Light In August Study Guide

Light in August Study Guide Chapters 1-11 Chapter 1 -The story of Lena Grove is recounted: Her father dies when she is young and she is taken in by her brother, who works at a mill. She meets Lucas Burch at the mill, and gets pregnant, much to the bane of her family. Lucas leaves to pursue another career in Jefferson, and when he doesn’t call for her, she decides to go looking for him. -She is on the side of the road where a man named Armistid finds her. He takes her in for a night, and provides her with food and money. -She then spends the next day at a store waiting for a wagon to take her to Jefferson. As she climbs over a hill, the town comes into view, along with a burning house… Chapter 2 -The scene switches to three years earlier to when Joe Christmas and Joe Brown (Lucas Burch) first come into the story. Byron Bunch works at the mill when Christmas comes to work there. He is aloof but a good worker, and refuses some of Byron’s lunch when it is offered. Brown joins the mill two and a half years later, and he is talkative and noisy. He and Christmas band together to form an illegal whiskey smuggling business in the woods. Suddenly Christmas quits, followed in a few days by Brown. -Byron Bunch has never known love, and is unremarkable in the town except to Reverend Hightower, with whom he has conversations every week-end. Bunch tells Hightower of his meeting with Lena, and reveals that he is quite taken with her. He asks her what he is doing, and when she describes her search, he realizes that Joe Brown is Lucas Burch, and he lets slip to her that they are one in the same. Chapter 3 -As Hightower looks out upon the street, he recounts his fall from grace. After coming here following his seminary graduation, he started a church but quickly bored people with long sermons about his grandfather, who was shot and killed off of a horse. Just as he loses his parishioners, his wife begins to distance herself as well. She makes frequent trips to Memphis to meet a lover, and tragically dies after falling from a hotel window during one of these rendezvous. - Word quickly spread of his wife’s scandalous behavior, and Hightower was forced to step down. He continued to live in Jefferson, however, among rumors that he taken up with a Negro woman and was subsequently beaten by a faction of the KKK. He delivered a Negro baby, but it died due to complications. He now reads a great deal and has an unsuccessful card business. Chapter 4 -Byron is now recounting his encounters with Lena. He loves her, or thinks he does, and has given her refuge at his house.

-More importantly, he tells Hightower of the story of the burning house. The first man on the scene found a drunken Joe Brown at the foot of the stairs, trying to hide the upstairs. When he finally ascended, he found Joanna Burden nearly decapitated, and when he goes downstairs Brown is gone. -Burden’s nephew in New Hampshire puts a $1000 reward for the killers capture, at which time Brown shows up shouting about Christmas being the killer. He says the two were lovers, and Christmas told him he killed her. He also says, under pressure, that Christmas has “negro blood”. Byron has not told Lena any of this. Chapter 5 -Christmas, unable to sleep, lies in bed when Brown walks in noisily. Christmas beats Brown, who calls him “niggerblood” before he falls asleep. Christmas then thinks about Joanna Burden. -He is angry that she lied to him about her age and the pregnancy. He takes off his clothes, yells at a woman in a passing car, and then falls asleep in a stable for about two hours, then goes back to the cabin to gather some things. He then proceeds to shave at a spring, using the water’s reflection to see himself. He regrets Joanna’s praying over him, then proceeds to go to a barbershop, eat lunch in town, and then walk back into town. At midnight, he enters the Burden house, wondering what is going to happen. Chapter 6 -Joe is five years old. He discovers toothpaste in the dieticians room at his orphanage, when she and a doctor come in and have sex. He vomits, and she thinks he has seen her and will tell. She tries to bribe him, but he does not accept, and she eventually tires to have him sent to a black orphanage. The janitor kidnaps him and brings him to Little Rock, though he is eventually forced to return him. The McEachern’s then adopt him, and his name is changed from Christmas to theirs. Chapter 7 -Three years later, Joe is being chided for not learning his catechism by heart. After he fails to do so in another hour, he is routinely beaten until he passes out. When he wakes, he is forced to pray for forgiveness and told once more to learn the catechism. Mrs. McEachern then brings Joe food secretly, though he smashes the dishes in her presence and refuses to eat until she leaves. -When he is fourteen, he and some other boys take turns having sex with a black woman, though when his turn comes Joe beats her until restrained. When he gets home, Mr. McEachern asks him if he has ever been with a woman. -Joe sells his calf at age 17 and lies to his father about what he did with the money, for he bought a suit with it. Later, Mrs. McEachern tells him that she bought the suit with butter money.

-Joe resents Mrs. McEachern’s attempts to be nice, and thinks that his punishments would be bearable if she didn’t always make it seem as though they were personal. He thinks she and all women try to make him cry. Chapter 8 -Joe leaves in the middle of the night to go meet Bobbie. He recounts of how he first met her in a restaurant with his father. After being told not to return, he did, and bought a slice of pie and some coffee, and though unable to afford the coffee, the waitress (Bobbie) covers for him. When he tries to repay her, he is laughed at. After a rocky beginning including their first date marred by menopause, they begin seeing each other. Joe begins stealing money from his “mother” in order to finance the dates, and uses it to at first buy Bobbie a box of chocolates. -In this chapter, Joe first has sex, tastes alcohol, and remains unaware that Bobbie is a prostitute. Mrs. McEachern can guess about her son’s activity, but his father is still unaware. Chapter 9 -The scene now switches to Mr. McEachern’s point of view, and him seeing Joe trying to escape to the dance as in the beginning of Chapter 8. He knows the suit has been worn, and follows Joe, being led seemingly by God. -At the dance, he bursts in, calling Bobbie a harlot and punches Joe in the face. Joe then hits him over the head with a chair, effectively killing him. He then leaves the dance, goes home, and takes all the money from under the floorboard. He brushes past Mrs. McEachern and leaves for Bobbie’s. -At Bobbie’s, he finds her and Max and Mame with a stranger with all of their things packed. Bobbie calls Joe a nigger and refuses to go with him. The stranger then beats him up until Mame stops him and they leave. Chapter 10 -Joe can here but barely comprehend the strangers around him talking, but eventually he regains consciousness and leaves the house. -The next fifteen years consist of Joe’s wanderings, taking odd jobs in fields and oil wells as he travels from place to place. He goes to prostitutes and tells them after having sex with them he is black, though is shocked to learn that not all women are disgusted by this. -He comes to Jefferson, where he breaks into Joanna Burden’s house looking for food. She is not angry, and offers him some when she finds him. Chapter 11 -Christmas and Burden become distant lovers that barely see each other during the day. She sets out food for him, but one time he gets angry and smashes the dishes. After he

gets a job, Joe lives in the cabin and doesn’t see Joanna for several months. One night in September he finds her sitting in his cot, where she explains her families history… -Nathaniel Burrington has Calvin Sr. Calvin Sr. become religious and marries a Huguenot from Kentucky, and denies Catholicism. He has a son named Nathaniel who runs away, and then returns with a Mexican wife and a child. Calvin Sr. and the son, also named Calvin, are murdered on Calvin Jr.’s 20th birthday by Sartoris. Nathaniel then marries a woman from New Hampshire and Joanna is born. -At the end, Joe reveals he may be part black.