Cheese
Cheese plays an important role in the overall tapestry of the narrative. In fact, the very first chapter is titled "Jesus's Cheese." Cheese is also the subject of one of the most memorable uses of imagery. "This was fresh, rich, heavenly, succulent, soft, creamy, kiss-my-ass, cows-gotta-die-for-this, delightfully salty, moo-ass, good old white folks cheese, cheese to die for, cheese to make you happy, cheese to beat the cheese boss, cheese for the big cheese, cheese to end the world." This highly descriptive passage indicates the extent to which cheese is significant to this story far better than any simple declarative statement ever could.
Nicknames
Nicknames can be an effective form of imagery by creating a resonance that legal names simply don't convey. “After practice on lazy summer afternoons, he’d gather the kids around and tell stories about baseball players long dead, players from the old Negro leagues with names that sounded like brands of candy: Cool Papa Bell, Golly Honey Gibson, Smooth Rube Foster, Bullet Rogan." Baseball players often have colorful nicknames. There is something to these nicknames, however, that almost immediately identifies them as players in the Negro leagues. They could be more easily applied to jazz musicians playing in segregated nightclubs than to baseball players in the segregated Major Leagues.
Sister Gee
This use of imagery to describe Sister Gee is filtered by the narrator through the perspective of another character "She laughed...Potts felt as if he were watching a dark, silent mountain suddenly blink to life, illuminated by a hundred lights from a small, quaint village...appearing out of nowhere, all the lights aglow at once." This is a particularly imaginative use of the technique. To compare a face to something so grand indicates as much about the viewer as the object of the gaze. The language informs the reader about the robust quality of Sister Gee's personality as well as how Potts feels about her.
