Slavery
The most important and obvious imagery is the painful remembrance of slavery in American history. The novelist works to create a lucid recreation of slavery as it really occurred. The slaves live lives that are defined by suffering and horror, and their thirst for freedom is worsened by their sense of dread and doom. They want freedom and life, but what they get instead is pain, abuse, domination, rape, assault, and dehumanization. The imagery is worth remembering because it really happened. It is hard to believe humans could be capable of such behavior, but it wasn't even that long ago that the American majority supported slavery.
Family and legacy
The imagery of family becomes a kind of resistance. The mother hopes that a new life could be possible for her children, although she accepts her fate, understanding that perhaps she will never find the restoration that she desires. This raises within her an abstract understanding of family that verges on legacy. How can she establish for herself a legacy that outlives her own mortal coil? She can raise powerful children and pray that a better future befall them.
Duality
The imagery of duality is plain throughout the novel. There is a famous verse in Paul's epistle to the Galatians: "There is in Christ neither Jew nor Greek, neither slave nor free, neither male nor female." Well, in the history of the American South, there certainly are those dualities. Not only are there slaves and freemen, but the slave owners actively work to make life as hellish as possible for the slaves. The prose underscores other dualities as well; light and dark, day and night, male and female. The imagery of duality also applies to time; there are two versions of time depicted, the immediate daily passage of real time, and the timeless, eternal kind of time that Clora hopes to enter upon her death.
Eternal life and redemption
Clora hopes for a kind of life that exists outside the physical reality of this realm. Her desire for a transcendental reality stems from her life of real suffering which makes her chronically wishful that death might bring some kind of redemption. She hopes that at least her children might have better futures than her own so that the mystery of life within her own family might be redeemed on the earth. This constitutes religious imagery for her, and her suicide is paired with a sense of religious martyrdom.
