Ada’s clothes
Ada, Jeeter’s wife, has been constantly complaining about her poverty and the lack of food was driving her crazy. But there was one thing she hated in her life even more than poverty and one desire she had been keeping in her heart through her existence. Ada hated her clothes, or, better to say, what had left of it “her stockings had been made by wrapping some of the longer of the black rags around her legs and tying the legs with knots. The coat and shirt she wore had been torn into strips an: shreds by the briars and blackjack pricks in the thicket where she gathered up the dead twigs for firewood, and there never had been new clothes for her.”. Ada dreamed about a beautiful dress to be buried in because she thought it would be the worst thing in her life to die in rags she usually wears. The image provides us with the understanding of the inner world of Ada.
The smell of sedge-smoke
When winter comes, all farmers burn off broom-sedge in their fields and underbrush in the tickers. And every time Jeeter feels this smell, it drives him crazy and he wants to cry. Because after that farmers start plowing their lands. And Jeeter cant do that because he doesn’t have money to buy seeds and guano to fertilize the ground. He is a farmer without farm, he is too poor to grow plants and the smell of sedge-smoke reminds him of it. “When the smell of that new earth turning over behind the plows strikes me, I get all weak and shaky. It’s in my blood—burning broom-sedge and plowing in the ground this time of year.”. The image highlights the poor state of Jeeter’s affairs without any chances to improve them.
Tobacco Road
The image of the tobacco road, where the main characters of the story live, is essential for the understanding of the main idea of the story. This road had been used for the rolling of tobacco casks, large hogsheads in which the leaf had been packed after being cured and seasoned in the clay-chinked barns. But later the road lost it’s importance and now it is nothing more but the way with depressions and hollows and, moreover, there are plenty of other tobacco roads nearby so this one is not needed now. Any one walking cross-country would more than likely find as many as six or eight in a day’s hike. The image shows how the role of the tobacco road changed through the course of time – once it was of highly importance but now its not.
Big family
There were seventeen children Ada born to Jeester; five of them had died in their early childhood and the rest twelve were living elsewhere, so that neither Ada nor Jeeter knew exactly if their children were still alive. “The children who had died were buried in different parts of the farm. The land had been plowed over since their deaths, and as the graves were unmarked, no one would have known where to look for them if he had wanted to find them.” . parents expected that their children earn more money than they do and some of them will give some of it to their old Ma and Pa, but, as it happened, their children were happy to get away from home and they weren’t going to help them out. The image shows a complicated relationship between parents and their children.
