Raymie Nightingale

Chapter 5 opens with streetwise Beverly taking control of Louisiana’s fainting episode with a characteristic no-nonsense approach, emphasizing the starkly different personalities of the three girls—delicate but optimistic Louisiana, anxious Raymie, and fearless Beverly. These distinct traits are heavily reinforced during the first half of the book, but as the story unfolds and their unlikely friendship develops, each girl’s defining characteristics evolve and mature into complex combinations of traits.

A central motif running though the book is that of a person’s soul, specifically Raymie’s. Raymie physically feels her soul. It is her bellwether of emotion, expanding and shrinking in response to her feelings of worth, acceptance, and joy. Since Raymie is an empathic character, her soul also reflects the emotions that she senses in others. Her soul is also likely a reflection of her state of insecurity and anxiety, which settles down as she matures emotionally throughout the book.

In Chapter 5 Raymie mentions her soul for the first time after Louisiana asks, shortly after waking up from her faint: “Have you ever in your life come to realize the everything, absolutely everything, depends on you?” (17). Raymie feels her soul expand upon hearing someone express exactly how she feels herself. As Raymie stands with her new friends, Louisiana and Beverly, she feels her soul becoming “larger, brighter, more certain” (18). A few moments later, however, on hearing that Louisiana is determined to win the same contest as Raymie, her soul shrinks into “something hard, like a pebble” (21). Raymie still believes that she must win the contest, that everything depends on her. The emotional tenor of the book swings wildly from one moment to the next, reflected in the size and density of Raymie’s soul.

By the end of Chapter 9, DiCamillo has made it clear that all three girls are dealing with issues much larger than the Little Miss contest. As the three girls wait alone to be picked up from Ida Nee’s house, their personalities are fleshed out. Louisiana appears naïve in her assessment of reality. She calls the animal shelter where her cat Archie was taken the “Very Friendly Animal Center,” even though we later learn that it is a kill shelter. She is optimistic about winning the contest to get Archie back and cheerily muses on how much tuna fish she will be able to buy with the winnings. When she describes her parents and their adventures as the Flying Elefantes, it is hard to tell fantasy from reality. Her trademark phrase is a surprised “My goodness,” said when Beverly helps her up and twice when Beverly pronounces that she is going to sabotage the same contest that both Louisiana and Ramie are determined to win.

Louisiana’s grandmother, known only as Granny, makes her first appearance in Chapter 7 with “two hands on the steering wheel” (26), in a beaten-up old station wagon. Granny, tiny and eccentric, refers to a mysterious Marsha Jean who she claims is chasing them as she whisks Louisiana away. Whether Marsha Jean is a real or not is left hanging as the narrative turns to Beverly, who is still waiting with Raymie to be picked up.

In contrast to the whimsical Louisiana, Beverly is streetwise, scrappy, and abrupt. Beverly idolizes her father, illustrated in the way she brags to Raymie about his policing skills. However, the way that Beverly reacts when Raymie shares that her father ran away in the middle of the night implies that Beverly intimately understands the situation. Beverly reacts not with sympathy but with anger and a strangely detailed description of the way people leave at night without saying goodbye. Beverly alludes to the dysfunctional relationship she has with her mother when she explains that her mother forces her to enter every contest despite knowing that Beverly doesn’t want to. The abusive relationship is confirmed when Beverly’s mother arrives to pick her up and physically wrestles with Beverly to get the baton. Watching this interaction, Raymie feels her soul disappear entirely. She empathizes deeply with people around her, reflecting their pain in her soul. On her way home, Raymie thinks about a question her lifesaving coach used to ask: “Are you going to be a problem causer or a problem solver?” (39). This question is answered later in the book as Raymie, through friendship, finds her courage and confidence to become the problem solver she is destined to be.