Home and Belonging

Over the course of the novel, the author uses the primary characters’ home on Apple Island as a symbolic representation of home and belonging. The island is particularly important to its inhabitants in the narrative present, as their forebears Benjamin and Patience Honey settled the land after escaping enslavement. In the wake of suffering such dehumanizing atrocities, Apple Island becomes like a Biblical Eden to the Honeys. Indeed, at the end of the opening section detailing Benjamin and Patience’s first years on the island, the narrator says that Benjamin “surveyed his orchard in the cooling air and . . . inhaled the perfume, salted, as everything on the island, and took a bit of the apple he held” (12, Harding’s italics). The images of the trees and the apples harken back to the Garden of Eden from the Genesis story. The island therefore grants the Honeys...