my whole dissertation turns on a "thus"

This episode is linked with matriarchal history: Meridian lies in her sickbed remembering her mother’s narratives of her great-great-grandmother picking berries at night and painting decorations on barns to survive. In this passage, the novel rides upon what Joseph A. Brown calls “the wheel of mystic time” (Brown 317), a paradigm in which subjective experiences of time take primacy and events are narrated in a way Christine Hall describes as “cyclical rather than chronological” (Hall 97). Walker uses time travel to articulate the distortions of memory but also the weaving and bridging together in which healing memory can take place. In Walker’s “mystic time,” as Miss Winter attends to Meridian, these reveries or memories are just as present as if they were happening in the corner of the same room, accompanying Meridian on “the calm plateau in her illness” (130). This episode of parallel histories informing the present illustrates the ways in which Meridian’s political illness lingers in her body until she can see and ask for what she needs. Locked into righteousness, her matriarchs “had not lived in an age of choice” (130), and as Meridian lies in bed, she embodies a generation that desperately reaches for a way to move into her age of choice, begging Miss Winter, as though she is her mother, “Mama, I love you. Let me go.” Miss Winter, “as if Meridian were her own child”, says, “I forgive you” (131). Here, Meridian lets go of her mother with love and understanding of the horror that led her to treat Meridian as she did; and Miss Winter stands in for her mother—a similar but sympathetic figure who is able to push back at her generation’s oppressions and thus forgive Meridian for her misunderstanding.