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Collier develops the imagery and descriptions of the story’s setting to help readers visualize what Lizabeth twice refers to as a cage of poverty. Collier not only uses the setting as the backdrop to the story but also allows it to function symbolically. People encaged or imprisoned have a past, but unless they can escape the cage, they have no hope for the future. As Lizabeth recalls her community, the details she uses to describe it suggest that, no matter what optimistic plans its people might have made in the past, poverty has ground them into lifeless dust and decay.
The dust obscures vision and infiltrates the throat, clinging to everything and stifling activity in the heat. Surely, the narrator says, “there must have been green lawns” and shade trees somewhere, but the dust permeates Lizabeth’s memories as it does the neighborhood. The children’s feet raise the dust in puffs as they run along dirt roads. The dust is one representation of the strangling effect of poverty that the narrator claims, first, that the children do not perceive and, later, that they do indeed perceive but cannot articulate except in the urge to destroy.
Miss Lottie’s house, the center of Lizabeth’s rage, draws focus on the symbolic aspect of the story’s setting. Lizabeth calls it “a monument to decay” and compares it to a house “constructed of cards.” Its once crisp white paint has faded, under the sun’s assault, to a “sullen gray.” This “most ramshackle” of homes in a community smothered in the dust of poverty frightens the children, whose own homes are also mere shacks and shanties.
