How we cite our quotes: (Chapter.Paragraph)
Quote #1
She fell asleep immediately when first she lay down, but after an hour she woke rigid and frightened from a dream of large hats. (2.1)
Jade has awful memories of being at her mother's funeral. She regrets wearing a giant woman's hat to the funeral, since it made her look silly. Jade is also embarrassed of the fact that she dressed like a white woman at her mother's funeral. It's suggested that this event might have signalled the beginning of Jade's attempts to distance herself from black culture.
Quote #2
As soon as she gave up looking for the center of the fear, she was reminded of another picture that was not a dream. Two months ago, in Paris, the day she went grocery shopping. (2.1)
On top of the bad memories of her mother's funeral, Jade also has a bad memory of watching an African woman in a French grocery store. There was something about the woman that interested Jade, but the woman spat at her. Jade was rattled by this event in a way that still bothers her in the present day of this book.
Quote #3
His claims to decency were human: he had never cheated anybody. Had done the better thing whenever he had a choice and sometimes when he did not. (2.25)
When he looks back on his life, Valerian tends to be pretty pleased with himself. He doesn't think he has ever cheated anyone, although he doesn't count the fact that he's always been neglectful toward his black servants Sydney and Ondine.
Quote #4
The disgust of the aunts at his marriage to a teenager from a family of nobodies dissolved with the almost immediate birth of his son. (2.25)
Valerian has vivid memories of the birth of his son Michael. More specifically, though, he remembers how quickly his aunts got over their objection to his wife when his son was born, because the family was too happy about having an heir to he candy factory fortune to care about Margaret being a child bride anymore.
Quote #5
Alone in the house, peeping into a room, it looked all right, but the minute she turned her back she heard the afterboom, and who could she tell that to? Not the coloreds. She was seventeen and couldn't even give them orders the way she was supposed to. (2.27)
As she sleeps, Margaret remembers being only seventeen years old when she first married the thirty-nine year old Valerian. She remembers being so modest and young that she couldn't even give orders properly to the black servants. Maybe she was precociously aware that ordering around servants was kind of a gross thing to do, or maybe she was just scared. Either way, she felt impotent.
Quote #6
She couldn't figure out why the woman's insulting gesture had derailed her—shaken her out of proportion to incident. Why she had wanted that women to like and respect her. (2.7)
Jade can't tell right away why she is so upset by the African woman who spat in her direction. Deep down, it's connected to her fears about not being "authentically black" enough. She feels like she could have felt more secure if this African woman had approved of her clothing and appearance.
Quote #7
That was over fifty years ago, and still his most vivid dreams were the red rusty Baltimore of 1921. (2.29)
It's been over fifty years since he lived in Baltimore, but Sydney dreams of this city way more than he dreams about any other place. It just goes to show how particular the mind can be in what it chooses to remember.
Quote #8
[Valerian] had married a high school beauty queen he was determined to love in order to prove she was unlovable to this very day. (5.62)
Looking back on his life, Valerian sees that he married Margaret in order to prove how unlovable his ex wife truly was. By showing that he was capable of loving a seventeen-year-old, Valerian essentially tried to spite his ex wife and prove to her that the problem in their marriage was definitely with her, not him.
Quote #9
Drunkenness he could take, had taken, in fact, since he'd always believed it. Anything was better than knowing that a pretty (and pretty nice) sober young woman had loved the bloodying of her own baby. (8.2)
When he looks back on his life, Valerian realizes how much he now wishes that his wife had been an alcoholic. That would have been way more acceptable than the fact that she spent her spare time sticking pins into their baby son Michael.
Quote #10
As they passed Sein de Veilles, Jadine's legs burned with the memory of tar. (10.11)
Jade is traumatized by her experience of sinking up to her waist in a tar pit and feeling as though she was going to die. For months afterward, she can feel the tar burning her skin. On a symbolic level, you could also say that the tar pit signifies the black people in Jade's life, who Jade fears are trying to pull her into a world that she has spent a lifetime trying to avoid.