Burden Place (Location Key)

Although in Light in August the Burdens are abolitionists who come to Yoknapatawpha during Reconstruction to work for the rights of newly emancipated slaves, the large house they move into is an "old colonial plantation house" at the center of what was an antebellum slave plantation two miles from Jefferson (36). Now Joanna, the last surviving member of the family, lives there alone, "in a lonely house in a neighborhood populated, when at all, by negroes" (258). The entire property has fallen into decay even before the big house burns to the ground. When Byron Bunch looks over it near the end of the novel he sees that "the plantation is broken now by random negro cabins and garden patches and dead fields erosiongutted and choked with blackjack and sassafras and persimmon and brier" - though the stately oaks that shade the plantation's mansion house "still stand" (425).