What are the motifs in Really, Doesn't Crime Pay by Alice Walker?

The darkness of marriage is a recurring idea throughout the story. Although the entirety of Roselily takes place during a wedding ceremony, Walker manages to inject darkness into this supposedly happy occasion. Roselily pictures Chicago as a place with black specks falling from the sky. By the end of the story, Roselily feels like there is a trapped rat in her mind scurrying to and fro. In this way, Walker injects the feeling of darkness into an event usually viewed and portrayed as happy. Walker continues to present marriage in a dark way; in Really, Doesn't Crime Pay, Walker portrays the wife, Myrna, as feeling like a bought possession and having the heart of a slave, and in Her Sweet Jerome, the narrator is abused by her husband, while she, in turn, is obsessively jealous. Walker's view of a black marriage is imbued with darkness.