Madeleine Williams is the protagonist in The Sunday Following Mother's Day. The story follows her progression from a six-year-old girl to an adult woman with a child of her own. Madeleine spends the first six years of her life in an apparently normal family situation, living with her older brother Samuel Jr. and her parents, Samuel and Agnes Williams. There is no hint of dysfunction in the family and they appear to be a normal middle-class black family living in an urban center of Washington D.C. When Madeleine is six years old, however, her father murders her mother one night while the children are sleeping. Samuel stabs Agnes repeatedly and then calls his sister, Madeleine's aunt Maddie, and tells her what he has done.