“Echo Tree”
Imagery is everything in this story. Well, not everything—there is also dialogue. Between long sections of short dialogue and short sections of intense imagery, however, that is about it as far as construction of “Echo Tree.” The divergence is marked by the italicizing of the imagery to draw attention to its significance as authorial insertion since the dialogue is stripped bare of even the indicative prose of which character is talking:
“The wind fans up a shape in the dust: around and around and over the hill. Out of the cavity of an uprooted tree, it blows up fingers that ride the wind off the hill down the valley and up toward the sun, a red tongue rolling down a blue-black throat. And the ear of the mountains listens….”
The Ark
Perhaps surprisingly consider the metaphorical nature of the title story as well as much of the other tales, it turns out that the ark is actually quite literal. Admittedly, however, it must be noted that even as a literal vessel, there is much about this particular ark that still manages to occupy the figurative realm:
“If that ark was Noah’s, then he left all the animals on shore because I ain’t see none. I kept lookin around. All I could see was doors and cabins. While we was standin there takin in things, half scared to death, an old man come walkin toward us. He’s dressed in skins and his hair is grey and very woolly. I figured he ain’t never had a haircut all his life.”
The Band
“Will the Circle be Unbroken” focuses on a music combo playing in a club which is understood to be off-limits to whites. The audience is all black, in other words, and that serves to create a frisson between the musicians on stage and the audience sitting in the darkness before them. The mechanism for this kinetic quality of connection are the instruments as demonstrated in this imagery from the beginning of the story:
“The drums took an oblique. Magwa’s hands, like the forked tongue of a dark snake, probed the skins, probed the whole belly of the coming circle. Beginning to close the circle, Haig’s alto arc, rapid piano incisions, Billy’s thin green flute arcs and tangents, Stace’s examinations of his own trumpet discoveries, all fell separately, yet together, into a blanket which Mojohn had begun weaving on bass when the set began.”
“Fon”
This final story in the collection begins with a very short, but enormously significant and powerfully wrought piece of imagery. It is from this dramatic opening that everything which follows relentlessly moves. The power lies partially the imagery being disconnected from contextual establishing information. It could anything—figurative or literal, a sign from God or an act of vandalism. Perhaps it is even all these things at once:
“From the sky. A fragment of black rock about the size of a fist, sailing, sailing….CRAACK! The rear windshield breaks.”
