James Baldwin's short story was written in the early 1960s, the
decade which also functions as its setting and that witnessed the development of the Civil Rights
Movement and important political progresses for African Americans. The story echoes its
historical context in depicting a white man, deputy sheriff Jesse, who is impotent to stop these
changes even in his small Southern town. This political impotence is paralleled by his sexual
impotence when, at the beginning of the story, he is lying in bed with his wife. Baldwin thus
shows a society in transition and the white man's inability to grasp the new social order that
will come.
As he recollects the castration of a black man,
supposedly guilty of raping a white woman, that he witnessed in his youth, Jesse suddenly feels
empowered both sexually and as a white man at the end of the story. Yet, this empowerment is
obviously ironic: his identity as a white man is linked to cruelty and to his own repressed
rapist fantasies/memories. At the end of the story, Jesse stops projecting his own rapist guilt
onto black men and explicitly defines himself as the "nigger"raping his own
wife.
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