The speaker is a confident four-year-old child depicted in a 1970 photograph, standing on a recently desegregated Mississippi beach. She wears a bright, floral bikini and digs her toes into the wet sand while silver minnows swim around her feet. The adult version of the speaker reflects on this childhood image, comparing her freedom to the restrictions her family faced decades earlier.

The grandmother is an African American woman who lived through the intense segregation of the Jim Crow South and the Great Depression. She is represented through two distinct moments in the poem: acting as the photographer for her granddaughter in 1970, and appearing as the subject of a 1930s photograph. In the earlier image, she smiles with her hands on her hips while wearing a handmade cotton meal-sack dress on a narrow, restricted section of the beach.