Ruby

Ruby Cathy — Eighteen and desperately lonely, she has adjusted from a life in the sun and blue seas of the West Indies to the mean, crowded streets of Harlem. Her mother is dead, and her father is obsessed with the American passion to succeed. Ruby makes the painful transition from girl to woman when she meets the beautiful and bitter Daphne.

Daphne Duprey — She prides herself on always being "cool, calm, collected, poised, sophisticated, cultured, and refined." Ruby is drawn to this girl,who, in Ruby's eyes, is everything she is not. They fill the aching emptiness in each other, love each other, despite the shared knowledge that their happines will end as abruptly as it began.