Summary

The story begins with an unnamed, omniscient narrator telling the reader that Genus Jackson was killed in Cotton County, Georgia, one summer night in 1930. Twins had been born shortly before: Winnafred, appearing white, and Wilson, whose skin was brown.

Their mother, Elma Jesup, told her fiancé, Freddie Wilson, that Wilson just had a darker complexion, but he was suspicious. Her father, Juke Jesup, accused Genus, an African-American field hand, of fathering Elma’s child, having once seen them in the barn together. Freddie and Juke and three other trucks of men drove to the shack where Genus was sleeping, and dragged him back to the Jesups’s. Juke instructed Elma to tell the men what Genus did. Elma was silent, but when she nodded, almost imperceptibly, the mob took it as permission to hang him. They chose to hang him from the gourd...