Cussy Mary Carter/Bluet/Widow Frazier

Cussy Mary is the main character of the novel, and the novel is told primarily from her first person perspective, with the exception of the short introduction told in the third person. The novel starts as she is 19 years old in 1936, and Cussy describes herself as having skin, lips, and nails, are “blue-jay blue” (7). People in town call her inbred as a result of this blue skin, but she explains how her “great-grandpa, a Blue from France, settled in these hills and wedding himself a full-blooded white Kentuckian,” meaning her blood is from diverse sources (8). Cussy is named after this great-grandpa who immigrated from Cussy, France. Doc, however, once compared her to a “bluet damselfly” so the name Bluet stuck, which is what most people in town call her. After marrying Charlie Frazier, and his death, people began to call her Widow Frazier...