Ashes

Laurie Halse Anderson

Fiction | Novel | Middle Grade | Published in 2016

A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.

Download PDF

Summary

Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Chapters 1-14

Chapters 15-26

Chapters 27-45

Character Analysis

Themes

Symbols & Motifs

Important Quotes

Essay Topics

Tools

Beta

Discussion Questions

Symbols & Motifs

Seeds

Isabel’s collection of seeds appears at several important moments in the story, and echoes the title of the series. Isabel has carried a packet of seeds as long as she’s been on the road, hoping to start her own farm one day. By the time she and Curzon are ready to begin their new life, the seeds are hopelessly muddled, and some are rotting. Curzon is skeptical about the success of any garden grown from such motley beginnings, but Isabel reminds him, “’Tis a fool-headed way to grow a country, too, but that’s what we’re doing” (354).

Seeds, in this story, represent both hope and struggle. As black people in an intensely racist new country built on a foundation of slavery, Isabel, Curzon, Aberdeen, and Ruth must try to figure out how to make their own lives in hostile soil. They can’t yet see what might grow out of this new world, but they must hold out hope that it will be better than they can predict, and that they can have some role in creating the future they hope for. The image of the seeds—long preserved, not yet proven—has in it both the hope of future bounty and the difficulty of doubt, uncertainty, and disappointment. Isabel’s final hard-earned conclusion is that she must plant despite her worries, holding out hope for a better world.

Ruth’s Wound

A wounded foot almost kills Ruth as the children journey through the swamps, but the wound itself is not so much the problem as Ruth’s concealment of the wound. The injury, not especially severe, festers and gets infected as Ruth walks uncomplainingly on it for days. This injury is a clear symbol of the major lesson Isabel must learn over the course of Ashes, and hearkens back to the moment early on when she breaks down crying in Serafina’s arms over Ruth’s rejection of her. Serafina tells her, “You been too strong” (59). It isn’t possible, Ashes suggests, to move forward with a wound: To heal, one must feel pain and injury and open up to others about this experience. When, during Ruth’s recovery, Isabel tells her unconscious sister all of the stories of how she came to find her, she begins to move toward this difficult truth.

The Column of Dust

When Ruth and Isabel are driven out onto the road again when the laundress they work for makes moves to sell them back into slavery, they have a guide: “A great column of red dust rose in the sky to show me the path to safety” (186). This dust cloud, the trail left by the advancing Continental army, is also a powerful Biblical allusion. The image draws on the book of Exodus, in which the wandering Israelites—also fleeing slavery—follow a divine pillar that appears as a cloud in the day and fire in the night.

This image adds a sense of cosmic weight to Ashes’ questions of how the personal and the historical interact. The movement from slavery to freedom, oppression to liberation, is not just a historical moment, or a personal process: It’s an issue at the very roots of what it is to be a human. Isabel’s journey to liberation involves accepting that she’s a small part of a much bigger story, and one that she won’t live to see the end of. The appearance of this cloud of dust foreshadows Isabel’s eventual realization that she needs to think both in terms of the people she loves and the world as a whole to see clearly and feel fully.