David’s Flight
The opening story titled simply “David” features multiple passages describing David and his bike, including several intense imagery-laden description of his flight on a bike as he tries to escape the mysterious men chasing him. One of the last intimates success as David is pedaling with almost superhuman effort at a speed that begins to put distance between him and his pursuers. And then comes the next description:
“Then out David’s laughing mouth come roar like a lion. Bright red roar like fire, like sunset, tomato-red roaring. David, he stop pedaling but the bike still rolling, rolling straight toward us. The roar spilling out behind the bike now, the red roar spraying from David’s mouth out onto the bike, splashing onto the dirt and leaving dark patches where the dry ground drinking it in.”
Sugar Cane
Imagery is used to convey the backbreaking labor used to harvest sugar cane in the story “Hope.” In addition, the description also highlights the paradox involved in this harvesting that that goes unrealized by most who benefit from it:
“Winston swept his sharpened machete a hair’s width from the ground to har- vest the plant. Once severed from the root, the cane stalk was shaved of leaf, sliced into even pieces, and the roughage discarded for later incineration. Then the whole process started again. In an irony the young man never came to appreciate, the cane forming the finest, sweetest sugar grew from a swamp of cow dung, mud and the burned ash of previously processed crops.”
“Railton Road”
The titular location of this story is efficiently delineated using precise imagery which leads to the ironic observance that notions of black empowerment in a place like this is something that is only possible in places with a larger white population. Here, it is a term that simply means not having to share communal cooking:
“Railton Road was a hive of activity. The squat’s many bedrooms were wall to wall with mattresses and tatty multicolored blankets. The shop in the property’s lower half was busy twenty-four seven with placard-making tables and the day-and- night thunder and thud of an aging printing press. The cauldron-like pot in the informal cooking pit of the small garden was always brimming.”
Gender and Identity
“Gaps in the Hickory” is a story about gender roles, convention, and identity. Carter is a young rebel with a cause living in a time and place almost specially constructed to crush the last lingering evidence of his existence from the memories of all who knew him:
“Carter’s learned to secret things away, find quiet corners where he can play with his sister’s toys, learned to wear hats to hide his hair growin’ jus that half inch longer. He push bracelets high up his arms an hide ’em neath the baggy sleeves of sweaters. Once he even pinch a jar-a sparkly purple nail varnish from the drug- store, tuck it into his sock when his ma was busy with Lucy. He paint his littlest toenail under the covers that night, keep it hidden neath his sock for a week, then scratch off the glittery varnish the night fore gym class.”
