The daughter of Suzette and mother of Emily Fredieu, Philomene is the result of Eugene Daurat’s rape of her mother. Suzette describes Philomene as a “high-yellow baby” (71) whose skin tone reflects her parentage. She is born into enslavement. Like her mother, she is only a girl when an older white man—Narcisse Fredieu—delivers threats to her family to force her to accept a sexual relationship with him. The birth of her children changes Philomene, and she becomes determined to give them a better life through any means.

Philomene’s main resource is her ability to see “glimpsings” of the future, which she uses to comfort family members and to inspire fear in the superstitious Narcisse Fredieu, whom she manipulates with manufactured “visions” in order to gain a cabin and other benefits for her family. When Emancipation comes, Philomene’s determination allows her to secure land and money to improve her children’s chances at success. Philomene is “color-struck,” an attitude that makes her bring only people with lighter skin into her children’s orbit. Her role in the narrative is to show how formerly enslaved women navigated postwar society, and her life’s challenges illustrate the ways in which sexual coercion shaped the choices that such women made to survive.

Daughter of Philomene and Narcisse and mother to T.O., Emily Fredieu is the first of the line to be born after Emancipation, and as such, she is expected to fulfill her mother and grandmother’s hopes for the family. Narcisse describes her as “white as any of the babies he had ever seen” (243). From the first, Philomene gives her anything she wants, but her life changes drastically when her father sends her to a convent school in New Orleans when she is 14. There, her encounter with her guardian and future partner, Joseph Billes, is the start of a tumultuous life marked by trailblazing acts, such as being a Black woman who runs a general store alongside Billes, who becomes her husband in all but name.

Her life is also marred by tragedy and challenges to her self-determination, particularly racist attitudes in the white community condemn her romantic relationships with Joseph, a white man. Joseph’s fear of violence compels him to force Emily to give up her life with him, and she moves closer to her immediate family for support. However, Emily also shares Philomene’s belief that her children’s chief advantage is their ability to pass for white. Emily ends the novel as a woman who passes for white when she can and still has not overcome her negative attitudes toward darker-skinned Black people. Her character arc shows the negative impact that internalized racism can have on Black people, and her life reflects the difficulties Black women faced as they confronted threats of racist violence in the Post-Reconstruction South.

Mother to Suzette and Palmire, Elisabeth holds the family together during times of adversity. Emily describes her as having dark skin and tightly coiled hair. Born into enslavement, Elisabeth endures rape at the hands of her enslaver in Virginia. Despite her lack of agency as an enslaved woman, Elisabeth later takes the risk of marrying an enslaved man and has children that her enslavers ultimately sell, shattering the family. Elisabeth’s lack of agency is also shown in her inability to protect her daughters from similar rapes by white men. As she grows older and watches multiple generations of women in her family experiencing rape and other forms of sexual coercion, Elisabeth becomes a source of wisdom, drawing upon her lived experience. She is the one who warns Philomene and Emily about the dangers of valuing lighter skin over darker skin, and she also identifies the practice of the “bleaching of the line” (382) as a strategy that has been imposed upon the women in her family. Elisabeth lives to gain freedom and to see the freedom for her descendants.

The son of Emily Fredieu and Joseph Billes, T.O. is a man who is light-skinned enough to pass for white, completing the family’s project of “bleaching the line” (382). The seminal experience of T.O.’s childhood is the ejection of his family from their home when Joseph Billes bows to the white community’s threats of violence over his relationship with Emily. From that moment on, T.O. is adrift, and he cannot come to terms with the loss of his father. Regaining his status as son to Joseph Billes becomes the motivating force in his life, so much so that he haunts his father’s house and launches a hopeless lawsuit to gain legal recognition as Joseph’s legitimate heir. As an adult, he makes a defining decision to reject the generations-long project of “bleaching the line” (382) by marrying a woman with darker skin. The course of his life allows Tademy to demonstrate the negative impacts of internalized racism. Geneva Brew, T.O.’s wife, is an English-speaking Baptist who refuses to accept Emily’s mistreatment of her because of her dark skin and her origins outside of the Black French Creole community.

A middle-aged white man, Eugene is one of several such men who rape and sexually coerce Black girls and women in order to exercise their power as affluent white men of the South. Suzette describes Eugene as a man who charms his white hosts and friends, but he shows the uglier side of his character when he rapes Suzette repeatedly, leaving her pregnant several times and abandoning her to her enslaver’s punishment. The lack of consequences for his actions illustrates that sexual coercion reflected broader issues of racism and unjust power differentials.

Father to Emily, Narcisse is a middle-aged, affluent white man who uses coercion to force Philomene to have sex with him and bear children. He spends much of the novel deferring to Philomene because of her ability to see the future. Early in the novel, Narcisse is a spoiled young opportunist; he takes advantage of his role as executor of the estate of Philomene’s enslaver when he moves Philomene’s family for his own convenience. Later, he punches a pregnant Philomene when he realizes that she has been lying to him about her prophecies. Tademy emphasizes his cruelty and absolute power over enslaved women when he hides Philomene’s daughter from her until the baby grows to be an adult. In the end, Narcisse perpetuates older white men’s pattern of exploitation of Black girls and women.

Father of T.O. and partner to Emily, Joseph Billes is an ambitious white man who finds financial success in Cane River through morally ambiguous deals and social connections in the French Creole community. He uses charm and surreptitious behavior to overrule the women of Elisabeth’s line when they try to protect Emily from becoming another Black girl who has children with a white man. Emily is 16 when Billes has sex with her for the first time. However, he is distinguished somewhat from other white male characters because he initially treats Emily as he would any white woman of the period. He is a bold, assertive man who refuses to hide his relationship with Emily despite social pressure to do so, and he openly tells everyone that he means to leave his property to his children by Emily.

Yet Joseph’s defiance of racial mores only goes so far. When white people threaten violence if he doesn’t end his relationship with Emily, he abandons her and retreats to New Orleans. Later when he begins losing business and social connections because of his relationship with Emily and her children, he marries a white woman and has his men bodily remove Emily from the house that he built for her. He later resumes his relationship with Emily, angering his wife and the townspeople, and that choice seals his fate, as does widespread jealousy over his land holdings. Men called “nightriders,” who take it upon themselves to enforce segregation, murder him and his wife, and his demise shows that even white men cannot violate the dynamics of racism during this era.

Doralise, the godmother to Philomene, is a free woman of color before Emancipation. However, she cannot intervene when women of Elisabeth’s line experience abuse, and she herself is abused by her husband. She gains a degree of freedom and agency when she uses Eugene Daurat’s attraction to her to secure a divorce, lands, and a house. The limits she faces because of her class and race illustrate the inability of Black women to exercise autonomy even when they are legally free.

Oreline is Narcisse’s cousin and an eventual enslaver of Philomene, Palmire, and Suzette. She considers herself to be kind to the enslaved women because she buys Suzette, Palmire, and Philomene in order to keep them together and because she does not beat them. When Philomene refuses to stay with Oreline after the end of the Civil War, Oreline’s anger forces Philomene to temper her own fury, for fear that Oreline will harm Philomene’s family. Oreline’s actions illustrate that the archetype of the “kind mistress” is a myth, as enslavement is inherently exploitative.

Clement is Philomene’s husband early in the novel. Narcisse sells him to another enslaver end the relationship. Clement’s constructs the “moonlight chair” for Philomene during hours outside of his workday, and this gesture makes it clear that the love between enslaved Black women and men represents their rejection of the dehumanization that enslaved people are forced to endure.

Louis and Françoise Derbanne own Rosedew Plantation and are the enslavers of Elisabeth and Suzette. Like many enslavers, they believe that all Black people, including free Black people of color, are inferior to white people and should show deference to white people or suffer punishment. Louis rapes Palmire, and Françoise is cruel to Suzette after Eugene Daurat rapes Suzette; these actions render the Derbannes archetypal enslavers whose power over enslaved people corrupts their moral reasoning.