Delphine Gaither is an 11-year-old African-American girl who visits her mother in Oakland, California, in the summer of 1968. The daughter of Cecile Johnson, who abandoned Delphine and her sisters when Delphine was almost 6, Delphine struggles between her desire to be a child and her deep sense of responsibility toward her younger sisters. Delphine has relatively old-fashioned ideas about racial identity at the start of the novel. Over the course of the novel, however, Delphine accepts the limitations of her role as a sister-mother figure to her siblings and becomes more racially conscious.

At the start of the novel, Delphine embraces her responsibilities as her sisters' caregiver. When her father tells her to look out for sisters, she does so without hesitation—bathing them, feeding them, and protecting them from her mother, who refuses to coddle them. Delphine derives her identity from being a responsible older sister, but the longer she stays in Oakland, the less comfortable she feels in this role. However, she refuses to accept her mother's advice about taking on less responsibility because she believes that her sisters will suffer a result.

Delphine's insistence on being a responsible older sister begins to shift when Cecile overrules Delphine’s decision to stop her sisters from attending the People’s Center.