Symbol: Shoes
Shoes traditionally symbolize society and being civilized, and Florens' love of shoes and her soft feet kept her tied to a version of herself that colonial America with its increasingly stringent legal separation of Black and white was trying to erase. She could not be enslaved and also retain vestiges of material comfort; her feet had to match her hands. By the end of the novel the shoes are gone, and Florens is firmly enslaved.
Symbol: The Gates
The gates with their twinned serpents embracing as the entry point to Jacob's grand house symbolizes his moral decline. As the serpent is a symbol of evil and their presence on gates alludes to the Garden Eden, there is a potent sense that Jacob, in trying to build this monument, has indulged too much in materialism and hubris and is inviting divine punishment upon himself.
Symbol: Animal
Jacob objects to the beating of a horse, as "Few things angered [him] more than the brutal handling of domesticated animals" (28). Brutalized and beaten down by humans while in their forced employ, the horse symbolizes all of the enslaved people in the novel. Also, Jacob evinces much more care for this horse than for actual slaves, and the scene becomes one of cruel irony when Jacob soon decides his conscience can handle dealing with slaves as long as they are out of sight and out of mind.
Symbol: Fire
Lina cannot get the image of fire out of her head: "Memories of her village peopled by the dead turned slowly to ash and in their place a single image arose. Fire. How quick. How purposefully it ate what had been built, what had been life" (49). In addition, Florens begins to think she should burn down the house where she wrote her words to the Blacksmith. Fire is an elemental force, symbolizing purification and cleansing; it razes everything to the ground and allows for the possibility of rebirth.
Symbol: Mirror
A mirror symbolizes insight and truth, and can show the viewer not just themselves but also the world around them. Looking into a mirror indicates a desire to see things as they are, not obfuscated by subjectivity. While on her sickbed Rebekka looks into a mirror, something Lina despairs at: "Never seek out your own face even when well, lest the reflection drink your soul" (59). What Rebekka sees is, of course, the truth—a ravaged, sick woman bereft of everyone and everything she loved. Her look into the mirror does result in her losing her soul, though, and after she improves in health she becomes crueler to the women around her.
