. Who is Harlan Granger?

Harlan Granger

Granger owns a ten-square-mile plantation which is worked by sharecropping families. The Logans' land had belonged to the Granger family before it was sold to a Northerner during Reconstruction, and Mr. Granger's desire to get it back from the Logans leads him to threaten Big Ma and to use his authority in town to pressure the bank to call in the note on the mortgage. He, Kaleb Wallace, and a third man, representing the school board, fire Mama for teaching history that isn't in the books and for defacing the school's books. When the boycott on the Wallace store begins, he recognizes the possibility of financial loss to himself because he owns the land that the store is located on. He decides to take sixty rather than fifty percent of his sharecroppers' cotton and threatens to kick out those who continue the boycott. On the night of the attack on the Averys, Granger lets Jamison tell the crowd that he doesn't want a hanging on his land but does little to stop the mob until the fire threatens to engulf the forest and his crops. Only then does he force the mob to fight the fire rather than to hang TJ.