Content Warning: This section depicts sexual assault, anti-gay bias, anti-Black racism, lynching, intimate partner violence, graphic violence, murder, termination of a pregnancy, and death by suicide. The source text uses the period-specific term “colored” to refer to Black characters and employs period-specific language to describe sexual orientation, mental health, and intellectual disability.

Maggie is the protagonist and the first-person narrator of the novel. When the novel opens, she is 17, an attractive young Black woman with a round face, thin lips, and big brown eyes (11). She’s inherited her mother’s “delicate features, thick hair, and well-proportioned body” (64). Maggie is the only child of parents who were raised in an orphanage, so she has no other extended family. Maggie was teased as a child because her father, Jasper’s alcohol abuse was well-known and her mother, Jeannette, previously was a sex worker to support herself. Maggie disliked the teasing she received because of how her parents were perceived, but she made it a point not to retaliate.

From the time she was seven, Maggie was sexually abused by her father’s friend, Mr. Royster, who threatened to harm her parents if she told anyone of his assault. When Maggie was eleven and became pregnant, Royster arranged for her to abort the child.