1. At the novel’s start Rufus flashes back to giving his sister a gift while he’s in the Navy. What is the significance of that memory?

He had brought back an Indian shawl for Ida.

He had never seen the beauty of black people before. But, staring at Ida, who stood before the window of the Harlem kitchen, seeing that she was no longer merely his younger sister but a girl who would soon be a woman, she became associated with the colors of the shawl, the colors of the sun, and with a splendor incalculably older than the gray stone of the island on which they had been born.