LaTisha Williams Character Analysis

Cedric Jennings’s one and only friend throughout high school. Like Cedric, LaTisha is an outcast at Ballou, but this is mainly because she is overweight; while Cedric dreams of attending an Ivy League college, she is not interested in leaving Washington, D.C.; She attends the University of the District of Columbia, but drops out after her first year and ends up selling candy on the streets to raise money for a fundamentalist church she has joined. While LaTisha manages to stay away from drugs, violence, and teen pregnancy, she is a lost soul who does not know what to do with her life. At one point, when she and Cedric reconnect during his winter break from Brown, she realizes that she harbors romantic feelings for him, and even imagines herself finding God just so that she can be closer to Cedric. Unfortunately for her, while Cedric cares about LaTisha, he is too intensely focused on his college success to understand what she is going through, and he eventually leaves her behind, like everyone else from his childhood.