Celia
The title character of the story is a teenage slave in Missouri. Very few facts surrounding her life are actually known thanks to the dearth of historical records. What is known is that a man named Robert Newsom purchased her as property sometime in the 1850’s and began serially raping her perhaps on the day of the transaction. While the particularities of those details are forever destined to remain murky, the fact that Celia kills him and ultimately faces execution for that—crime, for lack of a better word—is crystal clear.
Robert Newsom
Newsom runs a farm in Callaway County, Missouri, having settled there after growing up back east. In addition to Celia, Newsom calls several other human beings his property. As might be expected of the rugged frontier state that bank robber and notorious vicious racist Jesse James called home, Newsom is brutally vigilant about keeping his slaves in line. That he begins raping a young slave is not only overlooked as a criminal endeavor in that society, but is considered none-too-rare among male slaveowners. In fact, the only thing out of the ordinary about the entire situation is that a victim rose up in defiance to protect herself by killing a slaveowner.
George
George is another of Newsom’s slaves and even as the farmer is routinely raping Celia, a romance blossoms between the two. Perhaps it is a sign of the times that George considers what is taking place between Celia and Newsom a relationship that she has the power to end. Whatever the case, things reach a point where he makes that very demand of her if she wants to continue their own romance. Since there is no legal recourse available to her to accomplish goal and no illegal peaceful alternative, Celia chooses what she sees as the only available option: murdering Newsom. One of the lingering questions for readers reaching the story’s end is almost certainly one which views George’s behavior and actions in a singularly negative light. He himself takes no action to stop Newsom’s violent assaults compounds this injury with the additional insult of allowing Celia to face the consequences of her own actions alone.
Dred Scott
Although not an active participant in the events of the narrative, the presence of Dred Scott also hovers over the entire story with its suggesting of what might have been for the perhaps millions of other Celias in American’s antebellum period had the single most unqualified Chief Justice in American history not been ruling over the Supreme Court at the time. As the nation moved into the homestretch counting down the days before Civil War erupted, Dred Scott had successfully escape from his owner in Missouri into a neighboring “free state.” The Missouri Supreme Court declared that Scott was still the property of his owner which nullified any claims to freedom established through the criminal action of escaping. The case wound its way to the Supreme Court where Chief Justice Roger Taney upheld the lower court’s standing by declaring quite specifically that all black people—notably not limiting the decision only to slaves in his written opinion—were automatically denied all rights extended to all other Americans because they “are not included, and were not intended to be included, under the word 'citizens' in the Constitution.”
John Jameson
Jameson, a well-respected and—against all odds—a well-liked lawyer in Callaway Count, is appointed to head up Celia’s defense against murder. Although more is known about him than Celia, of course, the historical record is also skimpy on his background. It is suspected that he managed to become successful primarily because he was so likeble; not much in the historical record points to Jameson being Missouri’s version of that lawyer working across the way in Illinois at the time, Abraham Lincoln. On the other hand, what Jameson does appear to have in common with Lincoln—at least from what facts are available—is a solid grounding in basic morality and insight into what separates basically decent people from basically evil people. Although doomed from the beginning to lose, Jameson’s reputation as a less than stellar intellect can be placed in juxtaposition to what was, by all accounts, a nearly perfect defense for Celia that might well have found her acquitted had she not been a female slave in Missouri.
