Rev. Gail Hightower Character Analysis

Rev. Hightower is the disgraced former minister of the main church in Jefferson. His career was ruined when it was discovered that his wife, Mrs. Hightower, had been having an affair with a man in Memphis, and ended up dead. Hightower refused to leave Jefferson, which infuriated the townspeople, and at one point he was beaten up by the KKK. After the scandal faded, Hightower led a reclusive life, barely seeing anyone except Byron. He finds a renewed sense of purpose in helping Lena to give birth and attempts to save Christmas from being lynched, but is too late. Hightower’s final fate is left ambiguous, although he ends the novel lost in a kind of rapture imagining his grandfather, who was a Confederate general.