Mrs.+Hines

Mrs. Hines, of Light in August, is the wife of Doc Hines, mother of Milly Hines, and grandmother of Joe Christmas. Although a relatively minor character, her presence adds much to the work, particularly in terms of the novel's explorations of isolation, rebirth, movement, and multilevel challenges to existing power structures. Although at first connected to only one of the novel's multiple storylines, that of Joe Christmas, her impact ultimately radiates to include others such as Gail Hightower, Byron Bunch, and Lena Grove. Mrs. Hines appears seemingly out of nowhere rather late in the story, which echoes her unexpected emergence from a three-decade long period of seclusion within the home she shares with her husband in "a small bungalow in a neighborhood of negros" in Mottstown, Mississippi (340). She had apparently enshrined herself within this house to such an extent that some of their fellow Mottstown residents had never seen her, although they were aware of her existence there. Her re-emergence occurs with the same suddenness with which she and her husband first appeared in the town twenty-five years earlier.

Upon her re-emergence into society, Mrs. Hines experiences a rebirth of sorts. With freshly acquired knowledge of her grandson's whereabouts and a newfound dominance over her husband resulting in part from the reversal in the power structure between them in the face of his physical and mental deterioration, she confronts Doc Hines for the first time about what he did with Christmas when Christmas was a baby: "At first it seemed as if she were just watching him, with concern and solicitude. Then a third person would have seen that she was trembling violently and that she had lowered him into the chair either before she dropped him to the floor or in order to hold him prisoner until she could speak" (348). Within Jefferson, she not only advocates for her grandson and prevents her husband from committing any further atrocities but also assists Lena during childbirth and takes part in Bunch's attempts to lure Hightower out of his isolation in the hopes that he can help Christmas by providing him with an alibi. Although Bunch's ultimate motives here are somewhat suspect, he appears to believe in Mrs. Hines's transformation, asserting to Hightower that "'She has been lost for thirty years. But she is found now'" (365).

Through this rebirth process, Mrs. Hines becomes mobile on multiple axes, including not only movement through space but also movement through time. By assisting with the birth of Lena's baby, she is able to, in a sense, travel backward in time in order to relive the moment at which she was unable to protect her daughter and grandchild from her husband's murderous rage and can thus attempt to rewrite her and their stories. Also tied into Mrs. Hines's time traveling is her resultant out of sync positioning with respect to the world at large. She appears polished in contrast to the squalor-filled home in which she and her husband live, a "little house dark and small and rankly-odored as a cave", and the griminess of Doc Hines himself (348). However, her slightly old-fashioned clothing, "a purple silk dress and a hat with a plume on it," makes her seem out of time (351-352). Furthermore, over the course of her journey, as her power to help Christmas crumbles in the face of Jefferson's white supremacy, her clothes and hat become rumpled and droopy.

Similarly to Lena, Mrs. Hines is portrayed as being contradictorily both mobile, in the sense that her body is now moving from place to place, and motionless, in that her features, her speech, and at times her thoughts remain still and inscrutable. As made clear by repeated references to her "gray, still face" and "perfectly immobile face," she wears an unreadable mask once out in the world; it seems she is not yet completely willing to allow others access to her thoughts (346; 369). Her voice also displays this dual nature of movement and immobility when she begins to tell Hightower her story: "Her voice is sudden and deep, almost harsh, though not loud. It is as though she had not expected to make so much noise when she spoke; she ceases in a sort of astonishment as though at the sound of her own voice, looking from one to the other of the two faces" (370). This creaking return to life is also exemplified in her machinelike movements; later during her monologue to Hightower, we are told of her voice, "But hers is on a falling inflection, as if the machine had run down in midrecord" (373).

Ultimately, Mrs. Hines's significance with regard to challenges to the larger power structures portrayed in Light in August is multi-leveled; her resistance to the patriarchy is the means through which she is also able to challenge white supremacy. Despite her eventual inability to save her grandson, Abdul-Razzak Al-Barhow notes that "The way she and her husband come to Jefferson--she to save Christmas and Mr. Hines to take part in his lynching--and the way they leave with her in charge is one of the strongest suggestions that Christmas’s death has divided the white community, at least on the margins, and did not do so in vain" (68).

Works Cited

Al-Barhow, Abdul-Razzak. "Focusing on the Margins: //Light in August// and Social Change." //The Southern Literary Journal//, vol. 42, no. 2, 2010, pp. 52-72. Project MUSE, doi:10.1353/slj.0.0071.

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