LIGHT IN AUGUST
535
intends no parody; he is moved by the likeness of totality to totality.
But neither is he a Christian. There is no redemption; there is not
even in
A Fable-but
there man has the courage to redeem circum–
stances by denying their fatality. In
Light in August
the past is not
merely exigent; it is even malicious, the spirit of pure bad luck, a
god-like force that confronts man at every tum with everything he
has been, and so seems to mock and to oppose him. This is called
"The Player": Lena's seducer, "Brown," still running away from
her at the last, sends a Negro boy to the sheriff for the reward
money he has earned in informing on Joe Christmas, but knows
despairingly that he will never see the money.
'He wont do it. He cant do it. I know he cant find him, cant get
it, bring it back.' He called no names, thought no names. It seemed
to him now that they were all just shapes like chessmen-the negro,
the sheriff, the money, all-unpredictable and without reason moved
here and there by an Opponent who could read his moves before he
made them and who created spontaneous rules which he and not the
Opponent, must follow.
This is the Opponent that Joe Christmas decides finally not to
elude again, the "Player" who moves Percy Grimm unerringly from
position to position:
He was beside the ditch now. He stopped, motionless
in
midstride.
Above the blunt, cold rake of the automatic his face had that serene,
unearthly luminousness of angels in church windows. He was moving
again almost before he had stopped, with that lean, swift, blind obe–
dience to whatever Player moved him on the Board. He ran to the ditch.
All things are fated; man is in any place because the Player
moved him there. Our past sets up the positions into which we fall.
This is why Joe Christmas's grandmother, Mrs. Hines, utters the
most significant lines in the book when, at the end, she pitifully
cries out:
"I am not saying that he never did what they say he did. Ought
not to suffer for it like he made them that loved and lost suffer. But
if
folks could maybe just let
him
for one day. Like it hadn't happened
yet. Like the world never had anything against
him
yet. Then it could
be like he had just went on a trip and grew man grown and come
back.
If
it could be like that for just one day."
