God Help The Child

Booker Stabern is Bride’s love interest, a mediocre trumpet player, and a graduate student of economics who dreams about but has not managed to complete his magnum opus on greed and exploitation as the basis of society. Booker is absent for the first two portions of the novel because he walked out on Bride after realizing she was not the ideal black woman he imagined her to be when he first met her.

The mystery surrounding Booker dissipates in the third section of the novel when Morrison reveals that Booker is a highly idealistic man whose family was destroyed by the kidnapping and murder of Adam, his older brother, when Booker was a child. Booker’s inability to move on after the death causes him to be estranged from his family. Another impact of Adam’s murder is that Booker has a superhero complex that leads him to intervene—often with physical violence—when he believes children are at risk from careless adults or pedophiles.

The last major shift in Booker’s character occurs when Queen Olive admonishes him for holding on too long to his grief and Bride takes him to task for abandoning her. With the death of Queen Olive and Bride’s news that she is pregnant with his child, Booker idealistically decides to take responsibility for this child and stay with Bride. The end of the novel implies that his idealism will not be enough to secure the nurturing childhood he wants for this child.

Sofia Huxley is a white woman and former teacher who was wrongly convicted and incarcerated 15 years before the events of the novel for child sexual abuse. The product of a religiously conservative home and marriage to a controlling man, Sofia only manages to survive her incarceration by being quiet and obedient, skills she learned as a result of life prior to prison.

The bend in Sofia’s character arc occurs after she beats up Bride when the young woman tracks her down to give her some money and gifts as restitution for the false testimony that helped to convict Sofia. Relieved that Bride does not press charges and grateful for the chance to express the rage and sadness she experienced as a result of her incarceration, Sofia becomes a health aide and sees her nurture of her patients as an opportunity to gain forgiveness for hurting Bride. Sofia is one of the few characters in the novel who achieves redemption.

Sweetness is a fair-skinned African American woman who is Bride’s mother. Known as Sweetness because she does not want people to know that she is the mother of Bride, whose dark skin is repulsive to her, Sweetness spends much of the narrative explaining away her cruel treatment of Bride as an attempt to prepare Bride for the cruel racism she expected her daughter to encounter in the real world. Sweetness is primarily defined by this refusal to take responsibility for her own actions, although there are brief moments when she grudgingly admits that perhaps she should have been kinder and more loving to her daughter.

Sweetness does not change over the course of the novel, so she is a static character. She gets the last words in the novel—a grudging wish that all goes well for Bride’s child—and is most important as a figure Morrison uses to point out the reality that mothers can sometimes be the people most responsible for damage to children.

An underling of Bride’s at Sylvia, Inc, Brooklyn is an ambitious young white woman who sports dreadlocks and is an object of desire for African American men. Brooklyn is deeply envious of Bride, as evidenced by her unsuccessful attempt to seduce Booker one afternoon in Bride’s apartment. Like Bride, Brooklyn is a self-made woman. She ran away from home when she was 14, and she sees Bride as a ridiculous figure who is too foolish to take advantage of the opportunities that come her way.

Brooklyn ultimately usurps Bride’s position at the company when Bride disappears after Sofia’s assault and while Bride is on her journey to find Booker. As a character, Brooklyn serves as foil to Bride, and Bride’s inability to read Brooklyn’s self-interest and contempt accurately serves as an important part of Morrison’s characterization of Bride as clueless and self-involved.

Queen Olive is Booker’s aunt. She is outspoken, has red hair, and is a nurturing figure who breaks out into blues lyrics during her time in the narrative. Much like the blues women on whom she seems to be modeled, Queen Olive has had little luck with love but is content to give out advice on the subject despite her complete estrangement from her ex-husbands and children, all of whom ended up in the custody of their fathers. As a character, Queen Olive is crucial because she serves as a maternal figure for Booker when she advises him to grieve for Adam as long as he needs, when she takes Booker in after Booker breaks his arm and flees Bride, when she advises Booker to make up with Bride, and when her illness and death bring Booker and Bride closer together.

Known as “Rain” because Steven and Evelyn renamed her after they found her wandering a city street, Rain is a little girl who survived being sexually trafficked by her mother, who prostituted the little girl for drugs and money. After her mother kicks her out, Rain makes it on her own by learning survival lessons from sex workers and other street people. By the time she encounters Bride, Rain is less feral as a result of the nurture she receives from Steve and Evelyn. The encounter with Bride proves crucial to Rain because Bride listens to her stories about surviving on the street without judgment of the little girl.

Booker’s older brother, Adam Stabern, was kidnapped, sexually tortured, and killed by a man named Humboldt when Adam was an adolescent. His death in the novel is just one example of the many instances in which children are exploited or damaged by adults. His absence is also an important influence on Booker, whose idealization of Adam prevents Booker from forming attachments with the living.

Mr. Leigh is the landlord who rents an apartment to Sweetness and Bride at a premium because they African American. A harsh man who inspires fear in Sweetness, Mr. Leigh is also a pedophile who sexually assaults a little white boy in the alley beside the apartment. Like many adults, Mr. Leigh exploits and harms children.

Louis Bridewell is Sweetness’s husband and Bride’s father. Convinced that it is impossible for two light-skinned African Americans to produce a child as dark-skinned as Bride, Louis abandons his family. He eventually pays child support, but his rejection of his wife and child is one of the major motivations for Sweetness’s bitterness toward her daughter.

Evelyn is Steve’s wife. Like Steve, Evelyn embraces a simple life of homeschooling Rain and doing hard household chores because of their primitive lifestyle. While Evelyn is loving toward her adoptive daughter, Evelyn’s refusal to listen to Rain’s stories about her violent and abusive childhood creates some stress in her relationship with Rain. Evelyn has the distinction of being one of the few maternal characters in the novel who nurtures the child in her care.