Lena Grove, whose parents are dead, goes to live with her brother. 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. Hearing no word from Lucas for a long time, the pregnant Lena walks from Alabama into Mississippi looking for him. Along the way she hears that Lucas might be in Jefferson, so she walks toward that town. On the day she arrives in Jefferson, an old plantation house owned by Joanna Burden is on fire. 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. 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.
Flashback 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. A man named Joe Christmas shows up looking for work and is hired, followed soon thereafter by a man named Joe Brown being hired. Christmas and Brown work together and form a relationship about which the other workers are unsure. Brown lets it be known that Christmas used to run a whiskey distillery; it's unclear if Christmas still runs it. But the talk is that Christmas still does, and that Brown delivers the whiskey to whomever will buy it. Christmas quits the planing mill; Brown quits soon thereafter. 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. Burden's family had moved to Jefferson from the north during Reconstruction; Burden purportedly remains a Yankee — which in Jefferson means befriending blacks.
Byron Bunch is working alone at the planing mill when Lena Grove shows up looking for Lucas Burch. Byron and Lena strike up a conversation, during which Byron lets slip that Joe Brown is an alias of Lucas Burch's. Byron is disappointed because he has started to have affections for Lena.
