Tish (Clementine)

Tish is the novel’s central character, protagonist and first-person narrator. She is a young black woman, not even out of her teens, in New York City in the early 1970’s. This circumstance places her as having been born in the late 1950’s, and also puts her as coming into her youth at a time when the American Civil Rights movement was having an increasing impact on American culture and politics. That said, while she is aware of the racial tensions in America, and knows that she is affected by them, she starts the novel with a degree of innocence about the depth and variety of dangers associated with that set of circumstances. Part of her journey of transformation over the course of the narrative relates to her growing knowledge, awareness, and experience of those dangers, partly as a result of personal experience and partly because of...