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Circe is a Black woman living in the town of Danville, Pennsylvania. Along with working as a servant of the white Butler family, who were responsible for Macon Dead I’s murder, Circe was the town midwife, and she helped deliver Pilate and Macon Jr. She also helped the two children escape when their father was killed. As an old woman, Circe still resides at the dilapidated and otherwise uninhabited Butler house, but she has no loyalty to the family. Rather, she sees the family and their legacy as an evil, racist one, and remains at the house only out of the hope that she might live to see its literal destruction. In this sense, Circe’s long life seems to be fueled to some degree by spite—she is enraged by the lifetime of racist horrors committed against her community by white people, particularly the Butler family, and views the slow death of their house as a symbol for the slow but possibly imminent death of white supremacy.
Circe also operates as an entity that is slightly more than human. As Milkman travels further south, his journey becomes increasingly mythical. Circe appears almost as a character out of a folktale – strange, impossibly old, and with directions to a cave in which Milkman hopes to find treasure. Logic dictates that Circe is too old to still be alive, which casts her in a mysterious, mythical light. Her name, which is borrowed from the sorceress that Odysseus meets on his journey in Homer’s The Odyssey, also helps create the sense that Circe has a magical, fabulous quality. Symbolically, she may operate as a stand-in for Milkman’s ancestors, who have been waiting to welcome him back to the homeland of his father and grandfather. Just as Solomon flew away to freedom, so too has Milkman strayed far from his home, and his return to the south is a return to his roots. Circe plays the role of the guide, leading Milkman to the cave where his father’s body was once placed and reconnecting him with memories of his parentage.
