Opening Character Dossiers

 

Copyright Glo Lewis 7/31/2023

 

Dear Readers of My Blog, 💙

 

Character Dossiers:

I hope so much that you are all doing well. I have been thinking about you and this blog post for days, yet life kept getting in the way. But here we are now, so let’s begin. Below you will find the dossiers on three of my main characters. If circumstances dictate that I create other main characters, I will develop a dossier for them as well, but the three that I have developed below are my start.

You may wonder about how to create names for characters. My approach is simply to think of someone whom I’ve known in past times, and then to research in Google names in their ethnicity, e.g., Italian names or English names. Alternatively, if your muse directs you and you feel comfortable with that information, go with it, so long as you will not embarrass or defame anyone.

My Three Main Characters Thus Far:

 

Joseph Paul (Joe) Mancini:

It is 1958. Oakland, California.

Joe was born in Manhattan, New York in 1920.

He is of Italian American heritage. He has very dark hair and eyes, and many would describe him as handsome. He is 5’9” tall and slender in build. After high school in Oakland, California, he completed a Bachelor’s degree in business from the University of California at Berkeley, studying on loans from his father’s bakery business, Sweeter Cakes and Pastries.

Joe is 38 and married to Simone, age 36. They have two sons, ages 14 and 12: Michael and Peter, respectively. Michael is in high school, and Peter is in a grade school that goes up to sixth grade, which he is currently in. Both schools are in Oakland, California, where the family lives. Joe and Simone have a good marriage, although he did secretly have a brief affair with a secretary in his office a few years ago. Simone, who is of French ancestry, is a devout Catholic, who attends church regularly with the boys, and sometimes with Joe. She is lovely, immaculately groomed, dresses well, and wears alluring perfumes, but she tends to be a little chubby, something that Joe is not keen on.

Joe’s job: General Manager at Batya Motor Trucking (BMT)— (Batya means Daughter of God in Hebrew), by the way; he’s overseen the drivers, both long-haul and short-range, for five years. He’s generally viewed as a man of fair play by the drivers, but some members of the Teamster’s Union leadership have begun to be an irritation to him, pushing for better working conditions, and a few have started to posture toward him in what he perceives to be an intimidating manner. The International Brotherhood of Teamsters is growing more powerful every year.

Joe grew up in the Bronx, in New York, in the terrifying neighborhood of Hell’s Kitchen, because his father had been an immigrant from Italy, and they were desperately poor. As a child, Joe had played on the streets with boys whose immigrant parents had abandoned them on street corners when they could no longer afford to raise them. Joe’s parents would often try to save meals for these homeless children. He has painful memories of making his way around the alleyways of Manhattan when he was four, with his older brother, Antonio, who is now 40. But while Joe was younger, he nevertheless would not hesitate to come to his brother’s aid, no matter what fight they were in. And to this day, Joe and Antonio remain extremely close. Antonio still lives in New York and has taken over the family bakery and looks after their aging parents. He has never married, but he has an older girlfriend, Sofia, whose husband died, leaving her with four children to raise on her own—two boys, now ages 20 and 22, and two girls, ages 18 and 19. She owns an apartment building, and Antonio often spends the night with her in her apartment in Queens, about 30 minutes away from his house in the Bronx, which is next door to Joe and Antonio’s parents’ house.

 

Henry Samuel Burton:

Henry was born in 1917 in Bienville Parish, Louisiana, which is northeast of New Orleans. He is 41 in 1958. His mother moved with Henry to Alameda, California when Henry was nine, because his father, known as “The Duke,” was a traveling musician who ran out on Henry and his mother, when Henry was eight. Henry and his mother lived for a while with his maternal grandmother, who tried desperately to rehabilitate Henry’s mother, but she drank herself to death within months of their arrival in California. After that, Henry went to live with his late mother’s sister, Dorothy, a bitter, divorced aunt, who had a daughter, Ellen, who was six years old at the time. Aunt Dorothy was quite perturbed at now having to raise her nephew, when she was barely making ends meet raising Ellen by herself in Alameda. Henry was required to obtain a paper route and to contribute those earnings toward his care. He resented having to work at such an immature age, although many boys whom he knew also had paper routes. He never felt loved or understood and took to truancy by the time he was 11. After that, he was in and out of reform school until he turned 18, when the state threw him out. Homeless and wretched, he robbed a man coming out of a movie theater of his watch with the intent to pawn it. He was soon found and arrested, locked up and later released, and so began his long history of criminality. Finally, one day he joined the U.S. Army, but when his extensive criminal record was discovered, he was honorably discharged. At last, he joined the Merchant Marines, who weren’t as concerned with a man’s past as with his work ethic. Nevertheless, he lied about his past to get in. While the ship was docked in New York, he rented a room at the Young Men’s Christian Association (YMCA). He went one day to a dance at the United Service Organization (USO) club for military people. While there, he met the woman who would become his wife, LilyJean. By this time, he was 25, and she was just 18, a hat-check girl there, and still lived at home with her parents in Manhattan.

Henry is the shop steward of Local 70 of the Teamster’s Union. He’s also a short-range driver, who works various shifts. He’s a highly intelligent alcoholic, who always has an entourage of men who want to be close to the power. If there’s a wildcat strike, Henry is the one on the news that night.

Henry and LilyJean have been married for 13 years. Henry has lied to get his job with Batya Motor Trucking (BMT), failing to divulge his long criminal history on his application. In fact, before LilyJean demanded that he hold gainful employment, he was nothing more than a career criminal. But she knew how to embarrass him in front of his friends by saying things to their wives like, “At least your husband can hold a job,” making Henry burn with humiliation and rage. In fact, he spent the first two years of their marriage in jail for robbing a man’s car of his clothes that were hanging within. And when LilyJean had discovered that she was pregnant with their first child, with her new husband in jail, she went crying to her mother, Lucia, who happened to be on very friendly neighborhood terms with the local pharmacist in the Bronx. And he gave Lucia a French pill for her pregnant daughter to abort the child of her jailbird husband. So that’s how that pregnancy ended. But LilyJean had a fury against Henry for leaving her in this predicament and embarrassing her in front of her entire family by being a thug, so she wrote to him while he was in jail and let him know that she had terminated the pregnancy, a thing that was still illegal then. Henry, who held himself with an arrogance, but nevertheless had extremely low self-esteem, borne of his abysmal childhood, raged in his jail cell at the death of his unborn child, tearing the cell apart until he had to be restrained. From that moment, he despised his new wife, and she him.

Henry is 5’10” and has receding strawberry blonde hair, and he is starting to develop a drinker’s belly. He is of English, Irish, and French descent. At various times in his life, he has worked out at gyms, so he has a mostly muscular body, but his skin is pale and freckled. He has a regal, somewhat hooked nose and high cheekbones. His eyes are a gray-blue. Despite his balding head, he is capable of immense charm, and both women and men find him appealing. He reads the newspapers avidly and can converse with a huge vocabulary on any subject, and he is very opinionated. He and LilyJean have two children, both are girls, ages 10 and eight, Teresa and Juliana, who attend Diamond School in Oakland, California.

The importance of his role as the elected shop steward of a pivotal local, (Local 70), and his responsibilities as a working person and a husband and father, have not changed Henry at his core, as within him still lies the ardent criminal who won’t hesitate to commit crimes when he believes the situation calls for them, such as striking acts of revenge.

LilyJean Nera Burton:

LilyJean is 34 in 1958. She is a grocery clerk for Family Stores, Inc. She has just started with them, having worked in a glass plant prior to this employment. She is of Italian descent. Her mother, Lucia, grew up in Pennsylvania. LilyJean’s father, Giovanni Giordano, had emigrated to America when he was 16. Ten years later, he married Lucia. They moved from New York to Oakland, California about nine years ago, where they now own a house with a renter down on the first floor, who helps them to pay the mortgage.

Black hair dye helps LilyJean to sparkle away the gray hair. She pins her tresses up into a French roll with black bobby pins. Her skin is fair because she stays out of the sun. Her lipstick is a deep crimson. She smiles and her dark eyes twinkle, although her life is anything but happy. She wears high heels to catch her bus, clicking on the concrete sidewalks for blocks to and from work, catching and exiting buses. She has three pairs of high heeled shoes in the bedroom closet— a red pair, a black pair, and a gray pair. She keeps low-heeled shoes in her locker at work for the check stand. She is 5’1” tall and trim but with a large buttock. She keeps the house spotless. When the girls are at school, if she finds a toy in their room, she throws it out, as the kids are expected to behave like little adults. Everything neat and orderly so as not to upset a drunken, raging Henry upon his return. The girls’ bedroom looks like a hospital room, except where Juliana has dared to tape her Spelling Bee awards from school onto one wall.

What LilyJean lacks in education and refinement, she more than makes up for with her father’s shrewdness, learned at his knee, and her mother’s grim perseverance. But she carries a stubbornness all her own. She is determined to turn her Henry frog into a prince if it kills the whole family in the process. When Henry comes home with lipstick on his collar, a fight will always ensue, complete with yelling and slamming doors. When Henry swings drunkenly and falls into the steep ivy that is the ground cover of the lower front yard, LilyJean doesn’t hesitate to run for her youngest child, Juliana, to assist her in pleading with him to get on his feet and come into the house.

LilyJean often says to the children, “If you are ever accused of anything, deny, deny, deny,” which Juliana finds, even at age eight, to be a curious thing to teach one’s children. LilyJean is rarely home because she can’t drive and must run for infrequent buses. When she is around, she seems to resent her daughters and will usually require that they leave the house and go to the park or the schoolground to play.

When Henry comes home drunk and violent, smacking the girls around, LilyJean is silent. And where she finds it necessary, she will chime in, “Listen to your father.” Or she will say to the girls in an intensely ugly tone, on an afternoon when they sass her, “You yes-ma’am me to death!” and “I’ll chastise you for that!”

Assignment: For next time, write your opening pages to Chapter One AND think about its outline:

Next time, having begun our first pages in Chapter One, hopefully, we will have a keen sense of where the first chapter will lead, so that we can outline Chapter One of our books. I will hope to have my opening pages written, and my outline of Chapter One by then to share with you as an example. And within that work, I will make observations pursuant to a teaching novel, such as remarking on metaphors, research, names, similes, dialogue, etc.

God Bless, and more to come soon…Glo