A debut novel
The Weight
of the Light
by Jason Cleghorn
"Don't let 'em tell you that you don't belong in the light."
A Story of Survival
Across Every Divide
Alabama, 1927. When a tornado tears through the countryside without warning, two men — Henry Cleghorn and Lee Lowe — are stripped of everything except the raw instinct to survive. In a single desperate night, they save each other's lives.
In an era when the color of a man's skin determined the boundaries of his world, that act of mutual survival becomes something neither of them has words for — and something neither can forget.
The Weight of the Light is a novel about the bonds that form in darkness, the silences that protect them, and the quiet courage it takes to believe you belong in the light.
Some things you carry so others don't have to.— Lee Lowe
Two Decades.
One Silver Coin...
It is the summer of 1927, near Herren's Crossroads, Alabama. Henry Cleghorn, a white landowner with more debt than dignity, plows his cotton fields on a mule named Horace. Behind him works Lee Lowe — tall, Black, and sharp-eyed — a sharecropper whose grandfather was not free to leave this same land. Lee is. He stays anyway. He calls it "neutral." In those days, neutral was about as good as folks like Lee could ask for.
When a tornado tears through the farm, Lee runs through the storm and holds the barn door shut alongside Henry. When the Ku Klux Klan arrives the next morning offering "brotherhood," Henry turns them away and stands on his porch while a cross burns in the yard. These choices — made in a heartbeat, paid for over decades — forge a bond between the Cleghorn and Lowe families that the world around them has no name for.
Twenty years later, in post-war Montgomery, the sons of both men are trying to find their way in a city still drawing its battle lines. Henry's youngest son Felix — born the night the cross burned, raised on Lee's silver dollar and his blessing — has become a man drinking against his own potential. Lee's nephew James and his wife Loretta have built something fragile and hard-won above a barbershop on West R.E. Lee Avenue. When these two men end up in the same honky-tonk on the same Saturday night, a single drunken moment will set in motion a chain of letters, silences, and secrets that stretches all the way back to that barn door in the storm.
For readers of Mudbound, The Secret Life of Bees, and A Gentleman in Moscow
What the Novel Carries
Silence & Love
What does it mean to carry a secret not out of cowardice, but out of grace?
The American South
Two decades of Alabama — from a cross burning in 1927 to a honky-tonk in post-war Montgomery — rendered without flinching.
Fathers & Sons
The barn door the fathers held together. The honky-tonk the sons couldn't survive. The world passes between generations whether we speak of it or not.
A True Story
Henry Felix Cleghorn was the author's father. Lee Lowe was real. The farm near Herren's Crossroads was real. This novel is the son's attempt to understand what his father carried.
Bring Henry and Lee
to Your Reading Group
The Weight of the Light sparks rich conversation about race, loyalty, silence, and what it means to truly see another person. A free discussion guide — with thematic questions, historical context, and reading notes — is available for book clubs, classrooms, and reading groups.
Request a Discussion GuideContact via Amazon author page — free of charge
Jason Cleghorn
Jason F. Cleghorn is an urban planner currently living in Bedford, NH. A 1998 graduate of Auburn University, he grew up in the looming shadow of Herren's Crossroads, which you'll no doubt see more of in Book Two: The Weight of Love. These stories shaped his childhood and left a heavy, lasting mark on his life as he grew up in rural Alabama.
The Weight of the Light
by Jason Cleghorn
Order on AmazonAvailable in Kindle and paperback