Opening Line
The novel opens with a metaphor that hangs like a specter over the title. "Deacon Cuffy Lambkin of Five Ends Baptist Church be a dead man on a cloudy September afternoon in 1969." Lambkin is better known in his community as Sportcoat. On that afternoon, he shot a powerful drug dealer. He becomes a dead man walking as this act has just put a target on his back.
Segregation
Baseball is a huge element of the novel. Since it takes place within the African American milieu, this means memories of segregation. "Negro league players had leg muscles like rocks. They ran the bases so fast they were a blur." The metaphorical language here attests more to the recollection of the past than the literal reality. It is also a commentary on how segregation intended to instill a sense of inferiority often fosters the exact opposite result. In memory, the players in the Negro League take on a mythic status that makes them more than mere mortals.
Cool Rage
A fellow named Elefante has swiftly moved from lightness to darkness as "a familiar seething spread inside him, like a black oil slick sliding into place." This is a metaphorical portrait of rage marked by cool silence rather than fiery anger. The image of a sludgy buildup of slow-moving emotional transformation is made more tangible with the word choice.
Statue of Liberty
The supreme symbol of America as a land of unfettered opportunity is given a makeover that matches the statue's historical transformation from shining like a new penny into looking like a moldy coin. It was now "a gigantic copper reminder that this city was a grinding factory that diced the poor man’s dreams worse than any cotton gin or sugarcane field from the old country." The symbolism of the statue in the harbor shifts from representing the American Dream to symbolizing dashed hopes and crushed spirits. In doing so, it becomes one of the story's most powerful uses of metaphor.
Redemption
Ultimately, this is a novel about redemption. The redemption is centered upon the character of Sportscoat. "He felt like a radio tuning in to a new channel, one that was beginning to fuzz into range, slowly coming in clear, proper." This simile is the essence of redemptive tales. These stories all move toward and become all about this moment of clarity.
