Guiding Spirit Snake (Symbol)
The black snake Laye's father believes is "the guiding spirit of [his] race" is a symbol for faith in the supernatural. While Laye's mother instructs him to alert her of any snake that comes near their huts so she can beat it to death, she tells Laye that he must never harm the shiny black snake who routinely slithers into Laye's father's workshop. Laye learns that this particular snake visits his father in dreams and informs him of what challenges will arise each day. Because Laye's father knows in advance what is going to happen in a day, he is a helpful figure in the community, revered by all. When smelting gold, Laye's father pets the coiled snake as part of the ceremonial metal-working process. Possessing supernatural abilities to communicate the future to Laye's father, the snake quivers and vibrates into the hand that strokes him. Laye's father gains confidence by putting his faith in what the snake communicates.
Laye's City Clothes (Symbol)
The school-appropriate outfit Laye wears as a child is a symbol of class difference. When visiting his grandmother in Tindican, Laye becomes self-conscious about the khaki shirt and shorts he wears. His countryside playmates dress only in simple drawstring shorts that allow them to move freely through the fields. Laye has to keep his clothes presentable, so he is careful not to tear them or stain them with dirt and the blood of rodents they trap and kill. Beyond the fact that he cannot exist in the countryside as freely as the children who live there full-time, Laye is marked by these clothes as a city boy who is destined to stay in school and have an occupation far less connected to the land than those of his rural acquaintances.
Daydreaming (Motif)
Throughout the novel, Laye's tendency to daydream arises as a motif. As a child, Laye cannot help but let his mind roam in situations that provoke his imagination, such as when his uncle's talk of a calf with a star shape on its head leads Laye to space out and imagine what it would be like to live among the cattle. Laye's daydreaming also gets him into trouble with authority figures, such as his uncle Lansana, who catches Laye escaping into his own mind while they are busy harvesting rice. These reveries are significant because they establish Laye's origins as an imaginative thinker. While he may worry as a child about what his uncertain future holds for him, Laye does not realize that his habit of getting lost in thought is a precursor to his future as a memoirist and fiction writer.
Crocodile Totem (Symbol)
The totemism Laye describes at the end of Chapter Five is a symbol for his people's traditional spiritual connection to animals. When outlining his mother's supernatural powers, Laye explains how she inherited the crocodile as her totem—i.e. a spiritually significant animal adopted as an emblem. As the possessor of the crocodile totem, Laye's mother freely draws water from the Niger River even when it is flooded and the threat of crocodile attacks is heightened. While others find streams to gather water from, Laye's mother calmly goes to the Niger as usual, knowing the crocodiles will not harm her. From a safe distance, Laye witnesses with his own eyes the lack of fear his mother displays on the flooded river's sandy bank. To emphasize his people's traditional spiritual connection to totem animals, Laye ends the section by commenting that he has a totem as well. However, he has become so disconnected from the traditional ways of his people that he still doesn't know what the totem is.
Circumcision (Symbol)
The ritual circumcision Laye undergoes as a teenager is a symbol for the passage into adulthood. Rather than circumcise penises when children are babies, Laye's culture reserves the procedure until boys are teenagers to symbolize their evolution from children to men. The ritual begins when uncircumcised boys dance before the public for a week in loose-fitting boubous. Next they march together to a place where they form a line and a skilled circumcisionist deftly removes each foreskin. Laye is nervous about the operation, which he suspects will be painful, but part of the ritual requires not showing fear in front of the elder male spectators, any of whom could be a future father-in-law. After a weeks-long convalescence in which the patients live together in a hut and are tended to by men acting as nurses, the boys return to society with a new status, seen by others not as boys but as men. As a man, Laye's parents gift him his own hut close to his mother's.
