ABSTRACT
Soon after Christmas has blasphemed the black church, his search party discovers a "scrap of paper" wedged into a "split plank on the edge of the church" (326). This scrap serves as a sustained comment on his criminal and irreverent behavior. Although unsigned, ostensibly the note, which is addressed to the sheriff, was written by Joe Christmas' "unpractised hand" (326). The scrap comes from a cigarette container with a "white inner side"
Moreover, the precise "nature" of Joe's criminality will be decided once Joe's body is incarcerated and made legible as racially coherent through the unofficial, quasi-juridical lynching technologies the community wants to read and place Joe's recalcitrant body as black. Joe's mediated voice knows as much, "They all want me to be captured, and then when I come up ready to say Here I am" (337). The deliberate allusion to the biblical narrative of Abraham's willingness to sacrifice his son Isaac, "Here I am,"35 puts the capture, the lynching,
Gavin Stevens, in his brief appearance, describes such a logic of racial recognitions that subtend the religiously inflected sacrifice Christmas cannot avoid. Stevens narrates Joe's racial ambiguity to his professor friend. In direct address Stevens explains:
And it was the white blood which sent him to the minister, which rising in him for the last and final time, sent him against all reason and all reality, into the embrace of a chimera, a blind faith in something read in a printed Book. Then I believe that the white blood deserted him for the moment. Just a second, a flicker, allowing the black to rise in its final moment and make him turn upon that on which he had postulated his hope of salvation. It was the black blood which swept him up into that ecstasy out of the black jungle where life has already ceased before the heart stops and death is desire and fulfillment. And then the black blood failed him again, as it must have in crises all his life. He did not kill the minister. He merely struck him with the pistol and ran on and crouched behind that table and defied the black blood for the last time, as he had been defYing it for thirty years. He crouched behind that overturned table and let them shoot him to death, with that loaded and unfired pistol in his hand. (449).
