Morrison's Medallion, Ohio, is an upside-down world. The once-worthless land that a white man jeeringly gave to a black man is now being metamorphosed into a socially desirable locale for white people. But this inverted order is not merely an ironic setting for the novel; it is an essential theme of the novel, for as Morrison has said, "Evil is as useful as good. Sometimes good looks like evil and evil looks like good." What may seem good initially may prove to be not so good after all, and what may seem evil on the surface may later prove to be of value.
The ways that we perceive the ever-changing presence of good and the ever-changing presence of evil are directly related to our shifting opinions of events in the prologue. For example, although it might seem as though bulldozing the Bottom's dusty shacks and replacing them with a swanky golf course epitomizes civic progress, if we listen to Morrison we realize that this now-desirable land will never again be filled with the quality of vibrant life that it once had under its black citizens' stewardship. Country clubs and golf courses are not characterized by the "shucking, knee-slapping, wet-eyed laughter" that once echoed through these hills when the black community lived here.
