Jeremy Simms

Jeremy walks with the Logan children each morning out of a genuine conviction that the racial hierarchy around him is wrong. He never articulates this in political terms, but his daily choice to accompany them — despite mockery from white peers and disapproval from his own family — consistently demonstrates this belief. Taylor presents this habit as evidence that his friendliness is sincere rather than performative.

Jeremy gives Stacey a hand-carved wooden flute he made himself — the novel's clearest window into his interior life. Because he crafted it by hand without any social gain, the gift signals genuine affection. Uncle Hammer immediately warns Stacey against accepting it, and Stacey keeps the flute hidden, a detail that encapsulates the novel's tension: sincere goodwill met with guarded, necessary caution.

Uncle Hammer warns Stacey that white boys befriend Black boys only when it suits them, framing Jeremy's overtures as naïve at best and dangerous at worst. The novel does not dismiss Hammer's scepticism as paranoia; it presents it as hard-earned realism shaped by life under Jim Crow. His warning functions as an ideological counterweight to Jeremy's sincerity, compelling the reader to hold both responses at once.

Jeremy tells the Logans that his older brothers R.W. and Melvin were among the mob responsible for the night-riding violence. This is his most consequential act in the novel — it costs him family loyalty and provides the Logans with a dangerous truth they could not have learned otherwise. It also links Jeremy by blood to the very vigilante terror he implicitly opposes, sharpening the novel's portrait of the Simms family as a spectrum of white responses to racism.

Jeremy sleeps in a treehouse he built above his father Charlie Simms's home to escape Charlie's abusive household. Taylor uses the treehouse as a spatial metaphor: Jeremy literally elevates himself from his home's atmosphere of violence, creating a private space where the rules below do not apply. His longing for the Logans' warmth and solidarity partially stems from the fact that his own home denies him those things.

Jeremy rejects the casual cruelty his siblings embody. Lillian Jean humiliates Cassie in Strawberry by demanding she say "Miss," while R.W. and Melvin ride with the night-riding mob. Taylor deliberately fractures the Simms family this way to show that white supremacy produces a spectrum of responses — from active violence to passive complicity to Jeremy's quiet resistance — rather than a monolithic white community.

No — Jeremy remains on the periphery at the novel's violent close, unchanged in affection and equally unchanged in his powerlessness. T.J. is arrested, the fire burns, and the terror continues. Taylor denies Jeremy a redemptive climax to make a structural argument: individual goodwill, no matter how genuine, cannot dismantle white supremacy on its own, and good intentions do not constitute meaningful action.

Cassie watches Jeremy with a dual lens of appreciation and wariness. As narrator, she records his kindness — the daily walks, the flute, the information about his brothers — without endorsing it as sufficient protection or grounds for full trust. She has internalised the family's lesson that even sincere white friendship is an unreliable foundation in the Jim Crow South, so her portrait of Jeremy is sympathetic but clear-eyed.