Douglass’s reference to black people as the children of Ham wasn’t formerly as peculiar in black texts as it might seem now. In a passage that features other biblical language, like the use of the word “Ethiopian” to characterize any black person, George Schuyler describes a fictional town in Black No More called Happy Hill, Mississippi, in which black people–or “The Sons or Daughters of Ham,” as they are called–are “either hung or shot and then broiled” in order to “lighten the dullness of the place.”