Parchman Symbol Analysis

Parchman is the prison in which Pop, Stag, Richie, Bishop, and Michael are all imprisoned at different points in the novel. When Pop is sent there as a 15-year-old boy, Parchman is a working farm structured as a camp, where inmates are forced to toil in the fields all the day. This highlights the strong sense of continuity between Parchman and slavery. Indeed, this continuity is not unique to Parchman but, as Leonie reflects when Misty mentions wanting to see a “pretty courthouse,” is true of the criminal justice system in general. Slavery may have technically ended, but black people like Pop and Richie are still arbitrarily detained and forced to work in conditions that are almost indistinguishable from those under slavery. The extreme violence and brutality that characterizes life at Parchman shows how black people’s lives are treated as disposable within the highly racist world in which the characters live. Although Michael is not black, his imprisonment in Parchman highlights the pervasiveness of incarceration among poor people in Mississippi, and again emphasizes a vicious cycle of injustice. Poverty, racism, drugs, and prison are a daily reality for all the characters in the novel, and escaping them can seem nearly impossible.