Character Clues

Character Analysis

Names

When you're dealing with characters with names like Patience and Strong, well, chances are good names have some meaning. Sure enough, Patience is super patient—she rallies through the pain of losing her husband, stands vigil over her daughter's bedside for weeks, and generally just keeps on keeping on no matter what happens. And Strong is, well, strong. Does he have a moment (or, say, four years) of weakness? Yup—but he ultimately gets back on his feet. It's quite the feat of strength.

Mother Barker is officially called Mother because of her role in the church, but she acts like a maternal figure to the whole community, too, healing their wounds and helping them through hard times. When it comes to Abyssinia, this is only more true: Mother Barker is like a second mother to our leading lady. At one point, she even says Abby's "the only child" (24.22) she and the foreman have.

As for Abyssinia, her name is the former name of Ethiopia. This does two things: It subtly reminds readers that she is black, and it's also a shout-out to the tumult of Abyssinia's life. Abyssinia the place was fraught with tension—there were literally "centuries of feudal anarchy" (source)—just as Abyssinia the character's life is a series of struggles.

Speech and Dialogue

A key characterization tool in Marked by Fire is how characters talk. Instead of speech and dialogue differentiating characters, though, in this book the language used in conversations characterizes the setting and overall community, which in turn helps us understand the individual people we're reading about. Language, in other words, helps establish context. Check it out:

Another student recited "The Night Before Christmas" in Black English.

It was Christmas Eve, y'all,
All through, under and over the house
Wasn't nothin' stirrin', baby,
Not a rat, nor a mouse…

The student body laughed uproariously and gave the young man a standing ovation when he finished. (22.23-25)

This scene is from the Christmas program, and from both the boy's speech and the audience's response, we know we're in a black community (otherwise this passage would be super racist…). While race primarily takes the backseat in this book, moments like this one remind us that race is a huge issue in the country—the book's set smack dab in the middle of the Civil Rights Movement, after all—so there's simply no way the racial make-up of this community doesn't impact the lives of its residents. (Remember the woman who comes out from the county (14.24)? Yeah, we thought so. Ugh.) As a point of reference, the Black Panther Party was started in the same year as the Christmas program.