Character Keys

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).

In Light in August "five or six deputies" from Jefferson and Mottstown help the sheriffs of these towns escort Joe from the jail in Mottstown to the car that will take him to Jefferson (356).

The crowd outside the Burden house in Light in August is, like so many crowds in the fictions, an audience in search of sensations. Although the white people of Yoknapatawpha had avoided Joanna's place for decades, within minutes after her corpse is discovered in the burning house a huge crowd gathers there. It is comprised mostly of white men (who, the narrator pointedly says, "would not have allowed their wives" to call on Joanna while she lived there, 291-92), although the crowd includes "the women" too (289).

In Light in August this father is hoping to get the reward for Joe Christmas' capture when he brings his son to town to tell the sheriff about giving the fugitive a ride on the night of the killing.

The day the Grand Jury meets to consider Christmas' case in Light in August is a Saturday, which as always means there are a lot of people from the surrounding county in Jefferson; according to the narrator, while the “countrymen in overalls” join the townsmen standing around the courthouse, their wives and daughters of move “in and out of the stores . . . in clumps, slowly and also aimlessly as cattle or clouds" (416).

The father of the woman whom Reverend Hightower marries is also a minister, and a teacher at the seminary where she and Hightower meet.

In Light in August these military physicians tend soldiers wounded in battle during the Civil War. They are often assisted by Reverend Hightower's father, who learns from them to practice medicine.

This man waits on Lena Grove at Varner's store, where she buys cheese, crackers, and a box of sardines - which they both pronounce "sour-deens" - for lunch on the way to Jefferson (27). In other fictions the clerk at Varner's is sometimes Jody Varner and sometimes a Snopes, including Flem, but there's no reason to assume the clerk in Light in August is any of these people.

He owns the circus at which Milly Hines meets the father of her baby in Light in August. He appears in the novel during Milly's father's murder trial, to testify that the man Hines murders "was a part nigger instead of Mexican" (377).

In Light in August this is the choir that Byron Bunch leads on Sunday mornings in the country church "thirty miles" from Jefferson (48).

In Light in August, after Hines threatens the congregants in a Negro church with a pistol during a prayer meeting, "the law" comes and arrests him (378). 'Officers' is our way to translate "the law" into the terms of a Character database; presumably Faulkner is thinking of a few policemen or deputy sheriffs.

The American Legion was organized in 1919 for veterans of the First World War. In Light in August it is to the local members of this organization, now civilians working in "stores and offices" in Jefferson (453), that Grimm turns for volunteers to preserve peace and order after Christmas is arrested. Despite the initial resistance of the American Legion Commander, some American Legion members, and Sheriff Kennedy, he gets enough volunteers to create "a fair platoon" (453).

In Light in August Percy Grimm recruits members of the local American Legion from "the stores and offices where the legion members worked" and organizes them into a "platoon" to preserve the peace after Christmas is jailed in Jefferson (453). To pass the time, this man starts a poker game on Saturday night that lasts through Sunday night.

In Light in August Percy Grimm recruits members of the local American Legion from "the stores and offices where the legion members worked" and organizes them into a "platoon" to preserve the peace after Christmas is jailed in Jefferson (453). This man objects to Grimm's rhetoric and argues that this "is Jefferson's trouble, not Washington's" (454).

In Light in August, when Sheriff Kennedy and Deputy Buford go into the cabin at the Burden place to interrogate the black man that Buford and "two or three others" have seized (291), this "third man" is there too (293). The interrogation consists mainly of Buford whipping the Negro until he tells Kennedy what he wanted to know: who had been living there before.

This is the person in Light in August who, sometime after Grimm fires the shots that kill Christmas, covers the five gunshot holes in his body "with a folded handkerchief" (464). It seems safe to say that this "someone" is a man, but not even that is explicitly said.

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.

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.

This woman - referred to only as "Pappy Thompson's daughter" and the mother of Roz - does not appear in Light in August herself (323).

In Light in August he is the seventy-year-old deacon of an Negro church in Yoknapatawpha whom Joe Christmas knocks down in the middle of a service.

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).

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).

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).

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.

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 . . .

The son of one Gail Hightower and the father of another, this man is never given a first name in Light in August. A "man of spartan sobriety" (472), in the years before the Civil War he "rides sixteen miles each Sunday to preach in a small Presbyterian chapel back in the hills" (468). He also opposes slavery and refuses to be served by his father's slaves.

In Light in August Halliday is the resident of Mottstown who recognizes Joe Christman and, after hitting him in the face, captures him in the hope of claiming the thousand dollar reward.

In Light in August McKinley Grove's wife is described as "labor- and childridden," spending "almost half of every year either pregant or "recovering" (5), so it is not surprising that she discovers her sister-in-law Lena's pregnancy and tells McKinley about it.

Lena Grove is at the center of one of the three major plot lines in Light in August. Born in Alabama in 1912, she moved to her brother's house at the age of twelve, after her parents died. When the novel begins, she is around 21 years old, more than eight months pregnant, and traveling alone and on foot to find Lucas Burch, the father of her unborn child. Lena is a patient, trusting soul who feels no shame at her condition; she is also self-reliant, asking for no one's help yet accepting it gratefully during four weeks of traveling.

In Light in August Lena Grove's father dies in the same summer as her mother does, when Lena is twelve years old. Both parents have impressed upon her a sense of filial duty; she takes care of her father at her mother's dying request and goes to live with her brother McKinley in accordance with her father's wish.

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.

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.

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.

Joe's biological father in Light in August is called "a fellow with the circus" who tries to ride off with Milly Hines on a dark rainy night, but is shot and killed by Milly's father (374). He and Milly are together long enough for her to get pregnant. His legacy to his son, who is given the name Joe Christmas in the Memphis orphanage, is the mystery of his own racial identity. Doc Hines is convinced he is a Negro, i.e. in the racist world of segregation, has "nigger blood" (374). Milly apparently tries to tell her parents "the man is a Mexican" (374).

In Light in August Lem Bush is the neighbor in Arkansas who takes Milly Hines to the circus in his wagon.

One of the major characters in Light in August, Bryon Bunch is a "small man who will not see thirty again" (47). He came to Jefferson seven years before the novel begins, and leaves the town before it ends. The bookkeeper at the planing mill where he works calls him a "hillbilly" (413). While in Jefferson, for six days every week he is a steady, dependable worker in the mill; every Sunday he directs a country church choir. Scrupulously honest with himself and others, Byron is also a sweet-tempered man.

In Light in August, Bedenberry is preaching when Joe enters the Negro church and tries "to snatch him outen the pulpit" (323).

In Light in August, Bobbie comes from a brothel in Memphis to the railroad town where she works for Max and Mame, by day as a waitress "in a small, dingy, back street restaurant" and by night as a prostitute. She responds to the romantic advances of 18-year old Joe Christmas, even though "she would never see thirty again" (172).

The "them" in the phrase "made them return her money" is the only reference in "Miss Zilphia Gant" to the people who own or work in the store where Mrs. Gant bought and then brought back a miniature cook stove (373).

In "Miss Zilphia Gant," the one girl whom Zilphia has permission to visit and play with after school is not named or described, but after the two girls have grown up the narrative mentions her marriage (Zilphia herself makes the bride's "white gown," 374), and, after another four years, the birth of her first child, a daughter (for whom Zilphia makes dresses).

In "Miss Zilphia Gant" this woman becomes Zilphia's "partner" in the dressmaking shop less than a year after Mrs. Gant's death (378).

In "Miss Zilphia Gant," Mrs. Gant "borrows a pistol from another neighbor" when she leaves the Bend to get revenge on her husband (369). We know this 'other' neighbor is not the woman with whom she leaves Zilphia, but that is all the text makes explicit; that this neighbor's is male is our assumption.

In "Miss Zilphia Gant," years after learning that her former husband's wife is pregnant, Zilphia begins "to dream again" (380). The dreams that feature "negro men" cause her to "wake wide-eyed" (380).

In "Miss Zilphia Gant," the "oldish" man in "in the background" at the tavern where Gant stays is vividly described as a drunkard "with cunning reddish pig's eyes and matted hair which lent a kind of ferocity to the weak face which they concealed," but beyond that his place in the narrative remains vague (368). It's likely that he is Mrs. Vinson's husband or father, but all the text says about their relationship is that they are occasionally heard "cursing one another in the back" of the tavern (369).

"Miss Zilphia Gant" leaves it up to its readers to decide for themselves about the identity of the girl that Zilphia brings back to Jefferson at the end, claiming that she is her own daughter. The cues provided by the text, however, make it probable that this girl (whom the narrator calls "little Zilphia," 381) is the daughter of the painter Zilphia married many years earlier and his second wife: for example, the girl has "eyes like wood ashes and dark hair," both traits she shares with that husband (381, 375).

In "Miss Zilphia Gant" this "a hulking halfwitted boy" helps Jim Gant in his work as a trader (368). It is he who tells Mrs. Gant that her husband has left her, when he tries to collect the $1.75 he loaned to Gant; when she refuses at gun point to give him any money, he becomes "an ancient mariner in faded overalls" as - "wild eyed and drooling a little at the mouth" - he relates his grievance repeatedly to the other people in the Bend (370).