His time with the woman, Ts' the, completes his transformation. They say he is sick and want him to return (p. 228), but really he has found himself. Talking to Ts' the, Tayo says, "The destroyers: they work to see how much can be lost, how much can be forgotten" (p. 229). He recognizes how lost he was in the hospital: "the thick white skin that had enclosed him, silencing the sensations of living, the love as well as the grief; and he had been left with only the hum of the tissues that enclosed him" (p 229). Ts' the agrees, saying the scars thicken and that only destruction arouses anymore. Then later, crying around a fire, she says, "They want to change it. They want it to end here, the way...
The violence of the struggle excites them, and the killing soothes them" (p. 231-32). Her words are a warning. They'll hunt you down, she means, and lock you again in the hospital, "because this is the only ending they understand." They don't understand his identity and can't decide who he is (p. 235). When she sees him off later, she tells him, "Remember everything" (p. 235).
It is in this final remembrance that loss and fear are overcome. Tayo refuses the easy solution of drinking and blaming the whites. He achieves wholeness and unity in a journey out of painful fragmentation caused by loss (his own and his people's).…
