Changes in the name of Love
Marvin Macy, the former husband of Miss Amelia, used to be cruel and brutal man, until he had fallen in love with her. But love reversed his character: “ He reformed himself completely. He was good to his brother and foster mother, and he saved his wages and learned thrift. Moreover, he reached out toward God. No longer did he lie around on the floor of the front porch all day Sunday, singing and playing his guitar; he attended church services and was present at all religious meetings ” . This image illustrates the changes which happened with the character and the reason of it changes – love .
April Evening
The imagery of the “soft quiet evening in April” creates the feeling of safety and peace: “ The sky was the color of a blue swamp iris, the moon clear and bright. The crops that spring promised well and in the past weeks the mill had run a night shift”. This image gives an impression of the boring life in small town, where no huge changes take place and every day is like the previous one: “ It was such a night when it is good to hear from faraway, across the dark fields, the slow song of a Negro on his way to make love. Or when it is pleasant to sit quietly and pick a guitar, or simply to rest alone and think of nothing at all ”.
The Town
Events in the story take place in the small town, which is depicted as “dreary; not much is there except the cotton mill, the two-room houses where the workers live, a few peach trees, a church with two colored windows, and a miserable main street only a hundred yards long ”. There is no positive description of the town, and it seems that there is nothing interesting there and there live people who are bored of lif e. This imagery may be interpreted as a foreshadowing that the events which will held there, won’t have positive consequences, while giving the reader a vivid picture of the place where the story is set.
Town with and without the café
When Miss Amelia and her cousin Lymon opened a café in the town, it brought some vivacity in boring mundane life of town dwellers: “There were tables with cloths and paper napkins, colored streamers from the electric fans, great gatherings on Saturday nights”. People liked to spend time there, having a portion of their liquor an d chatting. But when Marvin Macy , Amelia’s former husband, destroyed it, everything had changed: “There is no good liquor to be bought in the town; the nearest still is eight miles away, and the liquor is such that those who drink it grow warts on their livers the size of goobers, and dream themselves into a dangerous inward world. There is absolutely nothing to do in the town”. The town became dreary again. The change of town is illustrated with this image
