The white man who owned the vast endless fields had scattered the cabins of his Negro sharecroppers far apart, like flyspecks on a whitewashed ceiling.
The black family at the center of the narrative are sharecroppers. Sharecropping was an economic system which developed in the South by necessity in the wake of the emancipation of the slaves. The owner of a large piece of land would extend tenancy to a person—usually black—in exchange for a percentage of the profit earned from growing crops on the land. It was essentially an offshoot of slavery in which all the power remained in the hands of the landowner and the sharecropper remains at the mercy of the owner for his own livelihood. This quote occur quite early in the novel and is a way of conveying both that power in the hands of the landowner and his fear of the power of being outnumbered. It is essential to keep distance between his tenants so that the power of union was blunted. It is a numbers game and no matter how much economic might private ownership endows, inevitably ten or twenty or fifty always outnumbers one.
“I’m afraid, child. Don’t bring it in the cabin. If it’s still here when mornin’ comes, you take it down the road and scold it and run so it won’t foller you no more. If somebody come lookin’, you’d be in awful trouble.”
This quote is the boy imagining what his mother would say rather than a direct quote from his mother actually saying it. This disconnect from reality makes it especially useful for illuminating how the author uses dialect in dialogue to convey the cultural background of the characters. Since the family members are not named, it is important for the author to convey specificity about them in other ways. The lexicon of their conversational vocabulary is one way to do this and it helps to situate them more concretely as living in a specific place. At the same time, it is here used to highlight how this specificity is also useful for the purpose of not naming them in the first place: universalizing their story. Note how when the boy imagines his mother responding to a situation, the words he puts into her mouth maintain the structural cohesion of actual spoken dialogue. He has already internalized the rules of discourse so that they naturally spring forth that way even in his imagination. This is an essential tool related to the book’s themes about cultural division and social stratification.
Years later, walking the earth as a man, it would all sweep back over him, again and again, like an echo on the wind.
The narrator is talking about the boy here. This quote nearly brings the book to a conclusion; only one short paragraph follows. The wistful nostalgia of this quote is belied by the fact that it is looking toward the future. He doesn’t describe how boy will feel at that point in the unseen future when he thinks back to the story the reader has just read. And it is not important, really. What is important is that he will remember and in the time it takes to get there he will have remembered it often and almost certainly will have passed elements of the story along to others, including his own children, perhaps. For that is one of the themes at work here: the events of the past always have resonance well into the future. What is essential is not burying those memories, not whitewashing those truths, not censoring those facts. Even if the events are painful to recall, one should do so in order to evolve and allow history to evolve more truthfully and accurately.
