Content Warning: This section of the guide discusses rape and racism. The guide quotes and obscures the author’s use of the n-word, which Himes uses to highlight and critique racism in the USA.

Bob Jones is the first-person narrator and protagonist of the novel. He is a young Black man who works in the defense industry in Los Angeles during World War II. Bob once aspired to be more than a shipyard worker, having attended two years of college in the interest of becoming a doctor but had to drop out due to family issues. Instead, Bob moves to LA from Cleveland in search of a better life and a deferment from the war, of which he is very afraid.

Now that he lives in LA, Bob experiences intense anxiety and fear because of the conditions of his life in white society. He has become obsessed with white people: with white men and their perceived superior masculinity, with white women and their attitude of superiority, and with the way white people use their whiteness to get ahead in life and oppress Black people. Bob is also obsessed with Blackness—especially the way his Blackness seems to inhibit his masculinity, his autonomy, and his attempts at upward mobility.