Streets+&+Roads

//Light In August// begins and ends on the road, with many of the characters in the book having some relationship to the road, travel, or journey. The connection to the road for many of our characters makes the road a powerful symbol for the search for identity and a home.

The book opens with young pregnant Lena Grove on the road to Jefferson to find the father of her unborn child, Lucas Burch. The chapter begins with the lines, "Sitting beside the road, watching the wagon mount the hill toward her, Lena thinks, ‘I have come from Alabama: a fur piece. All the way from Alabama a-walking. A fur piece.’ Thinking although I have not been quite a month on the road I am already in Mississippi, further from home than I have ever been before. I am now further from Doane’s Mill than I have been since I was twelve years old (1). Lena, not having a real family on her own, spends the entire span of the novel on a search for the man to complete her little family. For Lena, the road represents redemption. Though she starts off the novel on the road as unwed pregnant young woman on the search for the father of her child, by the end it does not seem like she's really looking for him anymore, even if she says she is, using this search as a reason to keep traveling. By the end of the book she is back on the road, now with her newborn baby and Byron Bunch who make up their own kind of family on the road to nowhere in particular.

Reverend Gail Hightower also has an interesting relationship to the road/street. Much like Lena, Hightower's story begins with a scene involving the street. The first lines of his first chapter says, “From his study window he can see the street....The house, the brown, unpainted and unobtrusive bungalow is small too and by bushing crape myrtle and syringa and Althea almost hidden save for that gap through which from the study window he watches the street. So hidden it is that the light from the corner street lamp scarcely touches it”(57). Several times throughout the novel there are scenes of Hightower looking out at the street. Haunted by his past, Hightower now lives "out there on what used to be the main street ever since, by himself. At least it ain’t a principal street anymore” (59). As his name suggests, Hightower spends much of his time observing the town while trying to not be a part of it. For him, the street represents his small connection to the town. Though he spends most of his time not getting involved in the town's business, there is still times where he comes out of his "tower" to preach the word, “But he would reach the church at the old hour each Sunday morning and go to the pulpit, and the congregation would rise and leave, and the loafers and such would gather along the street outside and listen to him preaching and praying in the empty church”(70). Here the street is also his connection to the people.

When it comes to the symbolic nature of the road/street, no character has a stronger connection than Joe Christmas. After being rejected by Bobbie and beaten up, Christmas goes on a fifteen year journey where he travels everywhere from Chicago to Mexico, working various jobs and living in different communities, to find somewhere to belong. Eventually his wonderings bring him to Jefferson where he moved into the home of Joanna Burden without actually even asking her. In the beginning of chapter 11 we have a long passage about the street and Christmas’s journey:

“He entered the street which was to run for fifteen years. The whiskey died away in time and was renewed and died again, but the street ran on. From that night the thousand streets ran as one street, with imperceptible corners and changes of scene, broken by intervals of begged and stolen rides… The street ran into Oklahoma and Missouri and as far south as Mexico and then back north to Chicago and Detroit and then back south again and at last to Mississippi. It was fifteen years long…And always, sooner or later, the street ran through cities, through an identical and wellnigh interchangeable section of cities without remembered names…Usually all he risked was a cursing from the woman and the matron of the house, though now and then he was beaten unconscious by other patrons, to waken later in the street or in the jail”(223).

Christmas’s journey is not only physical but emotional as well. As an orphan with an unknown heritage he assumes is mixed race, Christmas never feels that he belongs anywhere. No matter where he went he didn’t belong and he was the drinking, woman-beating man everywhere he went. The only home he has is on the streets, the home of wonderers. What’s interesting about this passage is the way the length of the roads are not in miles but in years, highlighting the incredibly long journey Christmas had to take to get to Jefferson, only to be the place where he dies. Later in the chapter it says: “He thought that it was loneliness which he was trying to escape and not himself. But the street ran on: catlike, one place was the same as another to him. But in none of them could he be quiet” (226). Christmas’s past has him fighting a battle within himself, not knowing who he is or where he belongs. The roads for him are never ending, full of possibilities, but are often dead ends that fail him in his search for an identity.