Cleona

Cleona is a young mother who hopes to finish high school, attend community college, and become a nurse. In the story surrounding Van Go Jenkins, she is both Rexall’s mother and a person with ambitions independent of Van Go’s claims on her. Her encounters with him reveal how those ambitions and her parental responsibilities are constrained by his coercion, while the novel’s later presentation of her story also raises questions about how violence against her is packaged as entertainment.

Identity and Circumstances

Cleona is still in high school when Van Go describes her as someone who dreams of graduating, going to community college, and entering nursing. He acknowledges that he hopes she will make money someday, but his grudging recognition of her plans does not translate into respect for her choices. He instead treats access to her home and her as something he is entitled to, despite her efforts to establish distance from him.

Relationship with Van Go Jenkins and Rexall

Cleona’s relationship with Van Go Jenkins is defined by his insistence that their shared child gives him a claim over her. She rejects that claim directly: after he forces himself on her, she identifies his act as rape and tells him that she is not his woman. When she further says Rexall is not his child, Van Go is left staring at her. Her statements puncture the family identity he has asserted and expose the conflict between his sense of entitlement and her account of their relationship.

Rexall remains central to Cleona’s circumstances as both her child and a responsibility she protects. In the later televised confrontation, he sits on her lap while Van Go arrives to meet the women and children associated with him. The image places Cleona beside her son in public, but it does not resolve her earlier denial of Van Go’s paternity; instead, it makes visible the family arrangement around which their dispute turns.

The novel revisits Cleona’s story in the passage Kenya Dunston reads from Fuck. There, Cleona demands money before letting Van Go into the house and refuses to let him enter the room where the baby sleeps. The retelling gives her practical boundaries and immediate demands, even as Van Go’s narration frames the encounter through his own desires. In the televised setting, Kenya praises the passage as realistic and the audience responds with approval. Cleona’s experience is thus presented not only as a personal history of coercion, but also as material that the fictional book and its public reception convert into entertainment.

Narrative Framing and the Limits of Her Voice

In the passage Kenya Dunston reads on air, Cleona’s aspirations appear inside Van Go Jenkins’s own divided account: one voice in his mind recognizes that she should be allowed to continue her education and pursue nursing, while another urges him to override her wishes. That contrast gives the reader evidence of her plans, but only through a narration organized around his competing impulses; Cleona’s perspective is not the voice interpreting the scene. Kenya’s praise of the passage as exceptionally real, followed by the audience’s applause, makes that imbalance consequential: a public audience endorses Van Go’s account as realism while Cleona’s experience reaches them through the words and performance of others.

Broadcast Censorship and the Performance of Realism

The passage Kenya Dunston reads is marked by repeated substitutions of “Beep” for explicit words, including in its account of the assault. That conspicuous censoring sits beside Kenya’s claim that the passage could not be more real: the broadcast presents Cleona’s experience through Van Go Jenkins’s narration, filtered again by a softened version of its language. The contrast makes the scene’s public treatment uneasy. What the audience receives as evidence of realism is already mediated—first by Van Go’s perspective, then by the televised reading—while Cleona’s own account remains limited to the brief demands and refusal represented within that story.