Abeng

James Arthur “Boy” Savage is Clare’s father. He comes from an impoverished aristocratic English family and is the extramarital son of his actress mother and an Italian immigrant worker who gets deported from the US. Boy does not get to know his mother, who eventually dies from illness in Hollywood. Good-looking and intelligent, Boy wins a scholarship to a Jesuit school and becomes interested in religion and mystic ideas about the afterlife, salvation, and extraterrestrial life. During his military service in North Africa, his beliefs lead him to embrace the Presbyterian idea of the Elect and believes the Savages will be saved no matter what. These convictions lead Boy to simply wait for the afterlife, trying to fill his days with betting, drinking, and extramarital affairs. He often talks to Clare about the past and human history, telling her what he remembers learning about the Ancient world, such as Atlantis and the Aztec empire. He is overly concerned with the whiteness of the Savage family and is disappointed by what he perceives to be Clare’s unseemly preoccupation with the Jews and is concerned with her rebellious behavior in stealing a gun and killing a bull. He arranges for Clare to go live with old Miss Beatrice who is a well-known white woman and who will be able to teach Clare about the proper behavior for a lady.

Kitty Freeman Savage is Clare’s mother. She comes from a poor mixed family. She has a distant relationship with her mother, Miss Mattie, which she unconsciously re-enacts with her own two daughters. Having adopted her mother’s emotional distance, Kitty is never naked with her children and feels unable to talk to Clare about anything intimate, such as Kitty’s love of her people or what menstruation means for a woman’s body. 

Like Clare, her maternal grandmother, Miss Mattie, is the product of a mixed-race marriage and has had a difficult life, having toiled in the cane fields and received beatings from the plantation owner. These experiences combined with the loss of her youngest son to measles, cause Miss Mattie to be emotionally distant with all of her family members with the exception of her Black father. She believes the Savages to be corrupt, and she opposed Kitty and Boy’s marriage. After the bull’s death, she concludes that Clare is morally depraved like her father and refuses to host the child, proving that Miss Mattie is biased against her own grandchild.

Jennie Savage is Clare’s younger sister whose mother expects her to play with dolls, unlike Clare, who receives books as presents. She is dark-skinned, and Clare is jealous of her for taking away Kitty’s attention. Furthermore, the older girl fears that when Jennie grows up, their mother will stop taking Clare out into the bush in favor of bringing along her younger daughter. The narrator implies that Jennie might be the only person with whom Kitty would be able to share her love for Black people and culture as they share the same skin color.

Clare’s closest friend and the older daughter of Miss Ruthie, Zoe is a dark-skinned, tall, and lanky girl. She is the same age as Clare, but their lives are fundamentally different. Zoe is much more self-aware than Clare and knows that if something goes wrong while the girls are together, such as killing the bull, she would be blamed because she is dark-skinned and poor. Clare gradually becomes aware that her deep feelings for Zoe might have to do with the lack of maternal affection in her life. Zoe and Kitty are both dark-skinned, so it is possible that Clare is trying to replace one with the other or to feel closer to her mother through her relationship with another dark-skinned female. 

Miss Ruthie is Zoe’s mother. She is a poor single woman living on a piece of Miss Mattie’s land for free. Miss Ruthie grows and sells food at a local market to make ends meet. She has two daughters and they all live in a one-room bungalow. Unlike Miss Mattie and Kitty, Miss Ruthie has a close relationship with Zoe and talks to her about such things as rape and social inequality. Zoe feels safe whenever she is with her mother, which serves to highlight the role reversal between Clare and Kitty—Clare is always mindful of not upsetting her mother. 

Miss Beatrice is an 87-year old rich white woman who has lost her husband and 13 children. She blames Jamaica for her losses and, as a result, despises Black people. Miss Beatrice is “utilitarian” as she does not like to spend money on anything that is not strictly necessary. She is cruel and racist and she frequently beats her old servant, Minnie. 

Miss Winifred is the sister of Beatrice Phillips. She has not washed for 30 years and everyone considers her insane. When she was young, she became pregnant by a Black man and went to a convent to have the baby, while her father killed her lover. As a result of her unhappy life, Miss Winifred blames herself for transgressing the social taboo against inter-racial relationships and absolves her family’s behavior by stating that they simply acted according to their beliefs.

The justice is Clare’s great-great-grandfather. He is the youngest song of an English earl, sent to Jamaica by the Crown in 1829 to serve as a puisne justice, and became a successful plantation owner. His wife remains in England and dies 10 years later giving birth to a sickly girl. The justice leaves his daughter behind but brings his son to Jamaica. The Savage family refuses to acknowledge any interracial mixing and insists that the justice had a Guatemalan-Spanish mistress. In reality, he “saved” a young Maroon woman, Inez, from capital punishment and forced her to be his lover. His failed efforts to prevent the Act of Emancipation, combined with Inez’s escape, likely make him feel disempowered, which enrages him to the point he burns his slaves alive. His moral failings are further highlighted when the justice claimed that the slaves would have been unhappy as free people.

Nanny is a heroic semi-mythical figure from the Jamaican past. She is an African woman who was either never a slave or a runaway and becomes one of the leaders of the Windward Maroons. Nanny is an obeah, or wise woman, who is able to discover caves and tunnels for her people to hide in and who teaches her troops how to stop a bullet with their hands and how to commit suicide by eating dirt, if captured. Legend has it that she knew how to stop a bullet with her buttocks. Nanny is a potential role model for Black women, but very few know about her.