Character Analysis
Cassie is a third grader with a big, big, big imagination.
She loves nothing more than to spend a summer evening on the rooftop with her family. There's just one thing her parents don't know: when they're not looking, she's flying around town, superhero-style.
Not literally, of course. She's zooming over George Washington Bridge in her mind's eye. She also makes a stop at the ice cream factory, which just seems practical. You need fuel for flying, of course.
We know that Cassie's flying in her imagination thanks to the way she's depicted in the illustrations. Both she and her brother, Be Be, are flatter and less realistic than the adults—but only when they're on Tar Beach. That's because they're lost in dreamland. Remember, for kids, the boundary between reality and fantasy can be thinner than it is for adults. The flatness is a visual cue helps clue us into their inner lives. (Want more info on her amazing powers of flight? Just soar on over to the Symbols section.)
Back to Life, Back to Reality
But it's not all fun and games. At eight years old, Cassie is of an age where she's beginning to pick up on grownup problems, but she doesn't fully grasp what's going on. She knows something about Daddy's work problems and Mommy's sadness after he leaves. But it's not enough to get her down, partly because she's a happy and hopeful little girl. She's a caring daughter and sister, always thinking about how she can help make the other members of her family happy.
One thing we're going to keep coming back to is the way that Cassie just briefly mentions her father's leaving.
Wait—what?
She mentions he left, almost as an afterthought, and then she immediately moves on. Why does she brush over this huge event in her family's life? One guess is that she doesn't want to focus on Daddy's absence because it's too painful; she zooms past it and focuses on happy thoughts instead. Another guess is that she doesn't really understand what the heck is going on. She knows that Daddy leaving isn't a good thing because Mommy cried for months. Cassie sees her Mommy's sadness, but she doesn't tell us much about her own feelings.
We're not going to lie: there's a real undercurrent of sadness in Cassie's life. Is the way in which she willfully overlooks it a sign that she just can't deal? That's one way to look at it. But at the same time, we can look at her ability to focus on the good times as another sign of her remarkable resilience and hopefulness.
Cassie's a Lightfoot. That means nothing's going to drag her down.