Of course, yes, it would be great to wake up as a princess and have someone there to make her bed every day and build her bedroom fire and cook her meals and whatever else a household staff did for you, but since she wasn’t a princess, she had no idea how to do this. She wasn’t walking into a restaurant; she was walking downstairs in a house and asking people who were used to working for royalty to work for her, a black woman from Oakland who had celebrated her fiftieth birthday almost five years ago.
-- Narrator (Chapter 1)

Importance: Since Vivian is a middle-aged black woman, she worries that the staff of Sycamore Cottage will not want to have to wait on her in addition to all of their other duties. Vivian, however, has misjudged the staff because they go out of their way to make sure Vivian’s stay...