“Glancing down the interminable Brooklyn street you thought of those joined brownstones as one house reflected through a train of mirrors, with no walls between the houses but only vast rooms yawning endlessly one into the other. Yet, looking close, you saw that under the thick ivy each house had something distinctively its own. […] Yet they all shared the same brown monotony. All seemed doomed by the confusion in their design.”

Marshall introduces one of the primary symbols of the Boyce’s struggle for the American Dream with this quote. The sameness of the designs are symbolic of the oppressiveness of that dream for people like Selina who do not want to conform, and the reference to the foundational problems in the design serves as foreshadowing that the goal of achieving the American Dream will not turn out well for the Boyces.

“The West Indians, especially the Barbadians who had never owned anything perhaps but a few poor acres in a poor land, loved the houses with the same fierce idolatry as they had the land on their obscure islands.”

For the Barbadian immigrants, the houses are symbols of success for which many of them are willing to do anything. The reference to “idolatry” indicates that this pursuit leads them down paths that are ultimately harmful.

“She could never think of the mother alone. It was always the mother and the others, for they were alike—those watchful, wrathful women whose eyes seared and searched and laid bare, whose tongues lashed the world in unremitting distrust. Each morning they took the train to Flatbush and Sheepshead Bay to scrub floors.”

For Selina, Silla represents her connection to Barbadian culture. As a Barbadian mother, Silla is hardworking but also brusque. Her brusqueness is one of the reasons why her relationship with her daughters is so contentious. As a girl, Selina does not stop to consider the relationship between her mother’s work in the white world and her unforgiving attitude toward the world.