Daughters of the Dust Characters

Nana Peazant

Nana Peazant is the matriarch of the Peazant family and the keeper of tradition on the island. As the oldest member of the clan, she feels the most connected to the island and its history, and does not want to leave for the North. She is spiritual, wise, and grounded in her lifelong belief in magic and its ability to carry her through difficult times. While she is old and wizened, she is nonjudgmental and welcoming to her diverse array of great-grandchildren and wants to keep connections strong between the past, present, and future. She believes that the living and the dead are connected, and in her first line, she narrates, "I am the first and the last. I am the honored one and the scorned one. I am the whore and the holy one. I am the wife and the virgin. I am the barren one and many are my daughters. I am the silence that you can not understand. I am the utterance of my name."

Viola Peazant

Viola is one of Nana's grandchildren. She has already moved North to Philadelphia, where she converted to Christianity and adopted modern ways of being. Although she is a devout Christian and thus criticizes her grandmother's "Hoodoo" ways, she ultimately has respect for the old customs, and tries her best not to judge, given what she knows about the history of the island. She is very conservative and judgmental, while also being loving and understanding.

Yellow Mary Peazant

"Yellow Mary" is the free-spirited granddaughter of Nana. Like Viola, she already left the island and has been living independently on the mainland. It is implied that she has been sexually indiscreet (perhaps working as a prostitute), and she causes a huge stir on the island when she brings a female lover, Trula, to visit the island with her. She is very respectful of Nana's customs and beliefs, even though she spent a lot of time away from the island. Mary is good at making money and sent some back to help the islanders at various points in her life. In spite of her initial intention to move to Nova Scotia when everyone goes North, she decides to stay on the island with Nana.

Trula

Trula is Mary's beautiful lover, mysterious and reticent.

Snead

Snead is a photographer from Philadelphia that Viola has brought along with her to take pictures of the islanders before they embark on their Great Migration.

Eli Peazant

Eli Peazant is Nana's grandson. When we meet him in the film, he is deeply upset because his wife, Eula, has been raped, and he fears that her unborn child is not his. He is highly emotional, worrying that the wrongs done to his wife will ruin his marriage, but he eventually learns to reconnect with Eula. He works as a smith on the island and has a strong connection with Nana.

Eula Peazant

Eli's wife, a mystical and peculiar woman, who has recently been raped by a white man on the mainland. She maintains a strong facade throughout the film, and has a certain naivety that reveals itself in her interactions with Mary, her more cultured and worldly sister-in-law. However, at the final dinner, when Haagar dismisses Mary, Eula becomes ferocious and outspoken, scolding her peers for being so dismissive of people who are different from them, and warning them that they are only hurting themselves by attaching to the wounds of slavery. Eula identifies with Nana, and has a strong connection with the spiritual and the magical.

The Unborn Child

The narrator of the film, Eula and Eli's unborn daughter. She has a great deal of wisdom and narrates her passage from the unborn to the living. She is connected to Nana, who is on the opposite journey, from the world of the living to that of the dead.

Haagar Peazant

Haagar is an in-law who is fiercely critical of both Nana's old-school spirituality and Yellow Mary's sexual indiscretions. In spite of her closed-mindedness, she is one of the fiercest proponents of traveling to the mainland, touting education and society as important milestones for the clan. In spite of her future-oriented outlook, she has very traditional views, and she is not open to experiences that are different from her own.