We are gathered here……. Like cotton to be weighed.
In the story ‘Roselily’ the narrator is having an internal monologue while the preacher reads the vows. Having second thoughts about marrying a man just for financial stability but not love, her mind provides her with a commentary as she is getting married. So, as the preacher says ‘we are gathered here’, she completes it with a thought, ‘like cotton to be weighed’, for the people who come together to form a formidable crowd. This is also a commentary on the Southern cotton trade that employed black people as slaves. This way, she is also comparing her marriage to slavery.
Lying unresisting on his bed like a drowned body washed to shore.
The narrator from ‘Really, Doesn’t Crime Pay?’ compares the submission of her body to her husband for sex to being dead like a drowned body that gets washed to the shore. This comparison paints a picture of a marriage that is dead, where the narrator offers her body as she has nowhere else to go
His eyes hold the panicked calm of the fishes taken out of water, whose bodies but not their eyes beat a frantic manoeuvre over dry land.
In the story, ‘The Child Who Favored’, the father goes to ask his daughter, after beating her mercilessly a night before, if she wrote a love letter to his white employers. He hopes that she would deny, so he wouldn’t have to punish her anymore. Added into the context is the backstory of this man who had incestuous feelings towards his elder sister who fell in love with the same man as his daughter and died later. The violence inflicted has its roots not only in the patriarchal mentality of ownership of one’s womenfolk, but his feelings towards his sister too. The comparison here tells one of his acceptance of his situation.
And the summer was over.
The summer is a metaphor for one’s innocence. Summer with its beauty and warmth in compared t innocence when one can dream and hopes about future. The corpse discovered later in the story with a noose around its neck breaks this picture. Thus, for Myop this was an end of innocence as sh begins to realize the history around her.
He was like a piece of rare and delicate china which was always being saved from breaking and which finally fell.
Mr. Sweets is compared here to a piece of rare and delicate China. The narrator in the story, ‘To Hell With Dying’ paints a picture of Mr. Sweets who had several brushes with death, and would get on death bed just to get up again if the narrator’s family visited them.
