Race and slavery
Many of the stories focus their attention on the dysfunction of slavery and the various ways that racist shaped life in the American South. There are stories about star-crossed lovers across racial boundaries, runaway slaves, and brutal racists who lynch innocent black men in the night. These portraits are not for the weak-stomached, but that is precisely the point. By focusing the readers attentions on the unfortunate truth, a lesson can be learned about evil and racism.
Family
The other dominant imagery is the imagery of marriage, family, and inheritance. Many of these stories feature various relationships among family members, like Uncle Buck in "Was," or like the ancestral dilemma of Lucas Beauchamp in "The Fire and the Hearth," whose story combines family imagery with racial imagery, because he is partially black and is paranoid he will be discovered. Ancestors of the characters appear as characters as if to demonstrate the generational flow of time.
Seasons of life
Through concrete reminders of the seasons, we see that these episodic stories are intentionally seasonal. One season comes and goes, and then the next one, and so on. There is a story about Autumn called, "Dear Autumn," which features a family having a child, thus entering their own Autumn in life (because their life shifts to care-taking a new life and readying their selves for death). We know this because the next story features a "winter" of death in the title story, "Go Down, Moses."
Religion and spirituality
Through a contrast of imageries, we see a gothic portrait of spirituality. One side of the contrast shows Christianity and its various motifs, like the title story's allusion to a sacrificial son, and the title itself, "Go Down, Moses," and then on the other side, we see the primitive mythology handed down through Native American folklore. This transcendental approach to religion appears in "The Old People," and "The Bear," which are both defined by the imagery of Native mythology.
