Louise Kendricks
Louise, the daughter of a domestic worker, is a lonely girl and fellow ten year old who shares Maya's dreamy romanticism as well as the Tut language, a secret child's language. Loss of Louise's friendship is Maya's sole regret in departing from Stamps.
Tommy Valdon
Maya's first male admirer, an eighth-grader who, without knowledge of her past, reawakens shreds of rape trauma.
Joyce
A sexually precocious fourteen year old who seduces ten-year-old Bailey, instigating his petty thievery of sardines, Polish sausage, cheese, and canned salmon from the store, then runs away to Dallas, Texas, to marry a railroad porter, one of a group of Elks that she met in Momma's store.
George Taylor
A recent widower after forty years of marriage to wife Florida. Mr. Taylor, owlish, bald, wizened, and pathetic, visits Annie Henderson's house at suppertime to tell about a request for children from his wife's ghost.
Mr. Edward Donleavy
A condescending white politician from Texarkana who patronizes Maya's graduating class by stereotyping their heroes as athletes and limiting their horizons to mundane trades, then exits the stage to attend to more important matters in the white world.
Henry Reed
Valedictorian of the 1940 graduating class of Lafayette County Training School. Raised by his grandmother and trained by his teachers in elocution, he earns Maya's qualified regard for reciting "To Be or Not To Be" from Shakespeare's Hamlet, then lifts the general mood by leading his class in an impromptu singing of the black national anthem, James Weldon Johnson's "Lift Ev'ry Voice and Sing."
