Lena Grove does not want to hear no evil. After Lucas Burch, her mysterious lover, implies he must go away but he will send for her once he’s all settled down, she patiently and serenely waits, while her belly continues to swell. She does not hear the awful truth in his honey-covered lie; he will not send for her. He won’t make her a Burch. She will not see him again.
Lena relies on the kindness of her Southern strangers to help her meet her lover all the way in Mississippi. She does not hear the incredulity and contempt and pity in their voices, when she tells them [often without being asked] of his promise, the time past, and her goal. Even among strangers who quietly listen to her tale, like the squatting, overalled men, she “tells her story again, with that patient and transparent recapitulation of a lying child” [25]. It is a summary she continues to tell, as though with each telling, it becomes more real to Lena. As I read her recapitulation again, I find myself feeling pity for Lena, as some of her audiences also demonstrate. But as I analyze the analogy of a lying child, my sentiments of pity heighten, because Lena is aware, though she would prefer not to be, that she is pursuing not a man waiting at the finish line, but one who will continue to run evermore. Her patient and serene profile is how she survives; it’s what allows her to put one barefoot in front of the other, all the way from Alabama.
While there is a lack of hearing on Lena Grove’s part, there is a lack of seeing Lena among the strangers she encounters. Mr. Armstid, who dropped Lena off at a crossroads that should have brought her closer to her lover thought, “she’s not listening…If she could hear words like that, she would not be getting down from this wagon…hunting for a man she aint going to ever see again and that she has already seen one time too many as it is…” [24]. It takes Armstid a good long while before he fully looks at her. In fact, he intentionally avoids fully looking at her and does not touch her to help her on and off the wagon he offers her a ride in. Even after she has slowly but finally climbed onto his wagon and they’ve spoken, “Armstid has never once looked full at her. Yet he has already seen that she wears no wedding ring” [12]. People look for markers – as well as the absence of particular markers – to tell them what is deemed important about a person. Lena’s swollen belly and empty finger ring of evil. To fully see her is to see sadness and sin.
Yet Byron hears the evil; “he listened quietly [to Jefferson], while thinking to himself how people everywhere are about the same, but at the same time [in a small town]…people can invent more of it in other people’s names” [71]. He tries not to speak the evil of hurtful gossip or to lie, not to Rev. Hightower and not to a very pregnant Lena, whom he has fallen in love with. Though he is able to see her fully, he cannot speak evil, he cannot lie. He unwillingly and partially unwittingly reveals who Joe Brown is. He speaks a truth, yet he is filled with regret at the possibility of reuniting the woman he’s fallen in love with, with a horrible drunk.
