Joe+Christmas

==== Joe Christmas is the indefinable. Not black or white, both and neither, Christmas is the amalgam of the new South and the great anti-hero of //Light in August//. Christmas is close and far enough from the rest of Jefferson, selling his homemade whiskey and living in the outskirt of town with an older white women. The mixed up of the mixed up ones. Originally his conception is unknown, he speculates whether he has some black blood while the other characters dismiss his attribute as those belonging to a foreigner. Christmas continues to suspect he has black ancestry; his fair skin complimented his course dark hair. Orphaned and abandoned, Christmas lives his life as he knew, or at least hopes, he has black blood. “I don’t know. If I’m not [black] damned if I haven’t wasted a lot of time.” (254) His mixed blood becomes his justification, his prayer and his curse. He identifies with his racial fluidity when it pleases him, choosing his race like a gladiator choosing a weapon before the battle. ====

==== Christmas uses his blackness to shock, to generate anxiety and to manipulate men to fear or loathe him. His life is narrated by one violence followed by another violence, all rooted in his inability to decipher his position in a segregated society. The Christmas story is the story of a traveler that never veers far from himself, because the road that he travels by is an inner journey. His name is everything, and nothing. “Christmas. A heathenish name. Sacrilege. I will change that.” (135) His Calvinist foster father may be determined to change Christmas (like all the other men in the Christmas narrative) but he cannot change what Christmas does not possess, an identity. The identity of Christmas is derived from a place of confusion and restlessness and the struggle to contain Christmas will result in nothingness. “My name ain’t McEachern. My name is Christmas.” (136) Christmas might not be certain what he is, but he is definitive in what he is not and finds power in the act of rejection. He may lack the capacity to identify his body, but Christmas does not hesitate to reject, and finds power in refusing the advances of men and women. His greatest attribute and his greatest folly, Christmas cannot deny his sovereignty because he has been refused. From his conception to his death, his family rejects him and the mixed blood that flowed through his veins. ====

==== Miscegenation is inevitable. White blood and black blood is too close not to mix. The young teenage mother of Christmas, Milly Hines, is impregnated by her circus lover whom she claims is of Mexican descent. Furious and self righteous, her father Doc Hines, permits his daughter to die in childbirth because he refuses to call a doctor. The babe is then rushed to an orphanage for white children. The grandfather is then employed as a janitor at the orphanage where he silently observes his young grandchild as he is ridiculed and ostracized by the other children and the orphanage staff. Watching but not interfering until the moment arises, Doc Hines is McEachern’s echo, and the epitome of false Christian ethos. According to “McEachern Christmas’s future is to be an atonement for his past”, and Doc Hines will ensure that Christmas pays the greatest fee. [i] Conjured by sin, it is Doc Hines and his like that insist that Christmas must compensate for his mixed blood by allowing him to be castrated and lynched. ==== ==== Joanna Burden is dead. The Negro blood within Christmas guarantees that he will be lynched for the death of a white woman. The manliest women, the most suitable partner for Christmas, her dead body will be used as a weapon against Christmas. In death, as in life, the body of Joanna baffles and intoxicates Christmas as a representation of blackness in whiteness and whiteness among blackness. The Yankee spinster, daughter of abolitionists, is consumed and aroused by Christmas, as he is stirred by her. Unlike the previous women that Christmas has encountered, pink creatures that evoke nausea, the masculinity of Joanna suits Joe. Consummating almost every night, their perverse attraction is derived by the ‘otherness’ of the other. He is attracted to her as a man in a women’s frame, and she is attracted to him as a black man in a white body. She “would be wild then, with her wild hair each strand of which would seem to come alive like octopus tentacles, and her wild hands and her breathing: Negro! Negro! Negro!” (245) More allured than loved, the relationship between Christmas and Joanna is a consequence of their mutually strained sexuality. [ii] Christmas (beginning with his childhood encounter with the dietician and her toothpaste) is strangely repulsed by women. Their bodies. Their smells. Their desire for secrecy, everything disgusts Christmas. Joanna becomes the sole exception because her masculine demeanor, both in action and body, make her a vessel that can contain herself. Joanna, however, makes the fatal miscalculation of attempting to contain Christmas. ====

==== In the final chapter of their relationship, sex is replaced with paperwork. Joanna, no longer devoured by lust, makes a business proposal to Christmas that will permit him to go to school and resume her political affairs. Simply, Joanna conceives a plan that will allow Christmas to benefit from his blackness. Until this situation in the novel, Christmas has used his blackness, particularly with women, as a weapon of rejection and fear. According to Christmas, to use his mixed blood as a tool to ascend would be the worst offense, and a refusal of his entire life. For Christmas, his mixed racial identity remains to be curse that will reap no benefits, and any adjustment will be dealt with hostility. Thus, he murders Joanna. ====

==== Like fighting a gun with a razor, Christmas will be beaten before the pursuit and trial have begun. His battle develops, and grows outside of his uncomfortable body and is laid in the public square for the town of Jefferson to witness the dissection of Christmas. The end of the novel creates a predicament. Christmas, the headstrong, the contrary, succumbs to the mob and is sacrificed like a black lamb sent to the slaughterhouse. His peace is achieved through surrender, like a false Christ, Christmas attains completion in his demise. Christmas and Christ, similar in name but not in action, one dies for himself while the other died for everyone but himself. However, the similarity that connects Christmas to Christ is not death, but the freedom to choose life by dying. Even on the road to death, Christmas remains free, because the road is more important than the destination. The destination is self realization and acceptance, and it is only through death that Christmas can attain completeness because there is no place for him in Jefferson. Death becomes freedom, because life in a mixed body is inferior to death. ====

==== Christmas is the manifestation of blackness and whiteness. Whiteness as normalcy and blackness as the other. Christmas transcends what has been perceived as a racial superiority and inferiority because his mixed up body terrifies all. His body does not fit; it is beyond the borders of white and black and therefore cannot be oppressed and becomes a shadow of illumination. ====

Works Cited

[i] Adamowski, T.H. “Joe Christmas: The Tyranny of Childhood”. Novel: A Forum on Fiction, Vol. 4, No. 3 (Spring 1971) pp. 240-251 (242). [ii] Ibid 250 Faulkner, William. __Light in August.__ New York: Vintage International Edition, October 1990.