Guitar's visions of "little scraps of Sunday dresses" at the chapter's beginning provide the reason for his willingness to help Milkman steal Pilate's sack of gold. More important, however, this phrase emphasizes the fierce racism that remains as a backdrop throughout the novel. This reference is to the September 15, 1963, bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama. A bomb, planted by whites protesting school desegregation, exploded and killed four black schoolgirls — Addie Mae Collins, Denise McNair, Cynthia Wesley, and Carole Robertson — and injured twenty-one people. As the Seven Days' Sunday man, Guitar is expected to avenge the four deaths by killing four little white girls.
Milkman and Guitar's encounter with the white peacock recalls the scene in Chapter 7 in which Macon, upon discovering the sacks of gold nuggets, imagines a life of luxury that "fanned out before him like the tail-spread of a peacock." Noted for its ostentatious and brilliantly colored tail, the peacock symbolizes pride and vanity. Guitar says of it, "Too much tail. All that jewelry weighs it down. Like vanity. Can't nobody fly with all that shit. Wanna fly, you got to give up the shit that weighs you down." Here in Chapter 8, the peacock, although stripped of its colors, maintains its vanity, suggesting that the white peacock is a fitting symbol of American society, which is marked by arrogance and white-male dominance.
The peacock, with its heavy tail that hinders its ability to fly, symbolizes Milkman's inability to fly. Hindered down by his materialistic values, his family's expectations, and his own apathy, Milkman is unable to free himself of "the shit that weighs [him] down." Fearful of his parents' past "threatening to become his present," he acknowledges that he avoids commitment and "strong feelings" but can do nothing to change himself. He even characterizes the plan to steal Pilate's gold as a "Jack and the Beanstalk bid for freedom" — a fairy tale attempt.
