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The Logan Family
In General
- Familial Foe: They and the Simms have a generations-long mutual emnity, fueled by the latter's racism, though the Logans just try to avoid them for the most part as they're aware of the potentially lethal reprisal they'd suffer if they tried fighting back.
- Tall Poppy Syndrome: If T.J.'s telling the truth, at least some of the other Black families in the area resent the Logans due to their relative prosperity compared to everyone else, as they own their land as opposed to being in virtual slavery to the Grangers or the other landowning white families as sharecroppers.
First Generation
Paul-Edward Logan
Paul-Edward is the product of a relationship between Georgia plantation owner Edward Logan and one of his slaves, Deborah, and the main protagonist of The Land. After realizing that he cannot flourish as the coloured son of a white man, he sets out to pursue his own destiny, eventually settling in Mississippi. He is David and Hammer's father, as well as Caroline's husband.
- Ambiguously Brown: It's mentioned a few times that people have a hard time figuring out "just what he is". At one point in The Land, he's able to pass for a white man and it saves him and Mitchell from being murdered by a mob.
- Born into Slavery: He's two when freedom comes.
- Call to Agriculture: He is an experienced and skilled horseman and a master carpenter, either of which could have made him a decent living, but he just wants to be a farmer.
- Determinator: If he wants something, he will find a way to get it no matter who stands in his way.
- I Want My Beloved to Be Happy: He and Mitchell fall for the same girl, Caroline, but he gracefully bows out since Mitchell speaks for her first. Mitchell's tragic death cuts their marriage short, and Paul-Edward and Caroline eventually end up getting married themselves.
- Love at First Sight: He falls head over heels upon seeing Caroline for the first time.
- The Narrator: Of The Land, which functions as an origin story to the rest of the series.
Edward Logan
Paul-Edward's father, a Georgia plantation owner. He owned slaves before the war, and one of those slaves was Paul-Edward's mother, Deborah, who he took a liking to despite being married with children of his own.
- Parents as People: He tries to treat all of his children equally as best as he can, but he also can't change the racism in society at large, nor can he fully protect his children from it.
Cassie Logan Sr.
Paul-Edward's sister. His granddaughter, the narrator of most of the other books, is named for her.
- Child Naming Request: She names her first daughter Emmaline at her mother Deborah's request. When her mother passes away shortly afterward, she and Paul-Edward both realize how much Emmaline resembles Deborah, and thus Cassie decides to add Deborah to Emmaline's name.
- Hair-Trigger Temper: A trait she passes on to the younger Cassie Logan is her quick temper.
Caroline 'Big Ma' Logan
The mother of David and Hammer, mother-in-law of Mary and grandmother of Stacey, Cassie, Christopher-John and Little Man. Caroline is a part-time healer who is kind but firm with the children.
- Bully Hunter: The first time Paul-Edward sees her, she chastises a group of white boys for bullying a young black boy.
- Cool Old Lady: She's the loving grandmother of the family and willing to face off the local racists.
- Establishing Character Moment: Her introduction in The Land; she catches a group of white boys bullying a black boy, chases them off, then gives the black boy one of the pies that she's supposed to be selling to make him feel better.
- I Was Quite a Looker: Her beauty as a teenager is elaborated on in The Land.
- Lifesaving Misfortune: In Mississippi Bridge, she's planning to take a bus to see her sister but is kicked off the bus, along with all the other Black would-be riders, to make room for a late-arriving group of white passengers. The bus subsequently crashes into a river, leaving no survivors.
- Long-Lived: She was a teenager shortly after the Civil War, and is roughly in her late 90s if not an outright centenarian by the end of All the Days Past in 1963.
- Never Mess with Granny: The incident where she brings a Winchester rifle out from under her bed to protect the kids from the Wallaces.
- Outliving One's Offspring:
- Paul and Hammer's two other brothers died fighting in World War I, and her daughters died as babies.
- At the end of All the Days Past, she's still alive when Papa Logan dies of implied blood cancer.
- Second Love: Paul-Edward is this for her, after Mitchell's death in The Land.
- The Golden Rule: Despite the horrible way white people treat her and other black people, she still invites them to use her well during a drought in The Well when it is the only one that works.
Second Generation
David 'Papa' Logan
The son of Caroline, husband of Mary, brother to Hammer and father to Stacey, Cassie, Christopher-John and Little Man. He starts off in Louisiana laying railroad track, but comes home during the book.
- Anonymous Benefactor: He's the one who set the fire that saved T.J's life at the end.
- Cruel to Be Kind: According to Cassie he justified using corporal punishment on his children by stating that the world is cruel and it's better that they learn pain through their parents than with the world outside.
- Disappeared Dad: Sympathetic example, as he has to leave home yearly to find work. This changes over the course of the book.
- Get Out!: In the short story Song of the Trees he frightens away some loggers illegally trying to cut down his trees, enforced with threats of setting off dynamite.
- Life Will Kill You: Dies at the end of All the Days Past from what is implied to be blood cancer.
- Made of Iron: Survives getting shot in the head by the Wallaces when they ambush him, Stacey, and Mr. Morrison.
- Papa Wolf: Cassie relates a story of how he punched a bull in the face to stop it from charging Little Man.
Hammond 'Hammer' Logan
The son of Big Ma, brother to David, brother-in-law to Mary and uncle to Stacey, Cassie, Christopher-John and Little man. Hammer works in Chicago because he can't stand the attitude of white people in Mississippi to the black population. He visits often.
- Arch-Enemy: He and Charlie Simms have a sustained mutual enmity from when they were children.
- An Arm and a Leg: Lost his leg fighting in World War I.
- Badass in a Nice Suit: He's a well dressed veteran willing to stand by his family in times of trouble.
- Cool Car: He's the only person in town besides Harlan Granger to own a Parkard. He eventually has to sell it, but buys a Ford, which is closer to The Alleged Car.
- Cool Uncle: Hammer dotes on his brother's kids, as well as protecting them in times of danger.
- The Cynic: He's skeptical of race relations changing in America and makes that fact very clear.
- Hair-Trigger Temper: Hammer has a very bad temper, and when he learns about how Cassie is treated by the Simms, he has to be stopped from going over there to give them a piece of his mind for fear of a horrific reprisal upon the Logans.
- Noble Bigot: He's a good guy but he really doesn't like white people, making it clear to the Logan children that he believes one day Jeremy will turn out just like the other Simms, and throwing his picture in the fire, although it's hard to blame him considering how racist the vast majority of the white people around them are. He also calls Cousin Bud in Let the Circle Be Unbroken a fool for marrying a white woman and having a child with her.
- Shell-Shocked Veteran: Fought in "Their German war" and has some lingering problems from it.
Mary 'Mama' Logan
The wife of David, daughter-in-law of Caroline, sister-in-law of Hammer and mother of Stacey, Cassie, Christopher-John and Little Man. Mary grew up in The Delta and trained to be a teacher in Jackson before moving to Spokane County to marry David and teach at Great Faith Elementary.
- Education Mama: She is very insistent on her kids making the most of their lives through school.
- Higher Education Is for Women: The only one in the family with a third-level education, until Cassie goes to law school and becomes a lawyer and Little Man an engineer.
- Hot Teacher: She's an attractive school teacher.
- I Want Grandkids: In All the Days Past she and Big Ma are insistent that Cassie marry again and have kids, despite the fact that all three of Cassie's brothers have married and had children of their own.
- Only Sane Woman: Mild example; she's slightly more articulate than the other Logans and uses better grammar.
Third Generation
Robert Stacey Logan
Known as Stacey, he is the son of David and Mary, the nephew of Hammer, the grandson of Caroline and the brother of Cassie, Christopher John and Little Man. Stacey is just now coming into manhood and has a bit more common sense than Cassie, but he is often moody and has a bad taste in friends...
- The Nicknamer: All the Days Past, All the Days to Come reveals it was him who gave Little Man his nickname, as he was born as a premature breech birth and didn't really cry.
- Only Known by Their Nickname: He is almost never called "Robert".
Cassie Deborah Logan
Cassie is the only daughter of David and Mary, the niece of Hammer, the granddaughter of Caroline and the sister of Stacey, Christopher-John and Little Man. Cassie is the narrator of Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry and primary protagonist of the entire Logan saga who struggles to understand the unfair treatment she and her family receives at the hands of Spokane County's white community.
- Best Served Cold: After Lillian-Jean Simms and her father humiliate her, Cassie pretends to be her friend (or rather, virtual servant) for a while before getting her alone and beating her up before forcing her to apologize for the humiliation. She gets away with it because in order to get a reprisal Lillian-Jean would have to admit that a younger Black girl was able to beat her up, a humiliation she's unwilling to suffer, on top of Cassie being careful not to leave any marks on Lillian-Jean's face that someone could ask about.
- Character Development: While Cassie never loses her fire, she does get better at picking her battles.
- Combat Pragmatist: When she fistfights Lillian-Jean she's careful not to leave any marks on her face and sticks to hair pulling and hitting her stomach and buttocks, and beforehand makes sure to get her alone.
- Crusading Lawyer: Cassie ends up going into law as an adult, and gets involved in the civil rights movement.
- Dead Guy Junior: Is named after both her great-aunt Cassie and her daughter Emmeline Deborah.
- Dude Magnet: As Cassie enters adulthood, many men become interested in her, but save for Flynn who she marries, she avoids or directly turns them down.
- Hair-Trigger Temper: She has a temper almost as volatile as Hammer's. It's something she shares with her namesake, Paul-Edward's sister.
- I Choose to Stay: At the end of All the Days Past, Cassie chooses to stay in Mississippi and help Mama and Big Ma following Papa Logan's death, and stays there for the rest of her life.
- Kid Hero All Grown-Up: In Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry she's 9, by The Road to Memphis she's 17, and All the Days Past goes over her adulthood from 20 in 1944 to around 39 in 1963, with the Distant Finale epilogue placing her at around 85 in 2009.
- Maligned Mixed Marriage: In All the Days Past Cassie gets into a relationship with Guy Harris, a white man she meets in Boston, but it doesn't progress due to both Stacey and her parent's disapproval despite personally liking him, even after he arrives in Mississippi to help Cassie against her wishes and gets brutally beaten by white racists who consider him a race traitor.
- The Narrator: She narrates most of the novels.
Christopher-John Logan
Christopher-John is the son of David and Mary, the nephew of Hammer, the grandson of Caroline, and the brother of Stacey, Cassie, and Little Man. He is quiet and unassuming and prefers to get along with everybody.
- Out of Focus: Compared to the other Logan siblings he's focused on the least.
- The Quiet One: He has the least dialogue of the family, preferring to listen.
Clayton Chester 'Little Man' Logan
Little Man is the youngest son of David and Mary, the nephew of Hammer, the grandson of Caroline and the brother of Stacey, Cassie and Christopher-John. He is very naive, and always likes to keep meticulously clean.
- Children Are Innocent: He's a laidback, happy kid who's a bit confused by some of the harsh realities of the world.
- Neat Freak: He's very meticulous about being clean. All the Days Past implies this is from Little Man being very sickly as a child, as he was a premature breech birth, and in his early years suffered numerous ailments and injuries.
- Only Known by Their Nickname:
- No one calls him Clayton, just Little Man.
- After becoming an adult, he finds the "Little" part demeaning so it's shortened to "Man".
- Rage Breaking Point: In the very first chapter of All the Days Past, the stress of being drafted for World War II and missing his education due to a clerical error showing him to be older all while still facing segregation from white people who insist on a curtain in the colored section of the bus so they don't even have to look at him finally causes him to snap. It was just his parents and siblings around, so all that happened was an angry rant, but still...
- Troubling Unchildlike Behavior: According to Cassie in All the Days Past Papa and Mama Logan were disturbed that Little Man would never cry when they beat him with a belt for misbehaving.
Others
L.T. Morrison
A man who used to work with David until he got fired for fighting with some white men. David brings him home early in the book to protect the family from night men. He soon becomes part of the family. He is enormously strong and is over seven feet tall.
- Cool Old Guy: He is over sixty, after all and is a nice man and tough fighter.
- Beware the Nice Ones: A very nice man, but can lift a man over his head and throw them to the ground as if they were as light as a sack of feathers if provoked.
- Breeding Slave: Not him personally, but he's descended from slaves who were designated as "breeding stock" due to their strength, which is believed to be the reason behind his own massive size and strength.
- Dark and Troubled Past: He lost his family at Christmas when he was six years old when some nightmen burned them to death. He was scarred by the incident, both literally and figuratively.
- Family of Choice: The Logans treat him like an uncle and vice versa.
- Gentle Giant: L.T. is a hulking, compassionate man who doesn't go out of his way to fight anyone.
- Intergenerational Friendship: The kids get along very well with L.T.
- Life Will Kill You: Dies of old age sometime between Let the Circle Be Unbroken and The Road to Memphis.
- Roaring Rampage of Revenge: After the Wallaces ambush himself, David, and Stacey on their way home from Vicksburg, shooting David in the head and causing him a broken leg in the process, Mr. Morrison goes after them and breaks Dewberry's back and Thurston's arm.
- Scars Are Forever: He has burn marks signifying his Dark and Troubled Past.
- Stealth Expert: Cassie describes Mr. Morrrison as being incredibly quiet while moving, made an even more amazing feat by the fact that he's more than seven feet tall.
Villains
The Wallace Brothers
Thurston, Dewberry, and Kaleb Wallace are three white shopkeepers who rent land from Harlan Granger. They are responsible for most of the awful things that occur in the book.
- Churchgoing Villain: Racist thugs who attend the local church.
- Disproportionate Retribution: Burned the Berrys alive for supposedly flirting with a white woman.
- Evil Redhead: They're vile, red-haired thugs.
- Even Evil Has Loved Ones: Their truck is described as being 'overflowing with red-headed children'.
- The Family That Slays Together: They go out threatening or outright injuring black people together.
- Would Hurt a Child: They have no compunctions about lynching the 15-year old T.J.
Harlan Granger
Granger is a local white man who owns a 6000 acre plantation which borders the Logan's farm. The Logan's farm belonged to his father before the Civil War and he resents that the Logans have it. To that end, he tries various schemes to take their land off them.
- Big Bad: Granger is the force behind the Wallace Brothers.
- Even Evil Has Standards: Apparently, he "doesn't approve of the Wallace's methods", though that doesn't stop him from supporting them.
- Faux Affably Evil: He can act all gracious while letting his persona slip when he doesn't get his way. It's something he appears to have developed over time, as when we see him as a child near the end of The Land, upon meeting Paul-Edward the first thing he asks him is if he's a "nigger" and displays open hostility the whole time as opposed to his more polite father.
- Life Will Kill You: In All the Days Past he's revealed to have died sometime following The Road to Memphis, though his family still controls the area.
- Politically Incorrect Villain: In The Land, where he openly asks Paul-Edward if he is a "nigger" and displays open hostility. He was a child at the time, but it shows just how racist he was then and how racist he will become by the time Cassie's generation comes to know him.
- Small-Town Tyrant: He pulls the strings around town and lets his fellow racists get away with a lot.
- Southern Gentleman: A negative version, being an influential, well-spoken, well-dressed racist.
The Simms Family
In General
- Familial Foe: They and the Logans have a generations-long mutual enmity, fueled by the former's racism.
- Know When to Fold Them: After their previous attempt at murder, Charlie and the Ames brothers don't dare to try attacking the Logans while they're with federal marshals at the end of All the Days Past.
- Politically Incorrect Villain: Save for Jeremy, they're a bunch of white supremacists who use the "n-word" liberally.
- Sequel Non-Entity: While Charlie Simms serves as a secondary antagonist in All the Days Past alongside the Ames brothers, none of his non-Jeremy children make an appearance or are even mentioned by Cassie.
Charlie Simms
A local white farmer. He's the father of R.W., Melvin, Lillian-Jean, and Jeremy.
- Abusive Parents: He beats Jeremy hard enough to leave physical marks every time he sees him be nice to Black people.
- Arch-Enemy: Charlie and Hammer have an enmity that goes back to childhood.
- Evil Is Petty: As a child, he poisons the Logan family well despite it being the only functioning well in the area during the middle of a drought, which even white people depend on, all because he started a fight with Hammer Logan and lost.
- Offing the Offspring: He tries to kill Jeremy when he realizes Jeremy helped Moe escape from being lynched in The Road to Memphis, and disowns him soon afterwards.
- Revenge by Proxy: Assists the Ames brothers in trying to kill the Logans when they can't find Moe.
- Would Hurt a Child: He's part of the lynch mob who tries to murder 15-year old T.J. at the end of the book.
R.W. and Melvin Simms
The two eldest sons of Charlie Simms.
- The Dividual: They're so closely associated with one another that they're basically one character.
- Karma Houdini: They get away with murdering Mr. Barnett and framing T.J. for it.
- Manipulative Bastards: They manipulate T.J. into helping them rob the Barnett's store, and have him be the fall guy when they end up murdering Mr. Barnett in the process.
- Pay Evil unto Evil: While they only were acting out of greed and cruelty (and their doing so causes a lot of trouble for the black community), the storekeeper they murder is a racist Jerkass to black customers.
Lillian-Jean Simms
Charlie Simms' only daughter, and just as racist as most of the rest of her family.
- Alpha Bitch: She behaves as a queen bee and is very demeaning towards Cassie.
- Dirty Coward: She talks a good game with her father backing her up, but is a weak enough villain that she loses a fistfight to a then nine-year old Cassie when she's much older.
The Ames Brothers (Statler, Leon, and Troy)
Cousins to the Simms and the primary villains of The Road to Memphis.
- Best Served Cold: They try murdering the Logans around 20 years after Troy's death for the sake of revenge.
- Hero Killer: They're implied to have murdered Moe's younger brother Morris near the end of All the Days Past.
- Revenge by Proxy: When the Ames brothers and Charlie Simms are unable to find Moe, they try murdering the Logan siblings in a tense car chase, and are implied to be behind Morris' death as well.
- You Killed My Father: Statler and Leroy seek to murder Moe because Troy died of the injuries Moe gave him during The Road to Memphis.
Others
Mitchell Thomas
Paul's childhood friend.
- Everyone Has Standards: Even as a child when he and Paul dislike each other, he refuses to let a group of four boys gang up on Paul, saying that they have to fight him one at a time or not at all.
- Massive Numbered Siblings: He's the oldest child of eight.
Wade Jamison
Mr. Jamison is the Logan's lawyer. He is the only white man the family respect, because he is the only one they know who does not hold their race against them. He plays a vital role during the climax.
- Cool Old Guy: By All the Days Past in the beginning he's in his late 60s and by the end in his 80s, but he's as kind to the Logans as ever and offers to help Cassie if she decides to go into law.
- Crusading Lawyer: He's a lawyer who's always willing to help Black people, to the detriment of his reputation in the white community.
- Gentleman and a Scholar: With emphasis on the gentleman part - he is noted as being the only white man to address Caroline and Mary as 'missus'.
- Nice Guy: Even as a child, he is nothing but friendly to the main characters and has no concern for their skin color.
- Secret-Keeper: The only person apart from the Logans themselves who knows what really caused the fire the night T.J. was almost lynched.
- Simple Country Lawyer: He's a humble mannered man with a shrewd legal mind.
- White Guilt: His father and grandfather owned slaves and he feels he must make up for that, even as a child.
T.J. Avery
T.J. is the son of a local sharecropping family with whom the Logans are close friends. He is Stacey's best friend at the beginning of the book, though by the end, his attitude pushes Stacey away.
- Alas, Poor Villain: Downplayed in that T.J.'s more of a jerkass, but although Cassie has always disliked him, she knows he doesn't deserve what will probably and does befall him, and despite how much of a jerk he was the Logans still mourn him. Decades later in All the Days Past when Cassie remembers T.J., she's willing to describe him as "a childhood friend", implying that she's managed to forgive him.
- Break the Haughty: When Cassie sees him in Let the Circle Be Unbroken when they sneak away from home to see his trial, he's a shadow of his former self.
- Green-Eyed Monster: After being caught cheating on Mrs. Logan's history test, he expresses a disdain towards the Logans for their (relative) prosperity compared to the other Black people in town, as they own their land instead of being directly under Harlan Granger's thumb.
- Hypocrite: He snarks at both Cassie and Stacey for "uncle tomming" to Lillian Jean Simms and accepting Jeremy Simms' friendship respectively, but he ends up befriending their older brothers, R.W. and Melvin.
- Jerkass: Is emphatically not a nice person: he has no trouble getting his brother Claude in trouble, framing Stacey for cheating, and even getting Mary fired.
- Killed Offscreen: We never actually see T.J. die, but he is sentenced to death and Cassie makes it clear that she never saw him again.
- Toxic Friend Influence: David and Mary are afraid of T.J. being a bad influence on Stacey.
- Uncle Tomfoolery: Becomes "friends" with the Simms brothers, who are white racists, though it turns out they just want to frame him for robbery.
Jeremy Simms
A local white teenager. In contrast to the rest of his (massively racist) family, he bears no ill will towards black people whatsoever and, in fact, tries to befriend the Logan children.
- And Now for Someone Completely Different: Mississippi Bridge is told from his perspective as opposed to Cassie's.
- Bystander Syndrome: Sitting there and watching as his cousins get a black man savaged by their hunting dog as a joke in The Road to Memphis costs him his friendship with Stacey for a while.
- Hair of Gold, Heart of Gold: He's blonde and one of the nicest white characters in the book.
- Killed Offscreen: The Road to Memphis ends with Jeremy saying goodbye to Cassie and Stacy as he leaves town to enlist in World War II, but Cassie's narration (and the novel) ends with the ominous note that it was the last time she ever saw him again, suggesting that he died during the conflict. In the final novel, All the Days Past, All the Days to Come, it's confirmed by Little Willie, who encountered him in Europe when he was still alive, that he was indeed killed fighting in World War II.
- No Good Deed Goes Unpunished: Every time he acts nice towards black people while his father is around, he is silenced with an angry glare if he is lucky. His sister brags to the Logans that the marks on his arms are where he gets disciplined for trying to associate with the Logans, and in Mississippi Bridge, he gets "boxed in the face" for offering words of comfort to a black man who was kicked off the bus. To say nothing of getting disowned for preventing a lynching.
- The Unfavorite: Implied, Jeremy's other siblings don't seem to like him much and his father hates the fact that he's willing to be friendly with the Logans so much that he beats him for it when he catches him doing it.
- White Sheep: He's the only member of the Simms family we meet who isn't a terrible racist. The Logans even lampshade how unlikely it is that someone like Jeremy is so non-racist when he's from a family filled with them.
