Introduced into Light in August in Chapter 19, twenty-five year old Grimm brings Joe Christmas' life to a violent end. A captain in the state national guard, he organizes American Legion members to patrol Jefferson even though both the Legion commander and the sheriff refuse to give him permission. When he insists on carrying a gun, the sheriff makes him a special deputy (455). Like Christmas, Grimm's life seems strangely determined.
Dollar is the Mottstown store-keeper in Light in August who tells the town about how Mrs. Hines retrieves her husband from the chair where she had left him and rents a car from Salmon to take them to Jefferson.
In Light in August Mame is a big, brass-haired woman. During the day she sits "like a carved lioness guarding a portal, presenting respectability like a shield," behind a cigar case near the front of the dingy restaurant where Christmas meets Bobbie (175). At night she is the madam of the small town brothel which she runs with her husband.
In Light in August Cinthy (like her husband Pomp) was a slave who belonged to the elder Gail Hightower. She cooked for him, and "raised [his son] from babyhood" (470). After both her husband and her master are killed during the War, she rejects the idea that she is now "free" (477) and moves back to the Hightower home to cook for that son and his family.
Joe Christmas' story is the most developed of the various narrative lines in Light in August, though at its center is the unresolvable question of his racial identity. The novel refers to his skin more than once as "parchmentcolored" (120), but race in the world of the novel is defined by the (hypothetical) color of one's "blood," as black or white. Joe is not definitively one or the other. He is the illegitimate son of Milly Hines and a circus worker of uncertain lineage, left at Christmas time anonymously at an orphanage in Memphis by his grandfather, Doc Hines.
In Light in August the mother whom Joe Christmas never knew was a young woman in Arkansas when she had a very brief relationship with "a fellow with the circus" that passed through her neighborhood (374). Nine months after that man is killed by her father, Milly dies giving birth to their child.
Mrs. Hines, the mother of Milly and grandmother of Joe Christmas, is described in Light in August as "a dumpy, fat little woman with a round face like dirty and unovened dough, and a tight screw of scant hair" (346). Early on, she is a much less vivid character than her dominating husband, whose religious fanaticism seems to control them both. Later, after she realizes that Joe Christmas is the grandson whom her husband had taken from her thirty-five years earlier, she takes charge of her husband, manages to visit Joe in jail, and seeks assistance on Joe's behalf.
