Feminine Figures
The majority of the romantic and descriptive language within the story is dedicated to feminine figures and imagery. Lorde writes of the color of women's skin and the shapes of their bodies, their hair and their eyes and their lips, the way they dressed and smelled and moved. She glories in and celebrates their uniqueness, finding the erotic in the mundane.
Cooking and Food
Moments of love and family connection are regularly centered around cooking and food. First it is Lorde's mother cooking for the family, then it is Lorde providing for others, and finally Lorde is eating and cooking with the women in her life in a cooperative way. She writes often of the way food looks, smells, tastes, and makes people feel.
The City
Lorde writes of the city, the "smell of the filled Harlem streets during summer, after a brief shower or the spraying drizzling of watering trucks released the rank smell of the pavements back to the sun" (3), of the markets, the children playing, the women sauntering, the shops, the sweltering summer sun, and more. This is where she lives and loves, a place that provides sustenance, traumas, love, death, and growth.
The 1950s
Lorde derides the FBI agents that show up at her door looking for her friends, especially as they represent the larger threat to anyone who is slightly different than the 1950s norm. She writes of how these "white college students were obsessed with security and pensions" and how "there seemed to be a never-ending supply of slightly stupid-looking, slightly menacing, blonde, blue-eyed gumshoes available in 1952" (121). We can picture exactly the sort of milquetoast dolts she is talking about, and how even though they were so anodyne in their appearance they were fundamentally dangerous to people like Lorde and her friends.
