Robert Joseph Pershing Foster Character Analysis

The move to the North offered promises of a new life for each of the main characters. Although the great migration promised new opportunities for success, the personal problems that African American’s were facing in the South would follow each of them to the North. These personal problems would drain the happiness of each of the characters. Robert Joseph Pershing Foster was both materialistic and always posturing himself in a way to seem elevated above others. For Robert being the center of attention was the most important thing. When his wife, Alice, died his pain was focused on how it would effect his socialite behavior as Wilkerson (2010) says, “What was he raking in all the money for if he couldn’t spend it on someone he could show off …show more content…
From the beginning, she was an attempt to get back at his father for not allowing him to finish out college. George didn’t love her and it took a toll on his relationship with her and his happiness. For George, “he had only to look at Inez to be reminded of the what could have been” (p. 421). She was a reminder of his anger for his father, the fact that he had to drop out of college, and for having to leave Florida to escape being lynched. She represented all his mistakes and he hated her for it. Even as she was dying, “she and George circled each other, [they] could not break through the hurt and recriminations that had built up over the decades… her passing lent a finality to the error in judgment” (p. 451). George’s relationship with Inez prevented him from experiencing true happiness in the North and until the day they had a mutual hatred and resentment for how the other had ruined their …show more content…
Even when she did not want to move to Chicago in the North she followed him, she got a job working as a domestic house worker that was essentially slave labor because she needed to make her own money, and she followed his every order as the pastor had told her she should. Although Ida Mae was not unhappy with her life, Wilkerson hints at an underlying question of whether it was all worth it for Ida Mae and whether she should have been more selfish when she is debating going to visit her sister Irene. “Eleanor said I was always doing what he said to do… She said I should go on up and see my sister” (p. 450). Ida Mae was a strong, opinionated black woman who had no problem standing up to a white man’s advances in an empty apartment and come out on top. She struggled to remain subjected to her husband and although she always did, one could infer from this conversation that she had grown tired of it and decided to make her own decisions. Ida Mae gave her life to her husband and did everything he asked at the expense of her own desires thus tainiting the enjoyment of the North for her