Dasani Coates
Dasani Coates is the main focus and protagonist of the story. Born at the dawn of the new millennium, the book follows her from age eleven in 2012 through the next decade of her life. The arc of that timeline traces Dasani’s path from extreme conditions of poverty in a rodent-infested room that is home to her entire immediately family through to her acceptance into a boarding school in Pennsylvania reserved for gifted students coming low-income economic privation.
Miss Hester
Faith Hester is a forty-eight-year-old teacher at the Susan S. McKinney Secondary School of the Art as well as the author of a self-help tome titled Create a Life You Love Living. She is also instrumental in the trajectory of Dasani’s life by virtue of recognizing that the young girl possesses a notably intuitive brain that is almost built for the processes of learning.
Chanel and Supreme
Chanel is Dasani’s biological mother and Supreme is her stepfather. They met at homeless shelter where she was dealing with a crack addiction and two kids and he was a barber dealing the difficulties of trying to raise two small kids in the wake of his wife’s untimely death. Their marriage enacted a kind of version of The Brady Bunch if it had been made for the BET network and was a grippingly realistic drama instead of absurdly fantastical sitcom.
June Sykes
The book draws historical context from not focusing merely on the present-day story of Dasani, but by traveling backward through time to present a portrait of Brooklyn as it existed in almost another world. Certainly, in another time. June Sykes is Dasani’s great-grandfather and the story of he and his wife Margaret moving from North Carolina to Brooklyn becomes the representative story symbolizing the Great Migration of the first half of the 20th century when blacks by the thousands exiled themselves from the rural south into the great urban centers north of the Mason-Dixon Line.
