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Cee, née Ycidra, is Frank’s younger sister and is born during her family’s journey from Texas to Georgia after they have to flee their farm in Texas. Raised by her mean-spirited step-grandmother, Lenore, Cee is led to believe that the conditions of her birth are “a prelude to a sinful, worthless life” (44). As a result, Cee grows up so sheltered by Frank that she is not allowed to date before he enlists in the army. As soon as Frank is out of the way, she falls for a worthless newcomer to town, a man named Principal, who calls himself Prince. Given her inexperience, Cee is naive and trusts both Principal and her future employer, Dr. Beauregard, too easily, missing crucial warning signs about both men. For example, when her Atlanta housemate Thelma tells her that Dr. Beauregard’s previous employee left as a result of some dispute, Cee does not ask questions. She also lacks the education to know that eugenics is a race science that proposes the superiority of the white race, and she is therefore not concerned when she finds books on the subject on Dr. Beauregard’s shelves. 

Throughout the novel, Cee must learn to stand up for herself. Although Frank rescues her from Dr. Beauregard, the neighborhood women’s treatment of her illness as “an illegal, invading braggart who needed whipping” personifies the malady and implies that Cee herself is at fault for being so compliant in the doctor’s plans (121). At the end of the novel, Cee has to face the harsh truth that she is infertile because her ignorance and passivity permitted Dr. Beauregard to do as he wished with her. The truth is painful; however, Cee has the courage to face it. 

Cee is “a habitual light eater” who is “normally indifferent to food” and in all likelihood, delicate-bodied (61). Her sickness as a result of Dr. Beauregard’s interventions make her a “slight form” (116). The clothes she wears as a child in Lotus are dowdy, and she delights in the dress that Prince buys her—rayon-silk with a “riot of blue dahlias on a white background”—so much that she wears it for her interview at the doctor’s (54).

Lenore is step-grandmother to Cee and Frank. Both regard her as denying and evil because she whips and chastises them and generally treats them as though they are of little value. Lenore is also partially responsible for Cee’s inferiority complex. She makes Cee the prime target of her wrath, calling her “‘gutter child”’ (45). Lenore feels superior to the rest of the neighborhood because her late husband leaves her with a Ford, a car that makes her “a serious catch for […] old unemployable man” like Salem Money (44). 

Nevertheless in, Chapter 8, the third-person narrator shadows Lenore and tells her story. Her first husband, a man “not just caring, energetic and a good Christian, but a moneymaker too,” who is shot by someone Lenore considers envious. Following his death, Lenore is terrified of suffering the same fate and moves from Heartsville, Alabama, to Lotus (86). She marries Salem Money mainly for the protection he can offer her. She is bitter when his impoverished relatives come to disturb her peace. The narrator generates sympathy for Lenore by describing how “there was no privacy at all” and how she is forcibly roped into caring for the children (87). Lenore believes she is “merely a strict grandmother, not a cruel one” (88).  

As the younger Money family find their own accommodation, Lenore feels increasingly isolated. She solicits the company of Jackie, a 12-year-old who comes to do chores for her. Eventually, as a result of her misery, Lenore suffers a stroke and grows increasingly weak and isolated. While Frank and Cee might wish to paint Lenore as plainly evil, Morrison shows Lenore to be an ambiguous character, both a victim of her circumstances and responsible for her misery because she fails to adapt to change.

The paternal grandfather of Frank and Cee, Salem Money is indolent and passive but opportunistic. Elderly and unemployable, he cannot bring in an income himself but considers himself lucky because his third wife, Lenore, has a Ford and owns her house. Salem feels Lenore’s financial value so acutely that he is deferential to her, ignoring how she mistreats his grandchildren. 

However, being well-connected in the neighborhood, Salem seizes the opportunity of Lenore’s stroke to gain more autonomy and leave home to play chess with his friends. Materialistic above all, he cannot help mentioning the Ford Cee steals when she runs away with Principal when he asks Frank about Cee’s condition when the two return to Lotus, feeling that he still has some ownership over it.

Lillian Florence Jones (Lily) is Frank’s girlfriend after he returns from the Korean War. She has a “slight paunch” and “a knockout beautiful face […] as though someone had redrawn her as a cartoon” (20). With a shelf full of bathroom beauty products and a talent for dressmaking, Lily is well-groomed and stylish. She is also ambitious, enterprising, and certain that she wants to open her own dressmaking shop and buy a house in a nice neighborhood with her savings and the money her parents have left her. Lily is furious when she is turned away from her dream home because she is black and is forced to rent a second-rate place.  

While Lily’s loneliness and attraction to Frank mean that she does not hesitate to invite him back up to her apartment and that she has a measure of compassion for the trauma he must have suffered at war, her priorities are clear when her “disgust fought with relief and lost” (79) following his departure. She is happy to live by herself, without having to support a weak man who seems incapable of bringing in income himself.

A “heavyweight Confederate,” Dr. Beauregard Scott is a private doctor who lives in a beautiful home in Atlanta and specializes in women’s issues (62). “A small man with lots of silver hair,” Dr. Beauregard has a formal demeanor, and Cee’s mistaken first impression is that he seems respectful of his patients’ privacy (64). Cee imagines that the personal tragedy he has experienced owing to his daughters’ cephalitis has made him compassionate. However, Dr. Beauregard has books on race science on his shelves and is ruthless in his experiments on Cee’s womb, a body part he is fascinated with, “constructing instruments to see farther and farther into them” (113). Although it is never explicit in Morrison’s text, it can be inferred that Dr. Beauregard’s interest in eugenics means that he believes blacks are inferior and that he feels himself morally justified in experimenting on black women with little regard for their health. In the judgment of Miss Ethel, a neighborhood woman in Lotus who helps nurse Cee back to health, he is a “devil doctor” (126).

A minor character and “the first thing” Cee notices “wearing belted trousers instead of overalls,” Prince brings Cee to Atlanta after they are married but soon abandons her and leaves her to her own devices so that she eventually must work for Dr. Beauregard (47). Prince’s “good-looking new face,” “shiny, thin-soled shoes,” and “big-city accent” have an aura of elegance and wide experience (48). However, no one in Lotus really knows who he is, and even after a month of marriage, he prefers to drive around in the Ford and never introduces Cee to his family. 

Prince’s two names are symbolic: his given name, Principal, is a correct indicator of his selfishness; however, in going by Prince, he gives himself airs of royalty. Cee’s Atlanta housemate Thelma inverts the name according to the fairy-tale stereotype, calling Prince “‘Frog”’ (56).

Sarah Williams, Dr. Beauregard’s housekeeper, plays the crucial role of sending Frank the letter that alerts him to Cee’s mortal danger. She is “a tall stout woman,” who mothers Cee, feeding her with appetizing food and becoming her friend and confidante during her employment with Dr. Beauregard (58). While Sarah has seen some malpractice in Dr. Beauregard’s version of medicine, she is not truly disturbed until she notices how ill Cee has become as a result of working with him. Sarah blames herself as much as Dr. Beauregard for not raising the alarm about his treatment of Cee sooner; however, she shows courage in contacting Frank, despite the likely personal cost of her actions.

The little Korean girl who visits Frank’s war camp scavenging for food, haunts him long after he leaves the service. The image of her “hand […] in the trash, clutching its treasure, a spotted, rotting orange” is especially prevalent in his imagination (95). At first, Frank identifies with her because she is “left-handed, like me” and hungrily searches for scraps, the way he and Cee did as children (95). However, when he becomes aroused by the way she approaches him—“the two missing teeth, the fall of black hair above eager eyes”—and the way she strokes his crotch, he is disgusted with himself and, in the moment, chooses to eliminate her, along with his shame, by shooting her in the face (95). The sacrifice of the little girl is mirrored in Cee’s infertility and her visions of toothless baby smiles in a green pepper and cloud and, most of all, in her vision of “a baby girl down here waiting to be born” (131). However, in the end, Frank has to live with his guilt rather than repress it, and in an act of atonement, he digs up the body of a man who was buried in a hastily made grave after dying in the human version of a dogfight and gives him a proper burial.

Luther and Ida Money, Frank and Cee’s parents, are most remarkable in the narrative for their absence in their children’s upbringing. Hardworking people who are forced off their patch of land in Bandera County, Texas, for reasons that are not explained in the novel, they spend much of Frank’s and Cee’s childhoods working in Lotus’ fields and do not have much energy to expend on their children. 

Ida is pregnant with Cee during the time of their eviction, and “the baby she carried was more important than kettles, canning jars and bedding,” so she does not carry more than she deems safe (39). When the baby is born, Ida names her the unusual, pretty name of Ycidra after a woman who was standing in line ahead of her at the Church of the Redeemer because the sound is the “sweetest thing” and the name will bode well for her daughter (40). However, Frank feels that his parents are indifferent, and Cee regrets that Ida was not more affectionate with her and that she never corrected Lenore’s insults. Thus, the children grow up thinking that they are beyond their parents’ notice.