Francie Coffin is the first-person narrator of her novel, and the most interesting character in it. On one hand, she is like any twelve-or thirteen-year-old girl, full of dreams, curiosity, and misinformation. She spends a lot of time thinking about boys and resisting sexual advances (from adults as well as from boys) and learning with her girlfriends, Sukie and Maude, about the outside world. (Sukie’s sister China Doll, for example, is a prostitute who is friendly to the girls; Francie, though, observes her beaten up by her pimp, whom China Doll will kill by the end of the novel.) She watches as a neighborhood friend throws his grandmother’s cat off the tenement roof; later, a man tries to rape her in the apartment’s dim hallway.

Francie is bright, enterprising, and a survivor: She knows how to hide her father’s numbers receipts so that the police cannot find them when they search the Coffins’ apartment. She sells grocery bags to shoppers who frequent an open Harlem market in order to earn spending money.

In the end, she has achieved her initiation: She has had her first menstrual period, and she has survived all the sexual abuse around her. More important for her emotional growth, she kisses her mother’s cheek in church one morning, thus symbolically forgiving her weaknesses, and she challenges her father for his. She has become a young adult.

Many of her best qualities actually come from her parents, who are loving and caring in their limited ways but who are being overwhelmed by the economic and social conditions of Depression-era Harlem. James Coffin does all he can, but it is never enough, and his male pride is battered by his family’s troubles. “I’m a mother-f*cking man. Why can’t you understand that?” he yells at his wife early in the novel. He escapes in the end, less to sexual freedom than from the shame of having a wife and children who must work or go on welfare. The blows to his pride are hard and sharp.

Mrs. Coffin is less clearly defined in the novel, but she emerges in the end as the bulwark for what remains of this small family: religious, self-sacrificing, and determined to keep a roof over their heads, even if she has to work full-time and be away from her children. Her pride only grows: When Francie is asked to do dangerous domestic work by the wife of Mr. Rathbone, the local candy-store owner, Henrietta confronts him and then tells Francie,Long as I live you don’t have to scrub no white folks’ floors or wash their filthy windows. What they think I’m spending my life on my knees in their kitchens for? So you can follow in my footsteps? You finish school and go on to college.

Francie concludes that “she was my mother and I loved her but I suddenly realized I almost didn’t know her at all.” All the characters change under the multiple pressures of the Depression.

Francie Coffin

Francie Coffin, the twelve-year-old narrator of this novel of initiation, who witnesses the disintegration of her Harlem family over the course of a year. She has or finds the skills to survive in this world of poverty, violence, and sexual abuse. Francie is bright, loyal, and enterprising.

Henrietta Coffin

Henrietta Coffin, Francie’s mother, the person who holds the Coffin family together. She goes to work part-time, later full-time, for a white woman, applies for welfare against the wishes of her husband, and somehow manages to save her shrinking family.

James...