The Digital Yoknapatawpha Project

She was the organist in Hightower's church when he preached there, but has now "been dead for almost twenty years" (366).

The superintendent in Jefferson's Presbyterian church orders the organist to play to distract the congregation from Mrs. Hightower's exit from the church service.

It is "a Jefferson woman shopping in Memphis" 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.

Hightower's wife is the only child of "one of the ministers, the teachers" in the seminary he attends (479), but this icon represents the imaginary "family" that Hightower invents to explain his wife's periodical absences in Memphis. He tells the congregation she has gone to visit them "downstate somewhere" (63).

They observe and talk about the conduct and behavior of other women. At church on Sundays, they talk quietly and nod "to arriving friends as they pass in the aisle" (366). When the Hightowers arrive, they watch and worry about Mrs. Hightower; they bring food to the Reverend when she goes to a sanitorium.

Old men and women, pillars of the church, are among the first to "astonished and dubious" about Reverend Hightower's obsessions (61). Others increasingly view his behavior and preaching with suspicion and gossip about him and his wife - though they also raise funds to pay for Mrs. Hightower's treatment in a sanatorium and cook meals for him during her absence. When his preaching becomes more incoherent after her death, they finally lock him out of the church - though they also raise funds to help him relocate in another town, and are disappointed when he stays.

A hypothetical figure, offered by the narrator as an example of the type of person who might pay attention to the sign in front of Hightower's house, which over the years the townspeople have come to ignore, and then mention it to "some acquaintance in the town" (59).

In a strange anticipation of itself, the narrative introduces the "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).

The "town" of Jefferson plays a prominent and pervasive role in Light in August, but the only time the narrative refers to the town's children is when it describes the occasional "negro nursemaid" who would pass Hightower's "with her white charges" (59).