The Book of Night Women

Homer is an enslaved person who is the head of the house at Montpelier. She is a thin old woman covered in scars who smells like mint and lemongrass. She acts as Lilith’s guide throughout the book, even though they reject each other at different points. She speaks in riddles and she seems to know things she shouldn’t know. She is so familiar with the night that Lilith thinks she can see in the darkness. She practices Obeah, which gives her a certain kind of power at Montpelier. Homer tells Lilith that she has experienced love, and after hearing the whole story, Lilith thinks Homer died the day she learned her children died. She lost hope for freedom and became the enslaved person the white people wanted her to be. In planning the rebellion, Lilith thinks she devolves into only wanting revenge.

When Lovey recounts all the night women’s songs, she says that Homer’s song is a “whisper like a night spirit leaping from a tree” (425). Staying consistent with her supernatural abilities and affinity for the darkness, they never find Homer’s body after the rebellion. Throughout the novel, Homer tries to protect Lilith and Lilith sees her as something between a mother and sister figure. Lilith notices when Homer begins to lose herself. She spends less time in reality and more time thinking about her dead children. The night woman that Lilith sees in the dark, the woman who tells the story of the night woman to Lovey, resembles Homer. Homer’s story is tragic but vital to Lilith’s and Lovey’s. Homer is the reason they know how to read, the reason the rebellion happens at all, the keeper of information at Montpelier, and the woman who protects and heals Lilith. Homer channels Darkness, Womanness, and Freedom and teaches Lilith to do the same.

Humphrey Wilson grows up in England and returns to Montpelier when his father dies to assume the role of master. He is an angry man. He plays the role of a master; he is especially cruel at random times, but ultimately, as demonstrated in the final scene in which he forces himself upon Lilith to hump her while crying, he is a pathetic man.

Wilson begins the story by trying to prove himself as a master at Montpelier. He dresses up when Isobel visits and tries to balance his rule of the plantation to oppress successfully but not inspire rebellion. As the story continues, he loses control over himself. He attacks Lilith in front of his guests at the ball, has sex with Isobel and then loses her to her mental health condition, and loses Quinn and his mother in the rebellion. In his final scenes, he acts like a child, throwing a rock at a preacher and insulting Isobel before leaving Montpelier forever.

Robert Quinn is the Irish overseer who Wilson brings to Jamaica to help him run Montpelier. Quinn is a large man with long, curly black hair and broad shoulders. He shows mercy to Lilith at times, but he also gives the order that led to Lilith’s rape and he lets Wilson and Isobel order her to be whipped weekly. He cannot look at Lilith while she is whipped, and he refuses to whip her himself.

Quinn’s identity as an Irishman brings down his standing at Montpelier. Wilkins outright references the fact that Irish people were enslaved before they found another race to enslave. Other white people regularly disregard him because of his heritage, which gives him even further incentive to prove himself as a white person. For this reason, he loudly proclaims his racism and continues inflicting brutal violence on enslaved people, despite the fact that he goes home to Lilith and calls her lovey. Above everything, Quinn is loyal to Wilson, as exemplified by the fact that he murdered a woman in Venice to protect Wilson’s reputation. Quinn undeniably commits evil acts, even and especially to Lilith herself, but he also acts as a loving, positive force in her life, complicating his character’s role in her story.

Isobel is a white Creole woman who lives on a nearby estate called Coulibre and begins coming to Montpelier to help plan the New Year’s Ball. She sometimes speaks in Jamaican Patois rather than proper white English and corrects herself, but by the end of the book she openly speaks to Lilith in Patois.

Isobel begins as a prim and proper white woman, trying desperately to overcome her Creole roots by proving herself a lady. She is especially cruel to Black people and personally sees to it that Lilith is whipped twice a week for the soup she spilled at the ball. She constantly spouts white supremacist remarks while undermining her own beliefs. For example, she calls Obeah “ungodly” and calls Black people “dim” for their use of it, but later boasts to Lilith that she herself practices Obeah (112, 114).

Isobel’s downfall is tragic and representative of a white woman’s woes in the West Indies at this time. White society requires Isobel to repress herself and act a certain way, but her efforts to do so affect her mental health. She develops a substance use disorder and rides each night in men’s clothes to Kingston to acquire them using sex. When the enslaved people at Montpelier rebel, she is raped and abused and intentionally left alive to experience the pain. Wilson leaves her pregnant and alone at Montpelier. As Isobel herself has sex with more and more people, she projects hypersexuality onto Black women. Her cruelty comes back around: The novel ends with her pregnant, traumatized, and alone at Montpelier.

Isobel constantly aims to overcome her own identity as a Creole woman. She uses racism to prove her whiteness because she feels that her standing in white society is unstable. In one of the final scenes, Lilith gently pours warm water on Isobel in the bathtub as she cries, demonstrating Lilith’s shift from anger to pity, as if Isobel is a child.

Jack Wilkins is the father of Lilith and five of the other night women. He is a cruel overseer who slowly loses his power as Wilson becomes more powerful and Wilkins deteriorates from an alcohol use disorder and old age. Lilith has complicated feelings toward Wilkins: He has saved her from violence on multiple occasions but he is also the man who raped her mother and so many other women. During the rebellion, she looks at Wilkins, whose Green Eyes match hers, and sees him as an old, helpless man.