Sister Julia is a nun operating a mission with the Daughters of Charity in East St. Louis. She takes the author around the Villa Griffin homes, where he meets the children. She is calm, steely, plainspoken, yet blunt, and speaks at length about the nearby failing school, the children's health problems, and area violence. She is serene, yet pessimistic.

Safir Ahmed is a reporter for the Post-Dispatch who has written about East St. Louis for years. He details its economic and social isolation and the city’s role as a dumping ground for the surrounding chemical companies. He describes the difference in segregation between the predominately Black East St. Louis and the predominately white St. Louis.

Irl Solomon is a history teacher at East St. Louis High. Other than textbooks, he pays for all the supplementary materials and media his students use. His students, he relates to the author, are candid and lucid about their own diminished expectations and opportunities; a discussion held in class goes as far as to explain how the dumping by chemical plants near where they live is a metaphor for their place in the system at large—the very metaphor Kozol uses to introduce the section.