Character Analysis
Can't Live With 'Em
Florence, Gabriel's sister, is a real tough cookie. She doesn't put up with any nonsense and is open about her objections to her brother's authoritarian ways. Unfortunately, though, she is his main supplier of wives; both Deborah and Elizabeth were Florence's friends before they had the bad luck of marrying Gabriel. Her big problem in life is, in a nutshell, men.
The first male disappointment Florence has to put up with is her brother, Gabriel. Back before his call to God he was a good-for-nothing drunken dirtbag. When she leaves the South for the North she can't stand him. Her anger started when they were kids, and he got all the privileges just for being a boy:
And he needed the education that Florence desired far more than he, and that she might have got if he had not been born. It was Gabriel who was slapped and scrubbed each morning and sent off to the one-room schoolhouse—which he hated, and where he managed to learn, so far as Florence could discover, almost nothing at all. And often he was not at school, but getting into mischief with other boys. (2.1.24)
So unfair, and yet such a common problem throughout history. This difference between the siblings plants the seeds for the rivalry and hatred that grows between them as long as they live.
But Gabriel isn't the only man that disappoints Florence. Both she and her friend Deborah have the same opinion of men in general:
(They) hated all men. […] Florence, who was beautiful but did not look with favor on any of the black men who lusted after her [...] reinforced in Deborah the terrible belief against which no evidence had ever presented itself: that all men were like this, their thoughts rose no higher, and they lived only to gratify on the bodies of women their brutal and humiliating needs. (2.1.25)
Her suspicions about men are confirmed when the master of the house that she works in as a serving-girl "proposed that she become his concubine" (2.1.29), and Florence leaves the South behind her forever to find a new life in the North. Unfortunately, things don't turn out any better there as far as her man problems go.
She marries Frank, a man who's pretty similar to preconversion Gabriel. He smokes, drinks, sings the blues, and spends all their money on ridiculous things they don't need. Poor Florence doesn't even care that much when their marriage ends:
When he had left her, more than twenty years before, and after more than ten years of marriage, she had felt for that moment only an exhausted exasperation and a vast relief. (2.1.74)
Good riddance.
A Dish Best Served Cold
Florence might have lost most of her battles with the men in her life, but that doesn't mean she gives up. Nope, this girl is full of vim, vigor, and vengeance. At the time of the novel (1935) she's dying from a mysterious illness and toying with the idea of asking the Lord for forgiveness for her sins.
She's also toying with the idea of finally ruining her brother's life forever. She has been saving a letter from his first wife, Deborah, for thirty years, waiting for the right moment to reveal Gabriel's deep, dark secret: "She had always meant to show this letter to Gabriel one day, but she never had" (2.1.120). The letter says that Deborah thinks he has a child with another woman, that he refuses to claim. Of course, it's true, but no one in Harlem knows about it.
Before she dies, Florence plans to use the letter to finally humiliate Gabriel, just like he has humiliated so many others:
"Maybe," she said, "I ain't long for this world, but I got this letter, and I'm sure going to give it to Elizabeth before I go, and if she don't want it, I'm going to find some way—some way, I don't know how—to rise up and tell it, tell everybody, about the blood the Lord's anointed is got on his hands." (3.1.198)
Yowza. Florence has a long memory, and she's finally getting her revenge for every single terrible thing her brother, and other men, too, put her through. She's using her final days to go on a mission of justice that will probably wreak havoc on the entire family and community. Way to go out with a bang, Flo.