Meridian’s internal fight for freedom reflects and mirrors the Civil Rights movement. She has grown up with a burden of guilt for which she is in no way responsible, yet she suffers an inward sickness that is symbolized by her loss of hair and the other external signs of illness. At the time she experiences her release, her hair begins to grow, and when she discards her cap, the soft wool of her newly grown hair frames her thin, resolute face. She reminds Truman of Lazarus, who was raised from the dead, and he realizes that she has raised herself and will return to the world cleansed of sickness.

The new part of her that has grown out of the old is also symbolized by the message on one of the sheets of paper that Meridian has tacked to her wall and that she leaves behind. There is a photograph of a gigantic tree stump with a tiny branch growing out of one side; beside it is a message from Meridian’s best friend at Saxon, Anne-Marion. It says, “Who would be happier than you that The Sojourner did not die?” The Sojourner was the huge magnolia tree in the center of the campus which had been cut down to the ground in the protest riots that followed the Saxon College administration’s rejection of the Wild Child. Meridian’s soul had been hacked to pieces and her inner confidence and sense of herself had been destroyed; the tree’s resurrection and rebirth are emblematic of Meridian’s. When Truman arrives for his last visit with Meridian, she is brought home like a corpse after she has defied an Army tank to protect the rights of children. She describes herself to him as a woman in the process of changing her mind.

Anne-Marion was part of the group of civil rights enthusiasts in New York nearly ten summers earlier who had accused Meridian of being a coward because she would not say that she would kill for the Revolution. She recalls the songs from her memories of attending church with her parents and her mother’s advice not to go against her own heart and realizes that she cannot promise that she will shed blood, so she leaves and returns to live among the people of the South. Anne-Marion stays behind: She becomes a successful poet and writes poems about her two children. She has sent Meridian several of the sheets of paper on her wall. Beside them, Meridian has placed her own poems, in which she says that she wants to put an end to guilt and shame, that she wants to love and forgive, to heal and to re-create herself.

One incident that is particularly significant in her self-healing occurs when another child drowns as a result of the city’s practice of draining the reservoir into a pool where the black children play because they have been refused access to the city swimming pool. The force of the water draining from the reservoir sometimes knocks children off their feet and cause them to drown. Meridian leads the people to the mayor’s office, carrying in her arms the bloated figure of a five-year-old boy who had been stuck in the sewer for two days before he was raked out. She lays the body on a table in front of the mayor, beside his gavel, during a meeting at which he presides. The ditch is finally filled at the end of the novel. Like the bread of the Eucharist, the broken body represents the sacrificial death of a son who has died to become a ransom...