Symbol: The Cotton Flower
The cotton flower in "November Cotton Flower" is an important symbol of life and beauty coming from a barren, cruel landscape. This landscape that is cold, filled with dead birds, boll weevil, and no water, is a strange place for the blooming flower. The land is the South, of course, and the flower symbolizes hope. It is beautiful like a woman amid the drudgery and terror of slavery and Jim Crow.
Symbol: Cane
Cane—its stalks, its smell, and the sounds of it rustling in the breeze—is everywhere in the first part of the work. It is a source of labor for blacks and wealth for whites. It is a symbol for the black experience in the South: an experience of pain, violence, dislocation, rape, oppression, despair, and loss. It is also the space where Africans forged a new identity as African American, finding value in their community, their culture, and even, as complicated as it may be, in the land itself. They are rooted to the land, and in Georgia, that land is cane.
Motif: Dusk
It is dusk, or about to be dusk, in almost every piece in the first and third sections of the work. Dusk is an interstitial time: it is a time between day and night, a time of mystery and magic and possibility. This interstitial time is a useful motif because it reminds readers of how these characters are caught between slavery and freedom, black and white, and the North and the South.
Motif: Language and Silence
Language is both a powerful tool and, often, completely useless in preventing the destruction of the black body, mind, and/or identity. In the first part of the text, language is often absent unless within the context of song. Ideas, words, and experience are writ on the body. Silence is powerful. In the North, words are more common. Characters use language to try to navigate their environment, to define themselves and others, and to wield at least a modicum of power.
Symbol: Father John (Kabnis)
Father John is a powerful symbol of the past, of the black experience in the South, and of racial heritage and pride. He is old and venerable, and seems to have adopted deafness and muteness as ways to come to terms with the incomprehensible violence and oppression he has witnessed. Amidst this muteness and deafness, though, he offers a connection, a pathway to the past. He speaks of white folks and the Bible to help Kabnis look beyond his limited intellectual milieu. He embraces Carrie K in a gesture of love and solidarity that indicates one of the few ways to mitigate the horrors of racism and its legacies in the South.
