Leroy Jessup

Leroy Jessup, the apartment building’s janitor, is a resentful observer of the people who live there and a persistent antagonist to Rhoda Penmark. His sense that the world has cheated him gives a grievance-filled account of his life an air of justification, even as his deliberate humiliations of others expose his own appetite for power. He notices Rhoda’s capacity to see through him; later, when he recognizes evidence of her involvement in Claude Daigle’s death, that wary fascination becomes a threat. Rhoda kills him by setting fire to the basement room where he is sleeping.

Identity and Background

Leroy works in and around the apartment building, performing tasks such as hosing the walk, sweeping the courtyard, trimming shrubs, and securing the basement door. He regards these duties not simply as work but as further proof of his low standing. The narrative gives his resentment a history: he sees himself as the unfortunate son of a sharecropper and recalls having no automobile, fine clothes, or private schooling. He remembers walking to school, often without shoes, and considers himself smarter than the children who had advantages he lacked.

This account of deprivation becomes a lens through which Leroy interprets other people’s ordinary comforts. He imagines the world as conspiring to withhold what is rightfully his, and he takes satisfaction in the belief that he can outwit people whom he considers privileged and foolish. His self-pity does not make him passive. He turns perceived slights into excuses to inconvenience and demean the people around him, using the limited authority of his job to make them wait, ask, or react.

Grievance and the Building’s Tenants

One encounter on the apartment steps makes the gap between Leroy’s grievance and his conduct particularly clear. While Christine, Rhoda, and Monica Breedlove are leaving, he directs his hose across the flagstones so they cannot pass without retreating. Once they have made their way to the sidewalk, he turns abruptly and splashes them. The act is intentional: he takes care to conceal his amusement, then savors the discomfort he has caused.

Monica has already considered Leroy emotionally immature, prone to irrational rages, and possibly disturbed. After witnessing his treatment of the women and child, she privately revises her assessment, wondering whether he may be schizophrenic with paranoid features. This is Monica’s judgment, not a confirmed diagnosis. She also knows that other tenants, including her brother Emory Breedlove, have favored having Leroy dismissed. She has intervened to keep him in his position because she considers him disturbed and not fully responsible for some of his actions, although she does not excuse his discourtesy.

Christine responds to the incident by trying to placate Monica, suggesting that Leroy did not mean to wet them and that it was an accident. Her explanation contrasts with the calculated obstruction the narrative has just shown. Leroy’s petty acts thrive partly on the difference between what he intends and what other people are willing to acknowledge about him.

Rhoda’s Clear-Eyed Attention

Leroy’s relationship with Rhoda is more complicated than straightforward hostility. He needles her, watches what she does, and tries to provoke a response; she, in turn, recognizes the spite behind his self-presentation. When he deliberately blocks the park entrance by claiming he has lost the gate key, Rhoda understands that he wants the children to wait and beg him to open it. She appraises him without the indulgence or confusion he can elicit from adults. On the day he splashes the departing group, she identifies his action as deliberate, and her composure unsettles him. He realizes that his usual tactics cannot mislead her in the same way they mislead others.

When Leroy later taunts Rhoda about Claude’s drowning, she answers that Claude was the one who drowned, not her. Leroy repeats the remark to himself as he works, treating her indifference as evidence that she is mean and, in some respects, like him. He tells his wife, Thelma Jessup, that Rhoda does not reveal what happens between them. Thelma warns him to leave the child alone and predicts that his interference with the wealthy residents and their children will get him into trouble.

The narration describes Leroy’s persistent attention to Rhoda as a perverse and frightened courtship, an interpretation that complicates his bullying without excusing it. He is drawn to her because he recognizes in her a capacity for secrecy and a refusal to be taken in. But the resemblance he imagines does not make their relationship mutual or safe: he continues to tease and threaten her, and his fascination becomes entangled with the leverage he believes he has acquired.

Suspicion and Threats

Leroy gathers information about Claude from what he has heard other people say. He confronts Rhoda with allegations that she attacked Claude and drove him from the wharf, then claims she struck him with a stick, took his medal, and pushed him into the water. He is not merely repeating gossip. When Rhoda dismisses his account, he reveals that the claim about a stick was a deliberate provocation: he wanted her to correct him and identify the iron cleats on her shoe as the weapon. His performance of foolishness conceals an effort to make her incriminate herself.

He then says that, while Christine and Rhoda were away, he found a key to their front door, entered their apartment, and took the shoes. He claims to have hidden them and threatens to hand them to the police, describing the blood he expects investigators to find. Rhoda answers that the shoes are gone because she put them in the apartment building incinerator. Leroy’s account establishes his theft and his understanding that the shoes could connect Rhoda to Claude’s death; his threat converts that knowledge into an attempt to control her.

Death and Narrative Significance

After learning that Leroy has been sleeping in the basement, Rhoda takes kitchen matches while Christine watches from the window. She lights the bedding in Leroy’s makeshift sleeping place, leaves the basement, and secures the door. When he calls to her from inside, she does not release him. Leroy eventually gets out and runs toward the courtyard gate, where he collapses and dies. Rhoda disposes of the remains of her ice cream and its wrapper, then behaves as though the event is a scene she had arranged for her own diversion. Christine witnesses what has happened and is overcome by the emergency.

Leroy’s death follows from the conflict he has helped create: by correctly recognizing Rhoda’s secret, he believes he can make his knowledge a source of authority over her. His insight is real, but his confidence in intimidation repeats the very misjudgment he had once made about the limits of his own tricks. He sees through Rhoda’s appearance of innocence, yet underestimates what she will do to silence him. The contrast between his elaborate grievances and Rhoda’s controlled actions makes him both an unsettling judge of her character and a victim of the power he tries to claim over it.