Content Warning: The source material contains references to sexual assault, racism, and torture. Additionally, the source material uses outdated, offensive terms for LGBTQIA people, Jewish people, and other groups of people; these terms are replicated in this guide only in direct quotes of the source material. 

Powerfully built Atlanta real estate tycoon Charlie Croker is on a morning horseback hunt at his sprawling quail plantation, Turpmtine, accompanied by his 28-year-old wife, Serena; his close friend, Inman Armholster; Inman’s wife, Ellen; and Inman’s daughter, Elizabeth. Charlie revels in his carefully built muscular physique as well as his enormous plantation, which covers “twenty-nine thousand acres of prime southwest Georgia forest” (4). As a young man, Charlie was a star football player at Georgia Tech University. Though football left Charlie with a perpetually injured right knee and a limp, he takes pleasure in the jersey-bull-like back the sport gave him. Around town, Charlie is known as “Cap’m Charlie,” a moniker he loves. Charlie also feels superior to Inman, because unlike Inman, who comes from wealth, Charlie is a “cracker”—slang for a poor white person—who reinvented himself. Charlie’s father was once a worker at Turpmtine, the plantation he now owns.

Charlie’s sense of well-being is punctured when Inman tries to talk politics with him, mentioning a Black activist called André Fleet.