White Lilacs

Fiction | Novel | YA | Published in 1993

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Summary

Background

Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Chapters 1-5

Chapters 6-9

Chapters 10-14

Chapters 15-19

Character Analysis

Themes

Symbols & Motifs

Important Quotes

Essay Topics

Tools

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Discussion Questions

Symbols & Motifs

Rose Lee’s Sketchbook

Content Warning: The novel contains racist language, including racial expletives, and depicts racial violence. Some of that language is replicated in this guide when directly quoting the source text, but the author’s use of racial expletives is obscured.

Rose Lee’s sketchbook is a symbol representing the importance of recording history. Initially, Rose Lee hides her sketchbook and shows it to no one, noting how “crude” her work seemed and feeling “shy” about it (33). She believes that it is something she enjoys doing but that is not as important as the work she does in the garden and Bell house to support her family. However, after seeing the work that Miss Firth does, she becomes encouraged to create drawings just as beautiful—which is supported by Miss Firth’s reassurance that Rose Lee is “very talented” at multiple points in the novel. When Miss Firth leaves, she gives Rose Lee a sketchbook and encourages her to “make a record of Freedomtown” (158). Rose Lee spends the rest of the novel drawing the different areas of Freedom, trying to get the specific details of all the buildings correct, and then recording information about them such as who lives there and what happens to the families. This act conveys the theme of The Importance of Recording History. Miss Firth recognizes that Black history has largely been marginalized, with enslaved people unable to write and white people largely uninterested in recording their history. However, Rose Lee uses her drawing ability to begin the process of remembering Freedomtown, which will be destroyed and then forgotten by everyone but those who live there. When she passes the sketchbook onto Henry, making him promise to “remember,” she both physically and symbolically passes on the written record so that it can be shared with the world outside Freedom.

Lilacs

The titular white lilacs are a symbolic representation of home and community in the novel. In the opening pages, Rose Lee notes how Grandfather Jim “built a low picket fence around it so [no one would] accidentally come too close to his precious white lilac” (2). He has cultivated a beautiful garden amid decades of facing The Impact of Racial Injustice. Not only that, but he also takes immense pride in the garden that he has cultivated for Mrs. Bell, even though Mrs. Bell takes credit for the garden to her friends. For Grandfather Jim, the lilac is a source of pride, as he has been able to grow something beautiful in his troubled community.

After the Black community is forced out of Freedom, Grandfather Jim works tirelessly to keep up his garden. Rose Lee notes how he “was out day after day, and sometimes far into the night” even though he “was getting slow about it, moving stiffly” (231-32). Despite his work, his garden in The Flats never bloomed as well as it did in Freedom—conveying the idea that his home and community were lost after they were forcibly relocated. After Grandfather Jim passes away, Rose Lee states that she “took the white lilac with [her], but it didn’t bloom much, not like it used to” (237). The lilac is representative of the beauty of the home that Grandfather Jim created in Freedom—despite the difficulties he faced—and the inability to recreate that space after being torn from his home.

Additionally, it is important that all of Grandfather Jim’s garden, including the lilac, originated with pieces discarded from the Bell garden. Rose Lee notes how “he had dug up a sucker from the white lilac by Mrs. Bell’s kitchen door and coaxed it to take root in his front yard” (2). This fact is representative of the idea that the Black community in Freedom—and much of the South in the 1920s—lived and died by the hand of the white community. Because of his skill and his passion for gardening, Grandfather Jim was able to create a beautiful flower, and with it a beautiful life, despite the white community’s best efforts to limit him. Thus, at the conclusion of the novel, as Rose Lee grows old and the lilac fails to bloom, it makes her life after being moved from Freedom seem hopeless; however, it also conveys the idea that, now, there is hope that the Black community can achieve freedom and build a new life—one that is not constructed from and reliant on the white community.

The Garden of Eden

The Garden of Eden is a recurring motif in White Lilacs. The Garden of Eden is a reference to the Bible and the creation narrative in the Book of Genesis. In the garden, God places Adam—the first man—in the garden and then creates Eve, the first woman. The garden was seen as a paradise, containing the tree of knowledge as well as the tree of life, which could allow humans to have eternal life. However, after being tempted by the serpent, the two eat the forbidden fruit and are expelled from the Garden of Eden by God. Their expulsion from the garden is often referred to as the Fall, as they went from a state of innocence and eternal peace to life on Earth, with all its struggles and losses.

In the novel, Grandfather Jim refers to his garden in Freedom as the Garden of Eden. This metaphor conveys the idea that the garden, for Grandfather Jim, is a paradise where he can create something beautiful despite the difficult life he has lived. However, after he is expelled from Freedom, he is never able to recreate that same beauty, as he fails to recreate his garden in The Flats. This idea conveys the theme of The Impact of Racial Injustice. Grandfather Jim had his paradise—his Garden of Eden—destroyed by the greed and corruption of the white community in Dillon.

At the conclusion of the novel, Rose Lee returns to Freedom to see what is left of their old home. She sees the “remnants of Grandfather’s former Garden of Eden, the way the first one must have looked when Adam and Even were driven out after the Fall, bleak and deserted” (234). This thought conveys the importance of not only Freedom to Grandfather Jim and the other Black citizens, but also the reverse—the importance of Grandfather Jim to Freedom. He was able to take the remnants of Mrs. Bell’s garden and create something beautiful and meaningful to himself, as the citizens of Freedom built a community for themselves despite the difficulties they faced.