Mississippi-born Orleanna Price is the wife of Reverend Nathan Price. Despite his despotic control over the family, Orleanna does her best to safeguard and nurture her daughters. When uprooted to the Congo, Orleanna tries to adapt, but she finds that she is grossly unprepared for the differences in daily life found in the Belgian Congo. She hides her severe depression from her family members and attends to the grueling tasks before her as a matter of obligation.

When her youngest child dies, she takes her surviving daughters and leaves the village of Kilanga. Ultimately, she is only able to take one of them, Adah, with her back to the United States. Her grief and guilt over her sense of complicity in her child’s death and the fate of the Congo haunt her decades later. Orleanna finds some solace in working for civil rights movements and foreign aid organizations, but she feels that she has never been able to leave the judgment of the Congo and her dead daughter behind her.

With white-blonde hair, pale skin, and blue eyes, Rachel is a vain and self-centered teenager who longs for the luxuries and consumer culture of America. Internally jealous of her sisters’ intelligence, Rachel often speaks from ignorance with confidence. She is primarily concerned with her own appearance, reputation, and comfort. The rest of the family considers her to be high maintenance and undeservedly confident. Her initial reaction to Africa is best put in her own words: “Jeez oh man, wake me up when it’s over (32).

Despite surviving traumatic events in the Congo, Rachel continues to be a self-centered individual who would rather accept convenient propaganda than apply herself to thinking critically. Her life philosophy is to ignore anything unpleasant which does not directly endanger her and to do whatever it takes to ensure her own comfort. While her experiences in Kilanga have little to no effect on her narcissism, they do change her to the point where she believes she will never be at home in the US again, where her peers would not understand what the experience was like for her. Her primary objective is to carve out a luxurious and indolent life, using her looks to do so. Rachel succeeds in using a series of husbands ensure a more privileged life. Ultimately, she becomes the mistress of her own, small domain, but she’s largely estranged from the surviving members of her family.

Leah, the second-oldest Price daughter, is an outspoken, brunette tomboy. She is also Adah’s identical twin. While the two have their own ways of understanding one another through their twinhood, Leah is primarily interested in making her own way. She is filled with guilt over her twin’s hemiplegia, which has damaged their relationship.

Leah is often more assertive than her sisters. However, she initially demonstrates naïve hero-worship of her father and black and white thinking with regards to justice and religion. Over time, her experiences in the Congo force her to acknowledge both her father’s faults and the complexities of life, which do not neatly fall into categories marked “good” and “bad.”

After leaving Kilanga, Leah elects to stay in Africa and marry Anatole Ngemba, a Congolese revolutionary, despite the hazards of the jungle, the dangerous political situation, and the additional risks which come from an interracial marriage in that time and place. Leah is tormented by the guilt of being a white American, knowing how white colonialism and America have devastated much of Africa. She is able to come to terms with the concept of injustice and her powerlessness to prevent it, though she continues to fight it as best she can. She and her husband eventually create a commune in Angola, where she uses her education in agricultural engineering to create a sustainable and reliable farming community. Above all else, Leah considers herself a mother, as her four sons become the most important aspects of her life. As such, she does not regret her choices post-Kilanga.

Suffering from hemiplegia, a lack of blood in the womb, Adah’s right side is paralyzed, resulting in many physical difficulties. However, she takes advantage of the fact that she is not expected to speak in order to observe. Like Leah, Adah is considered “gifted” and has skipped two school grades. She is talented with math and languages, but she hides her keen intellect for the sake of self-preservation and ease of observation. Despite the difficulties that come from life in the Congo, Adah appreciates its no-nonsense approach to disabilities and feels more seen and respected in Kilanga than she had in Georgia.

While she returns to the United States with her mother after Ruth May’s death, Adah believes that she never truly escapes Africa, but becomes a part of it. Her twin, Leah, agrees with this assessment, as Adah later becomes a medical doctor and then an epidemiologist dedicated to the tropical diseases found in Africa. During her studies, a neurologist helps her to reclaim the right side of her body, un-doing her hemiplegic paralysis. Unfortunately, when she gains back her mobility, she loses some of the unique abilities that her mind had once had, changing her perspective of both the world and herself and leaving her with a crisis of identity.

Adah’s experiences with Africa change her viewpoint substantially. She is unable to practice medicine due to her philosophical differences with the Hippocratic oath, resulting from a different perspective on disease and death, which she has gained from her time in the Congo. Adah considers herself more of a witchdoctor than a doctor and believes that God is “everything,” including viruses, and that they should therefore have as much a right to thrive as anything else.