59 pages • 1 hour read
Tayari JonesLeaving Atlanta
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2002A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Symbols & Motifs
Lemonade
Octavia’s classmates, Tasha and Rodney, notice that Octavia smells like lemons. Rodney picks up on the scent when she goes to comfort him after his father humiliates him in class by spanking him. The children think that Octavia smells like this because her former second-grade teacher, Mrs. Grier, gives her soap with which to wash before school. This isn’t true, but Octavia allows her classmates to believe whatever they want about her. Octavia’s attitude, coupled with the metaphor of lemons as sour, unpleasant things that can result in something sweet—lemonade—makes this recurring motif symbolic of her ability use her classmates’ rejection as a source of strength. Their ostracism hurts her, particularly the instance in which Rodney emphasizes to Leon Simmons that she is not his girlfriend, but she refuses to allow her classmates’ opinions of her to impact what she knows about herself and her family.
The motif of lemonade correlates with the symbolism of grapes. Mrs. Grier, when lecturing Octavia about why she should accept the opportunity to move to South Carolina, tells the girl about how her own mother used to say that she loved Mrs. Grier like a bunch of grapes. It wasn’t until she was in college that Mrs. Grier tasted grapes for the first time. Both the sweetness of its juice and the bitter seed in the middle helped Mrs. Grier understand, finally, what her mother meant. Though Octavia doesn’t understand the metaphor, Mrs. Grier tries to impress on Octavia something that she’ll not understand until the end of the novel—that a parent’s love will sometimes result in decisions that don’t feel good. Octavia resents her mother for sending her away but still cannot help loving her and knowing that she’ll miss her. Octavia’s experience of childhood has always been bittersweet and culminates in a recognition that this feeling, as well as the necessity of trying to make the best out of undesirable circumstances, will occur throughout her life.
Cardboard Trees
The cardboard tree is a symbol akin to a family tree. Its recurrence bonds the children who endure the terror that grips Atlanta from 1979 to 1981. Jashante sells cardboard, pine-scented car fresheners and gives one to Tasha. Rodney later sees one in the car of the killer who pretends to be a police officer when he lures Rodney into his vehicle. There’s also a mock cardboard apple tree in the hallway at Oglethorpe Elementary School, bearing the names of outstanding students on its fruit. Later in the novel, Octavia notices a cardboard pine tree hanging from the mirror in Mrs. Grier’s Cadillac. The tree connects seemingly disparate young people and events but also suggests the children’s shared heritage, pre-adolescent anxieties, and the confusion of embracing childhood innocence while living in the midst of violent terror.
The fact that these trees are synthetic, made of flimsy material, indicates that the children’s bonds are unfortunately weak, easily destroyed by their parents’ ability to make decisions over their lives, and by the maniacal methods of a killer who routinely kidnaps and kills little black boys.
The little trees, as Tasha and Octavia notice, make everything smell like Christmas. Tasha turns the one that Jashante gives her into a charm—a source of protection against the killer and a reminder of their friendship. The tiny trees are also preferable to the actual Christmas trees in the novel. The giant tree that Octavia sees at the downtown department store, Rich’s, takes on a grotesque ugliness. Its ostentatious beauty—and her sense that the tree isn’t meant for very black children like her—becomes repulsive. When she sees her face reflected back at her in one of the tree’s ornaments, she sees a distorted form. The department store tree lacks the intimacy and sensorial pleasure that Tasha gets from the little pine tree, which feels more like Christmas.
Monica Kaufman
Monica Kaufman is a real person who was the first person of color and the first woman ever to serve as a news anchor in Atlanta. The Baxters, the Greens, and Octavia Fuller have a ritual of watching her newscasts on Channel Two. Tasha and her mother comment on Kaufman’s fashion choices and hairstyles. Kaufman, who embodies two firsts, symbolizes the advances wrought from both the Civil Rights Movement and the Second Wave feminist movement.
Monica reports on the abductions of African-American children in Atlanta. These dark events overshadow Kaufman’s success, partly because there are rumors that the murders are racially motivated. Kaufman, thus, represents both advances within the African-American community and the threat of persistent racial violence that still hovers over it, as it had before the Civil Rights era. She embodies the community’s hope. They also rely on her to report any news about an invisible, but presumably white, force that terrorizes them.
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By Tayari Jones
