Who's Who
This unmarried bookkeeper arrives in town looking for money but ends up running a business empire instead.
Who is Birdie Calhoun?
$100: Frances’s banker husband who talks big about high society but runs his own family into financial ruin.
Who is Rory?
Birdie just wanted to ask her sister for a small loan, but she somehow ends up running this underground business venture instead.
What is a Dime Dance Club (underground brothel)
This is the exact admission cost, in cents, that gave the club its name and its business model.
What is ten cents (a dime)?
To make it past the first few chapters, you have to know this sweltering story is set in this specific year.
What is 1933?
This resilient 11-year-old orphan has zero time for pity and a sharp wit built for survival.
Who is Meg Lefleur?
This respectable local doctor secretly runs the orphanage’s dark, corrupt medical schemes.
Who is Dr. Pittman?
Miss Garnett thinks she has total control until Frances ruins her with a loud, public reveal of this secret.
What is that Pittman is Meg's father?
This severe 1930s economic crisis is the reason the women are desperate enough to open the club in the first place.
What is the Great Depression?
What is passing as a white woman in segregated 1933 Mississippi?
Meg’s fierce biological mother who is running low on luck but high on rule-breaking schemes.
Who is Charlie?
This woman is the severe and hypocritical chairlady of the orphanage who mistreats Meg.
Who is Miss Garnett (Pittman)?
Standard Depression-era poverty spirals into a dark, horrifying plot involving baby trafficking and this bad science movement.
What is eugenics/forced sterilization?
This is the specific type of uninvited local "guests" the women have to hide their illegal alcohol from every night.
Who are the police/law enforcement?
Birdie risks immense social shame at the local drugstore to personally purchase these items for the brothel's safety.
What are prophylactics (or condoms)?
Who are the couple who adopt Meg?
Who are Tom and Lucille Heidelberg?
Who is Meg's main bully/nemesis at the Orphanage?
Who is Dorella?
When things get way too dangerous in Mississippi, Charlie swoops in and escapes with Meg to this sunny state.
What is California?
To the outside world, the club is a regular dance hall, but the snobby town elites privately look down on it as an underground one of these.
What is a brothel?
These two sharp-tongued prostitutes work at the club and provide much of the book's comedic relief with their total refusal to suffer fools.
Who are Flossy and Ruby?
Who is the banker who becomes Birdie's love interest?
Who is Jack Walsh?
This man has a problem with alcohol and ends up being dying by suicide by drowning in a lake.
Who is Lucille's husband, Tom?
Birdie’s high-society sister who climbs the social ladder while secretly being completely broke.
Who is Frances Tartt?
In Mississippi, many local members of this real-life moral reform organization—led by antagonists like Chairlady Garnett—fought bitterly to uphold Prohibition.
What is the Anti-Vice League?
Kathryn Stockett nearly gave up on finishing this massive novel, but she found her inspiration again while living and writing on this tropical island.
What is Bali?