Antoinette's relationship with Tia represents several values ​​for her. Their relationship embodies several racial metaphors. Tia is the symbol of the person Antoinette greatly desires to be but has never been able to be. She embodies the black character free from any alienation accepted by her community, unlike Antoinette who is neither black nor white. She struggles to decipher her own identity. The novel opens with a portrait of the Cosways' ruin after emancipation, due to the fact that they once owned black slaves. They call them white cockroaches. “I never looked at a foreign Negro. They hated us. They called us white cockroaches” (Pt1, page 9). However, they find a certain security with certain black people, especially those who are not of Jamaican origin, like Christophine and Tia. Antoinette finds herself not only hating the black community, but also the new English settlers rejecting them due to their long intimacy with blacks and the fact that they are "Creole" and not English calling them "white niggers" . So Tia represents a girl around Antoinette's age, someone she can relate to, who is black and therefore has the privilege of being accepted into society. She was strong unlike Antoinette "the sharp stones didn't hurt her feet, I never saw her cry" (Pt1 Pg9), so she sought strength, comfort and a sense of belonging with her. We learn through her actions that Tia looks at Antoinette for her money and envies her, even though it is clear that the Cosways no longer possess a fortune. When Christophine gave Antoinette some pennies one morning, “they shone like gold in the sun and Tia stared at them.” (Pt1 Pg 9) Her look obviously shows her desire so she bets him to do a somersault in the middle of paper......to be and when I hesitated, she laughed. I heard her say: “You were scared”… I called “Tia!” and I jumped up and woke up. (Pt3 Pg124) Tia easily ordered him around again, paralleling the beginning of the novel, when she tried to do the somersault into the water to impress him. This suggests that throughout her life, her desire to become like Tia was a driving force and that she saw it in herself because that's what she wanted to become. Antoinette and Tia's friendship was based on something they wanted from each other. They were very close, almost like sisters, to the point that Antoinette saw herself in Tia and saw Tia as her driving force. Antoinette longed to be like Tia to escape the cage of abandonment, while Tia also wanted money. There were both altruistic and selfish motivations behind their friendship, but their conflicts are perhaps entirely unavoidable..