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Symbolism in The Water Dancer - Coggle Diagram

- - - - "and then the three walked up to the house. I did not then know why I found them so forbidding. All I knew was in their presence I felt something more terrible than any Holy Spirit" (80 ch 6)
      - "I noted they were all in black, Hawkins in a black suit, Amy in a black dress and, like Corinne, a veil of mourning, though less ornate. Standing there, Corrine's staff seemed extensions of her deeper mood, ethereal projections of her widow grief" (82 ch 6)
      - "Corinne's speech quavered under itself, such that it sounded like three voices trembling at once, a kind of perverse harmony, flowing out from whatever darkness lurked behind the veil of mourning" (83 ch. 6)
    - - "In the end, we--Thena, Sophia, young Carrie, and myself--were all that was stable at Lockless. Powers of blood bound us." (ch. 30, 346)
- - - - Hiram's brush with death and memories: "With that admission of imminent death, memories of my life descended on me unbidden, and now the same blue light I'd seen on the bridge returned and enveloped me again," (pg. 8, chapter 1)
        
        Peace and freedom: "There was peace in that blue light, more peace than sleep itself, and more than that, there was freedom..." (pg. 8 chapter 1)
        
        Memory: "But when the blue light cleared, I saw not my mother but a wooden gabled ceiling, which i recognized as the ceiling of the cabin I had departed only minutes before" (pg. 13, chapter 2).
  - - - Loss of memory: "So it was natural that I recall, even the may of the Goose, even after the bridge fell away and I stared down my own doom, that this was not the first pilgrimage to the blue door," (pg. 11 chapter 2).
      - Blue door symbolizes opening up new opportunities and a chance to escape from being the tasked
  - - - "And seeing this incredible feat, i knew that the woman patting juba, wreathed in ghostly blue, was my mother" (pg. 4, chapter 1)
- - - - The lockless are bound by a system, in this case one stronger than chains. Its not physical, but a superimposed binding system that figuratively locks the slaves into place.
  - - - "At every gathering there was this dispute about my mother's mother, Santi Bess, and her fate. The myth held that she had executed the largest escape of tasking folk--forty-eight souls--ever recorded in the annals of Elm County. And it was not simply that they escaped but where they'd been said to escape to--Africa. It was said that Santi had simply led them down to the river Goose, walked in, and reemerged on the other side of the sea" (92, ch 6).