We learn that Christmas - and perhaps Brown as well - supposedly lives in an old slave quarter on the grounds of an old plantation owned by Miss Joanna Burden. Christmas quits the planing mill Brown quits soon thereafter.

But the talk is that Christmas still does, and that Brown delivers the whiskey to whomever will buy it. Brown lets it be known that Christmas used to run a whiskey distillery it's unclear if Christmas still runs it. Christmas and Brown work together and form a relationship about which the other workers are unsure. A man named Joe Christmas shows up looking for work and is hired, followed soon thereafter by a man named Joe Brown being hired. The Jefferson townspeople seem more angry that Joe is part black and has killed a white woman than they are about it being Joanna who was murdered.įlashback three years earlier to the Jefferson planing mill where a man named Byron Bunch works Byron will become one of the main characters - and a primary narrator - in the novel. We later learn that Joe Christmas, who lived in an old slave cabin on the plantation and was having a sexual relationship with Joanna, is accused of the murder. On the day she arrives in Jefferson, an old plantation house owned by Joanna Burden is on fire. Along the way she hears that Lucas might be in Jefferson, so she walks toward that town. Hearing no word from Lucas for a long time, the pregnant Lena walks from Alabama into Mississippi looking for him. While there, she gets pregnant by a man named Lucas Burch, who runs out on her but not before saying that he'll send for Lena once he finds a town in which they can settle down.

Lena Grove, whose parents are dead, goes to live with her brother.

Light august faulkner