LIGHT IN AUGUST
525
phanage and then from It
III
a savage parody of loving care. Joe
Christmas is nothing but the man things are done to, the man who
has no free will of his own, who is constantly seeking a moment of
rest ("When have I ever eaten in peace?") and who looks for an
identity by deliberately provoking responses that will let him be
some–
one,
if only as a white man among Negroes, or as someone calling
himself a Negro in an effort to shock the white prostitute he has
just slept with. His passivity, his ability to lend himself to situations
and to people who will "carry" him for awhile, is immense and
pitiful.
Joe Christmas is the most solitary character in American fiction,
the most extreme phase conceivable of American loneliness. He is
never seen full face, but always as a silhouette, a dark shadow
haunting others, a shadow upon the road he constantly runs-a fore–
shadowing of his crucifixion, which, so terrible and concentrated
is his suffering, already haunts the lives of others like .a black shadow.
For, almost
because
he does not look it, he becomes the "Negro,"
or the thought of, the obsession with, Negroes in the minds of those
who, looking at Joe Christmas, can think of nothing else. And Joanna
Burden, whose abolitionist grandfather was murdered in the South,
whose whole life has been an obstinate carrying-on, deep inside Mis–
sissippi, of her family's coldly abstract espousal of Negroes, shows us
how much of an abstraction Joe Christmas is when she makes love
crying to him "Negro! Negro!" Whether the "Negro" represents the
white man's guilt or the white man's fear, he is always a thought in
the white's mind-and in the South, an obsession. So Joanna Burden,
who befriends him, and Doc Hines, who hates him, come to see
in him the cause of guilt that is finally the image of guilt. "I thought,"
Joanna says to her lover,
of all the children coming forever and ever into the world, white,
with the black shadow already falling upon them before they draw
breath. And I seemed to see the black shadow in the shape of a cross.
And it seemed like the white babies were struggling, even before they
drew breath, to escape from the shadow that was not only upon them
but beneath them, too, flung out like their arms were flung out, as if
they were nailed to the cross.
And she quotes her father: "In order to rise, you must raise
