presbyterian church in Jefferson, the site where his grandfather had died in a Civil War raid twenty years before his own birth. His obsession with that grandfather results in his loss of his wife, his pulpit and his vocation. For most of the twenty-five years he has lived in Jefferson, he has been treated as a pariah: the narrative describes him as a "fifty-year-old outcast" (49), "tall, with thin . . .
