T Ray Owens's Sympathetic Characters

Throughout most of Lily Owens’s life, she lived with the burden of killing her own mother at only four years old. After the fateful day, she wished for the “motherly love” that she never received. Instead, she experienced T. Ray Owens’s harsh, cruel discipline and scolding. Rosaleen, her maid, is represented as her stand-in mother and eventually shows her own love for Lily. After an incident causing Rosaleen to be confined in jail, the two of them escape to South Carolina to restart their lives and hopefully discover a thing or two about Deborah Owens, Lily’s mother. Following Lily on her coming-of-age journey, T. Ray may be considered the main antagonist. However, despite the impressions that T. Ray gives to the reader at the beginning, he develops into a sympathetic character as the story progresses.
The novel begins with Lily and her outlook on her relationship with her father. Their relationship is anything but lovely, and T. Ray does not seem to care much for Lily. She explains, “The special misery of living with T. Ray… Mostly I stayed out of the way” (Kidd 3). Lily knew better than to bother T. Ray with trivial matters that any other normal girl would fret over. She knew about the familiar …show more content…
Ray and if he cared enough to search for her. She musters the courage to call T. Ray through a collect call from Mr. Forrest’s office, and in the call, T. Ray exclaims, “You were a goddamn fool who went looking for trouble and found it… I had to stop everything and search for you all over creation” (Kidd 159-160). T. Ray had been looking for Lily ever since she ran away. He had even stopped his prideful peach business to take care of something more important to him. He may not have known Lily’s favorite color, but he did know the amount of trouble she would be in if he found her. Lily was in anguish after the call, realizing that T. Ray really did know close to nothing personal about