This story does not begin with the point of view of its eponymous focal character, Cora Lee, but with that of her parents when she is a child. The prologue gives us a warning, through the formless unease of her parents about her obsession with baby dolls, that there will be cause to worry about this girl when she becomes a woman. It also gives us enough of a background to help us understand the nature of her state of mind, if not the cause of it; paradoxically, we are better able to sympathize with Cora Lee through having seen her from an outside point of view.

The first focalization through Cora Lee comes in an abrupt transition from the past to the story's present, with the sound of a neighbor yelling at her to quiet her children down. She turns away from a soap opera, and only then do we see (through her eyes) what a stranger would no doubt notice first about the scene: the "howling and flying bodies that were throwing dingy school books at each other, jumping off of crippled furniture, and swinging on her sagging velveteen draperies" (p.110). The fact that Cora Lee is able to watch television while this is going on tells us the first important fact about her: she has a very high tolerance for certain things, arguably too high for her (or her children's) own good. The noise and messiness and overall chaos simply don't bother her, or at least not enough for her to take action to stop them. It is significant that the scene is described in words that are unlikely to be Cora Lee's own; "crippled furniture," "sagging velveteen draperies," and so forth - the reader can better appreciate this scene through the "camera eye" of the narrator's language, whereas Cora's own words to describe the scene would probably read more like "...they're wild and disgusting and there's nothing you can do" (p. 117).

This overly tolerant behavior extends to her taste in men; she is perfectly satisfied with a succession of "shadows" whose only interest in her is sex. She doesn't care if they lie to her about their names and marital status, feeling that it's simply "too much trouble" to listen to them. She isn't even bothered by the "peculiar ways" of the abusive man who fathered two of her babies, until he goes too far: "But she still carried the scar under her left eye because of a baby's crying..... Babies had to cry sometimes, and so Sammy and Maybelline's father had to go" (p.113). With her other children as with men, the only thing that upsets her enough to get a reaction is a threat to the latest baby: in that first scene, with her children's screaming and fighting seen only as an irritating distraction from the television, it is a ball hitting the baby's head that finally gets her attention.

In a sense, Cora Lee is fundamentally lazy. While she will spend hours taking care of the latest baby and its various impedimentia, any work that isn't directly related to the baby (especially work related to the children) seems to require a monumental effort on her part:

A recurring theme in her thoughts is that she has far too much work to do, and maintaining discipline in her children is that much harder. In her own mind, she is not a bad housekeeper or a bad mother; it's all just too much for her to handle: "How could she do all that - be a hundred places at one time? It was enough just trying to keep this apartment together" (p. 110). And again, later: "And how was she expected to keep on top of them every minute? It was enough just trying to keep the apartment together. She underscored that thought by picking up a handful of discarded clothes and throwing them into a leaning chair" (p.111). (Here we see an example of free indirect discourse: the quote begins in Cora Lee's own mental "voice," her own internal running commentary on her life - but then "She underscored that thought..." turns into the narrator's voice, as Cora Lee is hardly likely to be thinking "I am underscoring this thought," certainly not in those words.)

In this as in other things, Cora is fundamentally a child, feeling that anything she doesn't want to do is too hard. She thinks in terms of excuses - how do "they" expect her to do any better? it isn't her fault. This is highlighted very effectively about halfway through the story:

She has not internalized any sense of right and wrong; she measures her actions entirely by what other people will think, and cannot stand to be embarrassed in front of others. She sees nothing wrong, for instance, with letting her son root through garbage cans in search of sweets, figuring that he'll stop once he gets sick enough. She assumes that the strange look Kiswana is giving her means that she suspects her of lying, and adds mentally (in another example of free indirect discourse): "Sammy was really gonna get it for embarrassing her like this" (115) Her primary motivation for taking her children to the play is primarily a desire not to be have someone think her a bad mother. Even at the play itself, she is thinking in terms of not being embarrassed: "There would be no fidgeting and jumping up - show these people that they were used to things like this" (124).

We can tell by the use of Cora Lee's own words that she also hasn't internalized anything about sex; to her it's still "the thing that feels good in the dark," and has no connotations more serious than that, other than the fact that sometimes it brings the new babies. She has none of the usual adult guilt/sin/dirty complexes about sex, but also no sense of intimate connection to another human being. She doesn't connect to other adults on any level but the most superficial - there is no close friend or loved one in this story, male or female, and no sense of loneliness for one either, in Cora's thoughts. And her connection to her mother seems to be entirely that of a child: "... 'And the last time I let them go to the park somebody gave Sammy a reefer and when my mother found it in his pocket, I caught hell for that.'"

It is precisely because of this fundamental childlike quality that the ending of the story is plausible. Cora Lee is impressionable enough to truly believe that she can change her entire pattern of life just by wanting to, and to have no realistic concept of how difficult such a change is likely to be:

Cora Lee's resolution here has all the forethought and deliberation of a child declaring he will dig a hole to the center of the earth, but it is entirely consistent with the character we have seen described. Childlike in her flaws, she is also childlike in her sudden determination to fix every one of them overnight. And because this is a child's voice rather than an adult's, the reader is meant to be unconvinced that anything will actually change in the morning.