Honey Grapes
Grapes dipped in honey are described as tasting like happiness. The delicacy resonates with images of open fields and the flight of bumblebees. All these things taken together situate honey grapes as symbols of freedom for escaped slaves.
Nora's Birthmark
Nora is the daughter of the plantation owner. She was born with a strawberry mark—a reddish discoloration—on her face that her mother constantly tries to get her to hide beneath her hair or with powder. Her parents think the birthmark is a sign of physical weakness but ultimately their daughter will rebel against their active role in slavery. The birthmark becomes a complex symbol with aspects associated with feelings of white supremacy, unexpected strength, and acceptance of others.
Octopus
Nora’s birthmark is shaped like an octopus. She initially learns this through the negative association made by her father. When Nora learns more about octopi on her own, she comes to realize it is an intelligent creature, sneaky and capable of hiding in plain sight from its predators. Nora will go on to sneakily assist in the escape of slaves from her father’s plantation. The octopus symbolizes Nora specifically but more generally it is a symbol of all whites in the south who facilitated the freedom of slaves by outwitting those supporting the abominable institution.
Viola
On the opposite end of the spectrum from Nora is her older sister Viola. Nora learns that when her sister was younger, she used to regularly engage with a slave named Rose. Nora is shocked to learn this about Viola because she only knows her sister as she treats Rose now. Viola’s path to adulthood took her from empathy with her father’s slaves to cruel indifference as she learned to blindly accept slavery as being natural. Viola thus symbolizes the generational apathy toward owning human beings that allowed slavery to exist and continue without little challenge in America for almost its first hundred years of existence.
Whipping Marks
Although empathetic toward Rose, Nora does not secretly become an actual abolitionist inside the home of a slave owner until one day when her mother forces her to sit on Rose’s back as the slave is bent over on her hands and knees. The thick cords of scars created by a harsh whipping are viscerally felt by the young girl who immediately jumps off. Those marks of a whipping at the order of her father as punishment for attempting to run away come to symbolize the depths of the inhumanity of the entire system of slavery for the young girl who begins to make her transformation from passivity to activity soon afterward.
