Going To Meet The Man

Jesse, the story's main character, is a 42-year-old white police officer in a small Southern town. He lives with his wife, Grace, who is also white. Born and raised in the same town he now lives in by his father—a sheriff—and mother, Jesse has lived with violent racism his whole life. This, along with early exposure to the castration of a black man, has given Jesse a complex relationship to race and sexuality. Jesse feels he is "a good man, a God-fearing man" (230),though he has "never thought much about what it meant to be a good person" (235).

Jesse's upbringing and identity lead him to believe that black people inherently "fight against God and go against the rules laid down in the Bible" (234). Therefore, being a “good man” for Jesse means "protecting white people from" (236) black people and black people "from themselves" (236). As such, Jesse personifies the kind of white Southerner "fighting to save the civilized world" (238) by upholding the racial discrimination and oppression that embody white supremacy. Black activism via the Civil Rights Movement threatens to undo the systems that hold whites in positions of power, causing paranoia among white people. For Jesse, this paranoia manifests as a desire to possess and punish black people, like the women he rapes and the men he tortures with a cattle prod. It even extends into a desire to "set fire to the houses" (237) of all the black people in his town.

As a young boy, Jesse witnesses the lynching of a black man. Accused of attacking a white woman, the black man is burned alive and castrated. Witnessing this event and the subsequent sense of community and awe it inspires in his parents and their friends primes Jesse not only for a lifetime of racism but a linking of violence, sexuality, and dehumanization of black bodies. Though Jesse has suppressed this memory, torturing Julia Blossom's grandson stirs "a curious and dreadful pleasure" (239) inextricably linked to the lynching of his childhood. This memory becomes so engrained in Jesse's psyche that he can only perform sexually with black women or by fantasizing about being a black man.