Tessa

Tessa is the general receptionist at the courthouse where Aunt Lydia—then a family court judge—worked on the day the Sons of Jacob seized power. She appears only in Aunt Lydia's first-person account of the arrest, but her brief, vivid presence crystallizes the terror and helplessness of women caught in the regime's sudden, violent consolidation.

Identity and Role

Tessa is identified solely by her job title: the general receptionist. She is not a judge or lawyer but a clerical worker, which places her lower in the professional hierarchy than the women who are the primary targets of the raid. Her age is given as twenty-seven, making her younger than the judges and lawyers who are being systematically rounded up. She has no lines of dialogue beyond a scream; her entire character is conveyed through her physical reaction to the armed men who kick in the main door.

The Raid and Her Capture

When five men in camouflage gear, carrying submachine guns, burst into the office, Tessa screams and ducks down behind her desk. The leader of the raiding party, a man with eyeglasses and a handlebar moustache, reads a list of names. When he asks about the receptionist, the second-in-command suggests giving her a chance at the "box store"—a destination for women deemed potentially marriageable—rather than sending her to the high school or the stadium, which are reserved for pregnant women and professional women respectively. The leader agrees, noting that she has wet herself from fear, and comments approvingly that a fearful woman might do as she is told. Tessa is ordered to stand over to the side while the two judges, Anita and Aunt Lydia, are taken away. The men are instructed to wait for her until the other two female judges return from lunch, then lock her in the box-store van.

Significance

Tessa's role is to embody the raw, unmediated terror of the coup for ordinary women who had no political power or professional status. Her physical reaction—screaming, hiding, wetting herself—is the only unfiltered emotional response in the scene; the judges, by contrast, are stunned into silence or attempt to assert their authority through legal language. The raiders' casual assessment of her value—"maybe some guy might marry her"—reveals the regime's immediate reduction of women to their reproductive and domestic utility. Tessa is not a character with a backstory or a future; she is a synecdoche for the countless anonymous women who were swept up in Gilead's early purges, their fates decided by the whim of armed men who saw them only as potential wives or disposable bodies.