Old woman
The central figure in the fable at the heart of Toni Morrison's speech is an old, blind African American woman, the child of slaves. In the fable, she lives alone in a house outside the edges of town. She is revered by the people in her rural community, but viewed cynically by the young generation in the cities.
The children
In Morrison's fable, a group of young people come from the cities to prove the old woman a fool. They ask the old woman a single question: Is the bird in their hands alive or dead? Over the course of the fable, they reveal that they do not actually have a bird in their hands, but are there to engage the woman and hear her stories.
