He is bitter and angry, deprived of all loving human contact despite his efforts to secure it. He has no friendships, no sense of humor, no apparent hopes, no dreams. Who is he? Can he truly be anyone? After he wanders much of the country, at one point living in a black community in Chicago where he is condemned for being white, he winds up back in the American south, in Jefferson, Mississippi, where he gets a job shoveling sawdust in a planing mill. Some people broken by misfortune become psychotic, as Joe does, though there is probably some genetic predisposition to become so. His self-hatred becomes outsize, beyond reason. The unfortunate (and I would argue false) dichotomy of black and white seems to rip Joe Christmas apart before our eyes. Joe kills his step-father on the dance floor and runs for his life.įor fifteen years he drifts.

When he escapes his room one night to go dancing with a local harlot, about whom he entertains romantic notions of love and marriage, he is followed by his step-father who accuses him of whoring. Perhaps if he had been luckier in his foster parents Joe would not have developed as he has, but his upbringing by McEachern is brutal, physically abusive, traumatic. At age five, when his African blood is 'discovered' by the staff of the orphanage, he is quickly placed in the foster home of a white man named McEachern who lives in a kind of perpetual, self-dramatizing, Christian self-abasement, which he forces on his new stepson, and which Joe ultimately rejects.

He is left by persons unknown at a white orphanage one Christmas day, thus his name. Joe Christmas lives as a white man but believes he has a little African blood in him. But what Faulkner shows us in Light in August seems to me a wholly unique recounting - despite the fact that it is fiction - of a huge part of our national catastrophe. Certainly the works of Toni Morrison, Ralph Ellison and others should be part of that documentation too.

What Faulkner has done here is to lay bare the racial tragedy of the American South in the 1920s such as no one else has ever done. It occurs to me on reading Light in August for the third time, that if America were ever to try to come to terms with its legacy of slavery-unlikely now at this late date-but if it ever were to empanel some kind of Truth and Reconciliation Commission, like the one South Africa had after apartheid, and which seems especially needed now that we are mourning the shooting deaths by cops of so many unarmed black men, then William Faulkner's novels, certainly this one, should be part of the background documentation of such a process.

Light in august book