All the way through the story there is a significant theme of death granting approach to life. In the very start of the novel, Lily says "People, who think dying is the worst thing, don't know a thing about living" ((Kidd, 2008))
And so thanks to Lily and the other "Daughters of Mary" characters the Black Madonna is used effectively by Kidd. But author Penny Barham believes that Black Madonnas have more power than "a black version of the Christian Mary" (Barham, 2003, p
Lily is rebelling against the Southern Baptist church because it "reinforces the tyranny of her father, T. Ray…" (Emanuel, 2005, p
Lily asked the Black Madonna for this favor "daily," and she said she "couldn't get over that it seemed to be working" because no one had come to knock on the door and no one had "dragged us off to jail. Mary had made us a curtain of protection" (Kidd, p
As was mentioned earlier in this paper, one of the strengths of Kidd's book is that it ties in with the real history of the South in the Sixties. Laney points out that blocking Blacks from voting wasn't a new form of injustice, as the Supreme Court had declared civil rights laws that Congress passed after the Civil War ended (during Reconstruction) to be "unconstitutional" (Laney, 2003, p