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.