Chains

“Slaves don’t read.”

Robert Finch states a sad reality for enslaved persons during this era. Many states’ laws prohibited enslaved persons from learning to read or write. It was also illegal for anyone to teach them. This allowed slave owners to hold great power over their property. Lack of education kept enslaved persons in the dark and ignorant of any alternative to the life they knew. 

“[A]nd there was lion’s blood on the ground mixed with the dust like the very earth was bleeding […]”

Once Finch reveals his plan to sell the sisters, Isabel is transported in her memory to another time her family was on the auctioneer’s block. Knowing their family would likely be torn apart, her father decided to fight like a lion. He is savagely beaten in front of his family. The author’s use of figurative language invokes pathetic fallacy—the ascription of human emotion to inanimate objects. Though it is her father’s blood in the dust, it is as if the ground is also in pain, bleeding in the face of such dire cruelty.

“We couldn't take Momma’s shells, nor Ruth’s baby doll made of flannel bits and calico, nor the wooden bowl Poppa made for me. Nothing belonged to us.”

Possessions become a prominent symbol in the novel, particularly with Isabel. Every time she is moved to a new home, she loses more of her personal belongings and more of her dignity. By the time she is living with the Locktons during the war, she is left with only a piece of the statue and her mother’s seeds.