CHARACTER
Before We Were Yoursby Lisa Wingate

Briny Foss

Briny Foss

Quick Facts

The patriarch of the Foss family, Briny Foss is a charismatic “river rat” who raises his children aboard the shantyboat Arcadia on the Mississippi. First seen through the eyes of his eldest, Rill, he is husband to Queenie and father to Rill, Camellia, Lark, Fern, and Gabion. Handsome and magnetic—dark hair, dark eyes—he casts himself as “king” of the family’s make-believe realm, Kingdom Arcadia.

Who They Are

Briny is the self-invented monarch of a floating paradise. By renaming their boat the Arcadia and spinning a mythic family story, he turns poverty into pageantry and danger into adventure. His identity is entwined with performance—pool hustler, piano man, storyteller—and with protection, as he keeps his family far from the dangers of shore and the prying eyes of institutions. But his magic depends on denial. When catastrophe breaks through, the kingdom’s king has no shield. Briny becomes a tragic emblem of a father’s love that cannot withstand institutional power or his own unmastered grief, sharpening the novel’s meditation on The Enduring Power of Family Bonds by showing how fragile—even breakable—those bonds are when a parent collapses.

Personality & Traits

At his best, Briny is dazzling—funny, musical, fearless, and devoted. At his worst, he is volatile and paralyzed by fear, a man whose temper flares hot and whose courage falters at the exact moments his family needs him most. The same imagination that makes life bearable for his children also tempts him to mistake fantasy for control.

  • Charismatic storyteller: He christens their world “Kingdom Arcadia,” crowns Queenie its queen, and makes river life feel enchanted. His pool hustling and piano playing turn charm into survival.
  • Fiercely family-oriented: He avoids river-camp grifters and shore-side dangers to keep the children safe, choosing isolation over risk.
  • Temperamental: Rill calls his rage “blind-fool mad,” a fury that erupts when he feels cornered—foreshadowing choices made in panic rather than prudence.
  • Emotionally fragile in crisis: During Queenie’s harrowing labor, he freezes—hammering the wall, unable to decide—forcing twelve-year-old Rill to take charge.
  • Self-destructive: After Queenie’s death, he drinks, abandons responsibility, and finally challenges the river itself, courting ruin.
  • Magnetic presence: A photo May keeps captures him lean, confident, almost defiant—stance and gaze telegraphing the bravado he tries to live by.

Character Journey

Briny begins as the beloved architect of a myth: a father who turns a shantyboat into a castle and hard living into an adventure. Queenie’s death detonates that organizing fantasy. Shattered by grief, he is duped into relinquishing the children he swore to protect and spirals into drinking and despair. In the storm’s chaos, he severs the Arcadia’s moorings and dares the river to take him—destroying the home that symbolized his love and leaving Rill and Fern abandoned. Briny’s arc is not growth but collapse: the transformation of a protector into the unwitting instrument of his family’s undoing.

Key Relationships

  • Queenie Foss: Queenie is the center of Briny’s orbit and the heart of his kingdom. His love for her animates his storytelling and softens his edges; her death unravels his self-control, exposing how much his identity depends on her presence.

  • Rill Foss (May Crandall): Briny deputizes Rill as caretaker, charging her to “watch over the babies” when he takes Queenie to the hospital. That plea becomes both blessing and burden—a lifelong mandate that outlives Briny and shapes Rill’s fierce sense of duty and guilt.

  • Camellia Foss: Camellia mirrors Briny’s dark looks and blazing temper. Through her, we see how Briny’s charisma and volatility run in the bloodline, a legacy of fire that is as dangerous as it is alluring.

  • Old Zede: Mentor and ballast, Zede embodies a wiser, steadier version of the river life. He tries to guide Briny through grief, but even his counsel cannot anchor a man who has cut himself loose from hope.

Defining Moments

Briny’s defining scenes reveal how love, fear, and bravado collide—and how, when tested, he cannot hold the line.

  • Queenie’s labor and Briny’s paralysis

    • What happens: As Queenie suffers a complicated labor, Briny pounds the wall, immobilized by terror, while Rill forces action.
    • Why it matters: The “king” cannot command the crisis. Briny’s authority—rooted in story, not steadiness—cracks, shifting responsibility to a child.

  • Signing the surrender papers

    • What happens: At the hospital, he is misled into signing what he believes are medical and burial forms; in truth, they surrender his children to Georgia Tann’s Tennessee Children’s Home Society.
    • Why it matters: Love, clouded by grief and ignorance, becomes the instrument of loss. Briny’s signature literalizes his powerlessness before institutional deceit.

  • The final storm and the Arcadia cut loose

    • What happens: Drunk and raging, he slashes the boat’s moorings, climbs the roof, and dares the river to take him; the Arcadia is destroyed, and he disappears, presumed dead.
    • Why it matters: Briny destroys the home that symbolized his love and sovereignty. In choosing oblivion, he abandons the children to a world he always feared.

  • The making of Kingdom Arcadia

    • What happens: He crowns Queenie, dubs the children princes and princesses, and names the boat a realm.
    • Why it matters: The fantasy both shelters and endangers the family—its beauty binds them, but its illusions leave Briny unprepared for real-world brutality.

Essential Quotes

Don’t your mama look like a princess in a storybook? he asks me sometimes. Queen of Kingdom Arcadia, that’s your mama. That makes you a princess sure enough, don’t it?

This line captures Briny’s gift: he recasts deprivation as royalty and gives his family dignity through story. It also foreshadows his downfall—authority rooted in imagination cannot withstand institutions, death, and grief.

Briny turns to me then, but it’s like he’s begging me, not telling me. “You watch over the babies, Rill. Keep care of everybody, till we get back—Queenie and me.”

A father’s charge becomes an abdication. In begging rather than commanding, Briny passes his role to a child, setting Rill’s lifelong arc of responsibility and guilt while signaling his own impending collapse.

“C’mon, you blaggard!” he hollers, like Captain Ahab in Moby-Dick. “Try ’n’ win! Take me! C’mon!”

Invoking Ahab, Briny challenges a force he cannot master. The bravado is theatrical, but the self-destructiveness is real—the performative king becomes a tragic figure courting annihilation.

The man wears a battered fedora and holds a fishing pole. His face is difficult to make out—dark eyes, dark hair. He’s handsome, and the way he stands with one foot propped on a fallen log, his slim shoulders cocked back, speaks of confidence—defiance almost. It’s as if he’s challenging the photographer to capture him.

This image distills Briny’s essence: defiant, self-styled, and performative. The stance promises control he cannot keep; even in stillness, he’s challenging the world to see him the way he wants to be seen—right up until reality refuses.