A Melancholy Moses
The Biblical Moses is the protagonist of “The Fire and the Cloud.” His only companion is a talking lizard and his state of mind makes him seem more akin to Hamlet than the deliverer of a nation:
“The heart of a man is an ever empty abyss into which the whole world shall fall and be swallowed up.”
Harlem Slang
“Story in Harlem Slang” is a story that fits its title perfectly. The slang which makes up the bulk of the dialogue—which makes up the bulk of the narrative—is an exercise in the creativity of imaginative metaphor:
“I come on the Gang Busters and go off like the March of Time!”
“Just as hot as July ham.”
“You skillets is trying to promote a meal on me.”
Darkness on the Edge of Lenox
In the story “Muttsy” the author engages one of—if not the—most omnipresent metaphor in 20th century fiction: darkness. The favorite figurative image is extended to set a tone and mood which facilitates a portrait of the story’s setting:
“Darkness woke up the land east of Lenox—all that land between the railroad tracks and the river. Ugly by day, night kindly hid some of its sordid homeliness. Yes, nighttime gave it life.”
The Sound of Irony
A good-for-nothing husband in “Sweat” exploits his hard-working wife’s fear of snakes as a way to try to reclaim some of the manhood he’s lost by not being the head of the household. Things turn out bad for the man when the snake in a box is no longer a snake in a box. And through metaphor, the last vestiges of man slip into the realm of beast:
“Outside, Delia heard a cry that might have come from a maddened chimpanzee, a stricken gorilla. All the horror, all the terror, all the rage that a man could possibly express, without a recognizable human sound.”
Mr. Sun
In “The Gilded Six-Bits,” a lone paragraph, separated from non-metaphorical context appears and fuels the imagery of the story with a single-minded focus in figurative personification:
“The sun, the hero of every day, the impersonal old man that beams as brightly on death as on birth, came up every morning and raced across the blue dome and dipped into the sea of fire every day.”
