Van Go Jenkins’s assault on Cleona ends with a revelation that unsettles the family relationship he assumes: Cleona tells him that Rexall is not his son. The episode places sexual violence beside a dispute over fatherhood and ownership. Van Go treats his belief that he is Rexall’s father as a claim over Cleona; her disclosure exposes how little that claim rests on mutual understanding, and leaves the child’s parentage unresolved.

Circumstances and Setting

The episode belongs to Van Go’s first-person narrative within the book’s embedded story. Its limited perspective matters: the account follows Van Go’s version of events, including his self-serving interpretation of Cleona’s reactions, while the confrontation makes clear that she refuses him. His plans also establish the immediate circumstances. At one o’clock, he remembers that he is supposed to meet Yellow and Tito at the pool hall, and he is impatient to leave. That appointment does not explain or excuse his actions; it shows how casually he places his own schedule alongside Cleona’s safety.

The encounter takes place in Cleona’s home, where Van Go sits beside her on a new couch. She initially stiffens when he puts his arm around her. The narrative then describes an interaction in which he presses for sexual contact and reads her responses through his own assumptions. That uncertain beginning does not erase the later, explicit refusal. When Cleona tells him to get off her, he continues. The shift from Van Go’s interpretation of the encounter to Cleona’s direct objection is central to how the event is understood.

Assault and Confrontation

Van Go’s narration registers his own sense of power, but Cleona’s distress contradicts his attempt to frame the encounter as an expression of intimacy. She cries and tells him to stop. He does not heed her refusal. Afterward, when she identifies what he has done as rape, he laughs off the accusation and rejects her account. He instead invokes their supposed relationship and his status as Rexall’s father, as though those claims entitled him to her. Cleona disputes both the relationship he asserts and the authority he derives from it.

The confrontation therefore extends beyond a disagreement over what happened. Van Go treats Cleona as someone who belongs to him because she is Rexall’s mother; she insists that she is not his woman. His language turns fatherhood into a means of possession, while Cleona’s refusal makes visible the coercion in that logic. His denial does not undo the assault. Instead, his response reveals that he refuses to recognize her as an independent person whose consent matters.

The Revelation About Rexall

After rejecting Van Go’s claim that Rexall is his child, Cleona repeats that the boy is not his. Van Go reacts with surprise and asks who the father is if it is not him. Cleona says that this does not matter. Her answer discloses a fact about their family while withholding the identity Van Go demands: Rexall is not Van Go’s son, but the event does not establish who Rexall’s biological father is.

The revelation changes the meaning of Van Go’s earlier assertion that Cleona is his baby’s mother and that Rexall is his child. He has treated presumed paternity as settled ground, and Cleona’s statement removes that certainty in the middle of an already violent confrontation. The disclosure does not resolve their history, explain why Van Go believed he was the father, or offer a replacement account of Rexall’s parentage. Its force lies in the boundary it draws: Van Go’s confidence and possessiveness cannot make his claim true.

Narrative Significance

The scene couples Van Go’s assault with the collapse of his assumed paternal identity. His repeated reliance on family language attempts to recast domination as intimacy, but Cleona’s accusation and denial of his paternity expose the self-interest in that appeal. The event is thus not simply a quarrel about a child. It shows Van Go trying to make relationships into entitlements, then meeting a refusal that he cannot absorb without either dismissing it or challenging it.

Its first-person form also creates a sharp distance between Van Go’s account of himself and the facts his actions disclose. He presents himself as powerful and treats Cleona’s objection as something to laugh away; the episode nevertheless records her refusal and his decision to ignore it. Read alongside the book’s separate account of Lisa Ellison facing anti-abortion protesters and the financial precarity of Women’s Clinic Southeast, this episode contributes to a wider concern with women’s bodily autonomy under threat. The situations are distinct: the clinic faces political intimidation, while Cleona faces violence within an intimate relationship. The juxtaposition does not make them equivalent; it places different forms of control over women’s reproductive and personal lives within the same book.