Light in August

Byron visits Hightower again. Joe has been caught. Brown, too, is in jail. Hearing this news, Hightower cries. He’s always chosen to stay in Jefferson, but he laments the drama in town now that he’s old and no longer a man of God. Byron further adds to the tension, revealing an older woman has come to town: “She has been lost for thirty years. But she is found now. She’s [Joe’s] grandmother” (365). Byron leaves for church. Hightower watches his neighbors make their way to the sermon from his window. He mourns people’s inability to escape violence, and worse, their desire for it. Joe’s fate looks bleak. Hightower knows the town will kill him happily: “They will do it gladly, gladly. That’s why it is so terrible, terrible, terrible” (368). After church, Byron returns, accompanied by Mr. and Mrs. Hines. Mrs. Hines tells Byron and Hightower her family’s story.

When she is 18, Mr. and Mrs. Hines’s daughter, Milly, has an affair with a man from a traveling circus. The man might be Black or Mexican, but his race is never confirmed. Horrified his daughter slept with a non-White man, Mr. Hines tracks down the man and shoots him. He looks for a doctor who will abort Milly’s baby, claiming the child is an abomination, but he can’t find one.