The Digital Yoknapatawpha Project

This group represents the folks who, Lena says, "have been right kind" to her during her travels on foot from Alabama to Yoknapatawpha. The narrative implies a difference between the way men and women judge Lena when it describes Mrs. Beard looking at her "once, completely, as strange women had been doing for four weeks now" (85). Nonetheless the narrative does confirm Lena's assertion that everyone is "kind." When she inquires for Lucas Burch, people send her along to the next town, often finding her a ride in the process.

One of the major characters in Light in August, Bryon Bunch is a "small man who will not see thirty again" (47). He came to Jefferson seven years before the novel begins, and leaves the town before it ends. The bookkeeper at the planing mill where he works calls him a "hillbilly" (413). While in Jefferson, for six days every week he is a steady, dependable worker in the mill; every Sunday he directs a country church choir. Scrupulously honest with himself and others, Byron is also a sweet-tempered man.

This boy is born in Joe Christmas' cabin on Joanna Burden's property on the same day that Christmas is lynched in Jefferson. When Hightower asks his name, Lena says "I aint named him yet" (410). Joe's grandmother, who is there at his birth, calls him "Joey," confusing him with Joe, whom she has not seen since he was a baby over thirty-six years ago (397). Lena's baby's father has abandoned him, but at the end of the novel Lena is taking him with her as she resumes her travels.

This man waits on Lena Grove at Varner's store, where she buys cheese, crackers, and a box of sardines - which they both pronounce "sour-deens" - for lunch on the way to Jefferson (27). In other fictions the clerk at Varner's is sometimes Jody Varner and sometimes a Snopes, including Flem, but there's no reason to assume the clerk in Light in August is any of these people.

This good-natured man gives Lena Grove a ride from Varner's Store to Jefferson; on the outskirts of the town, they see the smoke from Joanna Burden's burning house.

Jody Varner runs the store founded by his father Will in Frenchmen’s Bend. He gives us the first indication that the man Lena has heard about at the planing mill in Jefferson is not Lucas Burch but Byron Bunch. Jody also silently declines to sympathize with the unmarried and pregnant Lena, perhaps anticipating his later obsession (in The Hamlet, 1940) with his sensual sister, Eula.

Light in August says that Grove McKinley's wife was "labor- and childridden," so the couple probably had more than the three sons who are specifically referred to (5). Because their mother is always either "lying in or recovering," Lena takes care of these boys; like Lena, they sleep in the "leanto room" attached to the McKinley house (5).