Time and History and Truth
The book opens with a philosophical pondering of the concept of time and history. The opening words suggests there are two parallel timelines to history: that which is actually lived and that which is written. And though running parallel chronologically, they can often diverge down wildly different paths. The narrative then proceeds from this point to suggest by the end that given enough time, the truth that was lived will out and rewrite the “truth” that was written. Or, as the narrator puts it near the end: “…truth is the light. Right or wrong.”
FAMILY!
The title and the last word of the book are the same, except that final word is much more imperative than declarative: “FAMILY!” The narrator is not simply discussing family in the sense of blood relations, however. Her family is an authentic realization of the term “blended family.” As a slave, she has no right to determine the state of her own live, much less than those of her offspring. Her favorite child, Always, is bought by Doak Butler and his rape of her produces a son which she secretly swaps out with his legitimate half-brother. Always has a brother named Son and she names the boy that is thought to be her own, but is in fact the son of Doak’s wife, Soon. Son, Soon and Sue reveal the deeply symbolic and allegorical nature of the tale in which the concept of family bursts through any ineffectual dam to contain it behind the wall of skin pigmentation or—as it is more popularly and wrongfully known—race.
Freedom
Aside from family and the potential for enough time to pass to bring everyone into the human family equally, the central thematic exploration of the novel may be the complexity of freedom. Any story about American slavery is bound to explore the longing for freedom as an end to systemic bondage, of course, but the author carries her story well beyond that starting point to consider freedom from the perspective of not just race, but gender, sexuality, economics, societal expectations and even the ways in which the family dynamic can impact freedom negative as well as positively.
