Jeeter Lester
Patriarch of Lester family, Jeeter is a poor white man from Georgia. Although he is somewhat reprehensible there is also a certain charm to him, charm in the sense of being interesting character who holds your interest and not in any other sense of the term. He will eventually accidentally die at his at the own hands of this charming fascination and take his wife with him in the bargain. Like Scarlett O’Hara, another Georgia character, Jeeter is devoted to land; he just doesn’t care too much about working it.
Ada Lester
Jeeter’s profoundly fertile (17 pregnancies with a dozen surviving) and long-suffering wife deals with both her hunger pangs and her pangs of marrying badly by reaching for a pinch of snuff throughout the novel. Not that she can be entirely blamed for her choice; the Lesters were once far more well-off than they are when the reader meets them. Her life comes to tragic if not altogether unexpected end in the same way as her husband's.
Ellie May Lester
Jeeter's 18 year old daughter must suffer the ultimate indignity of the clan: being looked down upon with contempt by her irredeemably shiftless brother, Dude. Ellie May suffers from a harelip which has disfigured her appearance and adding insult to that injury is the fact that her 15 year old younger sister has already snagged a husband. A situation which is not necessarily destined to last.
Dude Lester
Two years younger than Ellie May, Dude cares mainly about cars. It is this lust for cars that drives him into a marriage with a backwoods evangelist twice his age who tempts with the lure of a Ford. Dude turns out to be every bit as great a driver as he is brother and husband and tragedy results that even touches upon his close family
Sister Bessie
The older evangelic preacher woman who lands the virile if empty-minded Dude as a husband thanks to her Ford and availability. The extent of religious faith is revealed when she and Dude leave a black victim of her husband's bad driving lying dead on the side the road.
Pearl Lester Bensey
Ellie May’s younger sister is married off at the age of 15 to Lov Bensey. Unhappily betrothed to yet another shiftless rural Georgian, things come to a head when her husband ties her to the bed. She manages to escape and run away, leaving her husband.
Lov Bensey
After Pearl runs away, Jeeter—in one of those displays of charming idiosyncrasy that also manages to repulse, but it never boring—convinces his son-in-law to give up on trying to find Pearl. After all, he has a perfectly suitable spare in the admittedly less physically appealing, but infinitely more pliable Ellie May.
