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While Morrison describes several African-American experiences of life, what unites all of the characters’ struggles is the need to make their way through entrenched white prejudice. Poor and deprived of schooling, the novel’s black characters have lower expectations of life than their white peers, though they are eager to seize the opportunity to improve their standards of living. For example, Frank feels grateful for the army because it takes him away from Lotus, where “there was no goal other than breathing, nothing to win and, save for somebody else’s quiet death, nothing to survive or worth surviving for” (83). Even when he leaves the army, he is deeply proud of his uniform, dry-cleaning it and preferring it to civilian clothes, because it allows him to pass through the streets without being judged merely as a tall black man, who, in a deeply prejudiced society, is a figure of fear. 

When Frank cannot appear as respectable as he wishes, he prefers to be invisible. For example, on the first Greyhound bus ride he takes on his journey to visit Cee, “Frank dutifully sat in the last seat, trying to shrink his six-foot-three-inch body and holding the sandwich bag close” (19). Imposingly built Frank is crouching almost in a fetal position in at the back of the bus, as is expected of an African American, and thus seeking to deflect attention away from himself. Throughout the novel, there is the sense that Frank’s advancement is synonymous with his being able to pass unnoticed.

As a well-presented, African-American woman, Lily is not viewed as threatening in the same way Frank is, though she notices how racist white people look at her when she aspires to middle-class things like a “lovely” house, and they think that she is getting above herself (73). When she walks down the streets of her dream neighborhood, “the stares she had gotten […] didn’t trouble her, since she knew how neatly dressed she was and how perfect her straightened hair” (73). Lily thinks that because of her neat clothes and straightened hair, she is worthy of that neighborhood, no matter what her white prospective neighbors think. However, when the unalterable fact of her race is an obstacle to her living in her own home, Lily is forced to take a rented apartment in another part of town. The distinction between owning and renting is significant because, while ownership is related to a sense of belonging, renting is transient and reflective of the African American experience of constant migration. Lily knows that renting is not good enough for her and determines that one day she will own something like the first house she saw. 

Unlike Frank and Lily, who have been trying to pass in a white world, the ladies of Lotus exist in a predominantly African-American sphere. They are happy in themselves, and though their poverty and lack of opportunities mean that they have a low literacy level, they enjoy a sense of community and self-confidence that eludes the black city dwellers. When Cee returns, Miss Ethel tells her that she is “free” in Lotus because she can decide who she is (126). The alternative—someone else defining Cee, as Lenore, Prince, and Dr. Beauregard have, each using her for their own purpose—is another form of “slavery” (126). Thus, overall, Morrison shows that the African Americans, like all other people, fare best when they can define themselves and worst when they are defined and therefore owned by other people.