Elinor Dammert
The strangely composed red-haired woman rescued from a flooded Perdido hotel in 1919, in truth a creature of the rivers wearing human form. She marries Oscar, wages a decades-long quiet war against his mother, removes the family’s tormentors one by one, steers the Caskeys to oil wealth, and at last lets the returning flood carry her back to the water.
Oscar Caskey
The mild-mannered Caskey who pulls Elinor from the flood and finds in her the courage to defy his mother and marry. He runs the lumber business through boom and Depression, asks Elinor to make sure he dies before she does, and is claimed in old age by a fatal fall when the ghosts of Mary-Love and John Robert come for him.
Mary-Love Caskey
The saga’s first matriarch, who rules her children through money, delay, and possession. She takes Elinor’s firstborn Miriam as the price of Oscar’s independence and raises the girl as her own, feuding with her daughter-in-law for years until illness leaves her dying, powerless, under her rival’s care.
Miriam
Elinor’s elder daughter, surrendered to Mary-Love as a baby and shaped into a proud, withholding heir. She grows into the family’s most formidable businesswoman, commanding the mills and then the oil fortune, marrying Malcolm Strickland on her own terms, and raising Frances’s daughter Lilah exactly as she herself was raised.
Frances
Elinor’s younger daughter, timid on land but heir to her mother’s river nature, which she comes to recognize in the Gulf as a young woman. She marries Billy Bronze and bears twin girls, one human and one aquatic, before abandoning her human existence to live in the river with Nerita while the family reports a drowning.
Sister
Mary-Love’s daughter, who breaks from her mother by proposing to the levee engineer Early Haskew, then uses one of Ivey’s preparations and a crippling fall to escape the retirement he planned for them. She hardens into a demanding invalid, a second Mary-Love, and dies upstairs while Miriam’s wedding reception carries on below.
James Caskey
The gentlest of the Caskeys, who takes Elinor in after the flood and survives a cruel marriage to the alcoholic Genevieve. He pours his devotion into his daughter Grace and into Queenie’s son Danjo, and his death reveals an unexpectedly large estate divided among Grace, Queenie, and Danjo.
Billy Bronze
A shrewd corporal from North Carolina who visits the Caskeys during the war, decides he wants to join a family where the women hold real power, and marries Frances. He becomes the fortune’s financial architect, accepts the truth about the river women without flinching, and stays beside the dying Elinor as Perdido floods.
Queenie Strickland
Genevieve’s sister, who arrives penniless with her children after fleeing her brutal husband Carl and finds protection under James’s roof and through Elinor’s unspoken methods. After years trapped as Sister’s companion, she is killed in a grotesque haunting, found dead with coins weighting her eyes and a key set in her mouth.
Grace
James’s daughter, drawn to Elinor from childhood and uninterested in the conventional future imagined for her. She builds Gavin Pond Farm and a shared life there with Lucille, and the seemingly worthless swampland she acquires turns out to hold the oil that multiplies the Caskey fortune.
Zaddie Sapp
Sister of the cook Ivey, brought into the household as a child, who serves the Caskeys into old age. She dives into the river to retrieve the newborn Frances, brushing against something inhuman in the dark water, and at the very end stays with Billy to keep watch over the dying Elinor as the town drowns.
Early Haskew
The good-natured engineer who comes to Perdido to design its levees and marries Sister. His long absences suit her far better than his presence, and when he plans to come home for good she ends the marriage from a hospital bed; his levee finally gives way, proving Elinor right about the rivers.
Lilah
The fully human twin daughter of Frances and Billy, presented to the world as their only child and raised by Miriam after Frances returns to the river. She flourishes at Barnard, goes on to Columbia Law School, and marries the physicist Michael Woskoboinikow, while Miriam presses her to produce the next Caskey heir.
Nerita
Lilah’s twin, born an aquatic creature and given to the river, where Frances eventually joins her. She carries the predatory instinct of Elinor’s line, and on the night Tommy Lee fires at her, the shot strikes Elinor instead, setting the saga’s ending in motion.