When the novel begins, Grave Digger has just returned from six months’ leave after being shot on duty. He has a “dark brown lumpy face” with “slowly smoldering reddishbrown eyes,” carries a self-modified .38 revolver, and dresses like “hog farmers on a weekend in the Big Town” (8). After the hijacking on the Back-to-Africa movement, Grave Digger and Coffin Ed get put on the case to find Deke and the missing $87,000.

As one of two black detectives on the force, Grave Digger must be extra tough to prove himself to both his white colleagues and to black criminals. Grave Digger stays close to his partner, Coffin Ed, and gets along with his white lieutenant, Anderson, but otherwise remains an outsider on the force. He often resorts to violence and breaks the law on many occasions, such as when he slaps Iris “with such sudden violence she caromed off the center table and went sprawling on her hands and knees” (19), and when he threatens to forge evidence to convict Colonel Calhoun. Grave Digger and Coffin Ed often have to be warned away from being too violent with hoodlums, though as Grave Digger argues, “You’re not getting paid to get killed” (8).