Rochelle Watkins

Rochelle Watkins is the station beauty whose arrival in the ticket-collection booth changes the balance between Orphia Phillips and Uriah Moseley. In a scene where Orphia tries to reclaim Uriah through desire and what she believes is obeah, Rochelle’s place beside him proves decisive: Uriah announces that he has asked Rochelle to marry him, and Orphia’s struggle abruptly collapses.

Identity and Introduction

Rochelle enters the story as the station beauty who takes over Orphia’s position in the ticket booth after Orphia and Uriah are caught together. A complaint has been lodged, and although both have kept their jobs, Orphia has been confined to the booth, deprived of her former work in the elevator shafts. Rochelle’s replacement of her is therefore more than a change of station assignment: it places Rochelle in the space where Orphia and Uriah’s affair had played out.

When Orphia later comes down the stairs, she finds Rochelle simpering beside Uriah, who is leaning against the booth. Orphia taunts him about Rochelle’s interest in his body. The provocation briefly unsettles the pair, but it also brings the triangle into the open, forcing Uriah to declare where his attachment lies.

Conflict with Orphia

Orphia expects her power over Uriah to work. After Gibreel Farishta has taken her hand, she seems certain that Uriah will follow her, and she advances on the couple with the confidence of someone who believes events are moving according to her design. Rochelle disrupts that expectation. She tells Uriah to make Orphia leave and dismisses Orphia’s obeah as powerless there.

Uriah puts an arm around Rochelle and holds Orphia by both wrists as she struggles. He then announces that he has asked Rochelle to marry him. The revelation ends Orphia’s resistance more completely than his physical restraint: her fight goes out of her, and she sinks to the floor by the tunnel wall while a train pulls in. Rochelle and Uriah hurry back to their posts, leaving Orphia behind.

Relationship with Uriah and Narrative Role

Rochelle’s relationship with Uriah is presented through small, public gestures rather than an account of its beginnings. She stands close to him at the booth; he chooses her when Orphia challenges their intimacy; and, after the engagement announcement, Rochelle blows him a kiss from her own booth. Her promise of home cooking and no surprises gives their future together a domestic, reassuring tone, sharply opposed to Orphia’s volatile pursuit of him.

Rochelle’s role is brief but consequential. She is not merely Orphia’s replacement at work: she becomes the person Uriah openly chooses, and her refusal to credit Orphia’s supernatural claims helps turn the encounter from attempted enchantment into an ordinary, painful rejection. The scene closes with Orphia blaming Gibreel for having disrupted her life, while Rochelle and Uriah return to their stations as an affianced couple.