“It’s as if he made of the negative space around her a frame to foreground some difficult knowledge: the dark past behind her, her face lit toward a future upon which her gaze is fixed.”

Natasha recalls a professional portrait that her mother took not long before her death. She makes sense of a flaw in the photograph, making it a metaphor for her mother moving beyond her painful life with Joel.

“And yet—undeniably—something else is there, elegiac even then: a strange corner of light just behind her head, perhaps the photographer’s mistake, appearing as though a doorway has opened, a passage through which, turning, she might soon depart.” 

Natasha continues to meditate upon the professional portrait her mother took a short while before her murder. The flaw includes a light that appears above Gwen, which the reader could either liken to the “gates of Heaven” or to Gwen’s possible hope, which went unfulfilled, that she was entering a new life. 

“Though my father believed in the idea of living dangerously, the necessity of taking risks, my mother had witnessed the necessity of dissembling, the art of making of one’s face an inscrutable mask before whites who expected of blacks a servile deference.” 

This quote describes the difference between Natasha’s parents’ lives, which were predetermined by race. Rick’s racial privilege and gender afforded him opportunities to take risks, as well as the freedom to live according to his whims. Gwen, on the other hand, learned to anticipate White people’s expectations and to model her behavior accordingly, in order to remain safe and alive in the Deep South.