Delphine is the protagonist and first-person narrator, and over the course of the novel, she matures upon experiencing family conflict and feeling the impact of forces beyond the family. At the start of the novel, Delphine has just come back from trip to Oakland, California, where she embraced The Influence of Black Power Politics. She is 11 years old, but she feels responsible for her two younger sisters. Although she engages in childish behavior like running through an airport, she is a serious, thoughtful child who tries to understand adult behavior, as when her father marries a woman younger than her mother or when she witnesses the trauma that her uncle brings home from the Vietnam War.

Delphine initially tries to understand the behavior of adults in her family using the conservative values that her Southern grandmother taught her, especially the notion that Black people must behave respectably if they hope to be treated as equal to members of other races. However, when she begins applying the Black Power politics that she learned in Oakland, Delphine begins to see the influence of power in family relations as more important, especially the difference in power between adult authority figures and people with less power, like children.