The sterility and stagnancy of the Copelands's lives are emphasized by pervasive images of flatness and drabness.

Flatness dominates Brownfield's world, beginning with his birth "in the vast cotton flats of Georgia" and continuing through his adulthood when he works in the cotton fields as his father had before him. The hopelessness of the sharecropper's life is underlined by brown and gray imagery. Brownfield was named after the "sort of brownish colored fields" that were the first things Grange saw after his son's birth. Grange thinks of the day on which Margaret killed herself and her newborn son as "that gray day of retribution in sorrow." Grayness also permeates Brownfield's life, from the gray dirt floor of his family's one room shack to the grayness on the palms of his hands. The last child of Brownfield and Mem has a gray appearance like a phantom: "small and still...