Alfred Kazin
THE S11 LLNESS 0
F "LI GHTIN AUG US T"
Light in August
begins unforgettably with a pregnant
young woman from Alabama sitting beside a road in Mississippi, her
feet
in
a ditch, her shoes in her hand, watching a wagon that is
mounting the hill toward her with a noise that carries for a half–
mile "across the hot still pinewiney silence of the August afternoon."
She has been on the road for a month, riding in a long succession
of farm wagons or walking the hot dusty roads with her shoes in
her hand, trying to get to Jefferson. There, she firmly expects, she
will find her lover working in a planing mill and ready to marry
her, and there-that is the big city-she will put her shoes on at last.
This opening chapter, so dry and loving in its pastoral humor,
centering on the picture of Lena and her precious burden being
carried in one wagon or another, by one farmer after another, to her
hoped-for destination in a husband, ends sharply on the outskirts of
Jefferson, from which she can see smoke going up from
a.
burning
house.
It
is the house of Joanna Burden, who has just been murdered
by Joe Christmas. And the images that have been crowding us with
the dust and the heat of the unending road-with Lena continually
amazed at how far a body can go, the serenity of the deserted young
woman whose face is "calm as a stone, but not hard," the "sharp
and brittle crack and clatter" of the "wagon's weathered and un–
greased wood and metal," the identical and anonymous wagons, the
mules plodding in a steady and unflagging hypnosis, the drowsy heat
of the afternoon; with Lena's faded blue dress, her palm leaf fan,
her small cloth bundle in which she carries thirty-five cents in nickels
and dimes; with the shoes that she takes off and carries in her hand
as soon as she feels the dust of the road beneath her feet-all pro–
vide us with that foundation in the local and the provincial, the
