Author Archives: Mosaic Citizen

Polling for Social Class – Roskin

Asking someone about their income and assessing the quality of their neighborhood are objective ways to determine social class, but these methods sometimes produce different results than simply asking people what social class they belong to. Many people who are either poorer or more affluent think of themselves as “middle class” (122).

The Great Gatsby – 1

Miss Baker is described as “a slender, small-breasted girl” and compared to a “young cadet.” This description of her androgynous features characterizes her as a “flapper,” and makes her representative of the novel’s emphasis on modern styles that clash with established, traditional standards, including gender roles.

The Great Gatsby – 2

Tom Buchanan is supposedly reading a book called “The Rise of the Colored Empires,” which is a reference to the real-life book The Rising Tide of Color, by Lothrop Stoddard. Stoddard was a white supremacist and Buchanan’s association with his ideas–in particular, the notion that northern Europeans have contributed everything that makes civilization worthwhile and must guard their dominant position vigilantly–is likely to make Tom unpopular with readers.

The Great Gatsby – 3

Fitzgerald makes reference to the Fourth of July in the same sentence in which a “gray, scrawny Italian child” is described. Tom comments that the neighborhood is “terrible” immediately after the reference to the child. Maybe this kid represents the classes of people he feels like civilization, and the country, needs to be guarded against.

The Great Gatsby – 4

Tom’s mistress, Myrtle Wilson, is described in a manner that contrasts with the descriptions of Jordan Baker and Daisy Buchanan. She’s “faintly stout” and carries her “surplus flesh sensuously.” She’s also described as having “rather wide hips.” She is not a flapper, so she might be symbolic of something more traditional.

The Great Gatsby – 5

Gatsby stands absorbed in his observation of the point where the green light appears at Daisy’s house, even though Daisy is standing at his side. He’s focused on the light that symbolizes her, as he has been for so long, instead of interacting with her while she’s actually present. The green light is losing significance for him now that he and Daisy are interacting, and Fitzgerald writes “His count of enchanted objects had diminished by one.”

The Great Gatsby – 6

Nick concludes that there must be moments during Daisy’s interaction with Gatsby when she falls short of the dream of her that Gatsby’s created, the “colossal vitality of his illusion.” If Daisy is Gatsby’s dream, in a novel about the American Dream, what do her shortcomings say about how that Dream can be unfulfilling?

The Great Gatsby – 7

Fitzgerald describes the “vast, vulgar and meretricious beauty” James Gatz re-creates himself for when assumes the name Jay Gatsby. This concise description is a bleak summary of the American Dream.

The Great Gatsby – 8

When Tom confronts Gatsby about his affair with Daisy, he makes hypocritical reference to “family life and family institutions,” even though he’s guilty of infidelity himself. This reference to traditional institutions symbolizes the challenge to tradition that is at the heart of this modernist novel. Gatsby’s modern dream is to be the upstart who topples tradition and wins the girl of his dreams, despite the fact that he’s not from an old, established family. Furthermore, Tom compares the affair between Gatsby and Daisy to the idea of interracial marriage, another prospect that represents a challenge to tradition and, in Buchanan’s mind, civilization.

The Great Gatsby – 9

As they recover her mangled body, Myrtle Wilson is described as having “tremendous vitality.” This description contrasts with that of the other women, the lithe, androgynous, modern flappers. What does it mean that the woman with the traditional appearance is killed, albeit accidentally, by the modern woman?

The Great Gatsby – 10

Nick notes that Gatsby’s guests guessed at his “corruption” while he waved at them, “concealing his incorruptible dream,” his intensely personal version of the American Dream, his yearning for Daisy.

The Great Gatsby – 11

Nick describes Gatsby as having “paid a high price for living too long with a single dream.” This sounds a lot like the “grotesques” from Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio, men and women who are disfigured by their fixation on things they aren’t able to obtain or accomplish. Fitzgerald uses the word “grotesque” in the same paragraph.

The Great Gatsby – 12

Nick notes that the story’s main characters are from the West and asserts “perhaps we possessed some deficiency in common which made us subtly unadaptable to Eastern life.”

The Sun Also Rises – 1

In the first scene in which Brett Ashley appears, she enters a bar with a group of gay men. She is described as “lovely,” but Jake is angry, and he even says he is inclined “to swing on one, any one” of the men.

 

The Sun Also Rises – 2

Shortly after the scene in which Brett Ashley appears with the gay men, she is described as attractive, even though her clothes and hair are boyish. Jake notes, “her hair was brushed back like a boy’s. She started all that.” These aspects of her personal fashion associate Brett with androgyny.

The Sun Also Rises – 3

The unspecified injury that stops Jake and Brett from being in relationship–to which Jake refers with the words “Besides, what happened to me is supposed to be funny. I never think about it”–has presumably resulted in his impotence. This impotence could be regarded figuratively. Jake and Brett, who symbolize modern culture, are incapable of generating anything new.

 

The Wasteland – 1

“That corpse you planted last year in your garden,
“Has it begun to sprout? Will it bloom this year?
“Or has the sudden frost disturbed its bed?
        These lines from “The Wasteland” refer not only to death and decay, but also, to an inability to generate new things. This is a theme that’s echoed in other works associated with Modernism.

The Sun Also Rises – 4

A black character who is described, in passing, as “the nigger drummer” says “Hahre you” for “How are you?” and “Thaats good.” This deliberate effort on Hemingway’s part to depict the character’s mangling of English is an example of the mnemonic minstrel mask described by Houston Baker (Modernism and the Harlem Renaissance). In other words, even though it’s possible to extract meaning from the way the character’s speech is written, black language is sometimes depicted as mnemonic, nonsense that only has meaning as a representation of the people to which it refers; meaninglessness that represents “blackness.”

The Sun Also Rises – 5

Jake and Bill wait for quite a while for a seat at a restaurant that’s become popular with Americans. As they leave, Jake says “Too many compatriots,” immediately prior to his observation that a neighborhood is being razed to accommodate those “compatriots,” American tourists and expatriates. Jake and others like him are disrupting life in the old world, spurring progress that’s destroying the past.

The Sun Also Rises – 6

Jake sees a cathedral he describes with the words “The first time I ever saw it I thought the facade was ugly, but I liked it now. I went inside.” Does this new interest in the church represent a nostalgic desire for former meaning-making institutions, for the authority and grandeur of old establishments that have become less accessible, with the dawn of modernism? Whether it does or not, Jake has trouble praying once he enters it.

Native Son – 1

Early on in Native Son, Bigger watches a pigeon “strutting to and fro with ruffled feathers, its fat neck bobbing with regal pride.” After watching the bird, Bigger says to his friend Gus, “Now, if only I could do that.” This scene can be compared to an idea from Beloved, in which Paul D has been dehumanized to the point that he feels like a rooster named Mister has more dignity than he does.

Native Son – 2

Bigger hates Gus, who is holding out on Bigger’s plan to commit a robbery, because Gus’s fear reflects his own. He fears Gus because if Gus agrees to commit the robbery, Bigger “would be compelled to go through with” it.

Native Son – 3

Bigger thinks to himself “Poor white people are stupid,” because they haven’t prospered, even though they have the social advantage of being white. His mother has given him the impression that wealthy white people like black people better than they like poor white people.

Native Son – 4

After Bigger picks a fight with his running mates, so he can ruin the plan he’d initiated to rob a white man, he’s unconsciously aware of the fact that he feared the prospect of committing the robbery. But he can’t acknowledge this fear. Wright writes, “his courage to live depended upon how successfully his fear was hidden from his consciousness.”

Native Son – 5

Mrs. Dalton, the woman who owns the house where Bigger works, is blind and ethereal and dressed in white clothing. Her appearance operates metaphorically, suggesting the she and other white people are blind to the individuality of Bigger and other black people. For instance, she is quite interested in helping black people, but she wants to help them the way she thinks they need to be helped. After she talks to Bigger about going to school, Bigger “felt that Mrs. Dalton wanted him to do the things she felt that he should have wanted to do.”

Native Son – 6

When he’s in his apartment with his family, after visiting the Dalton’s home, Wright writes about Bigger, “He hated this room and all the people in it, including himself.” This may help to explain why he hated Gus, whose fear reminded him of himself. Bigger also thinks to himself that he and his family might be forced to live this way because they’d never “done anything, right or wrong, that mattered much.” Conservatives might agree with this opinion. Liberals might believe the inverse of Bigger’s thought, that his family had never done anything that mattered because they lived in stultifying conditions.

Native Son – 7

Double consciousness is evident in Bigger’s thought that “He was black and he had been alone in a room where a white girl had been killed; therefore he had killed her. That was what everybody would say anyhow, no matter what he said.”

Native Son – 8

Bigger thinks because he is black, Mrs. Dalton would not have been suspected of being in her daughter’s bedroom. He believes he isn’t factored into Mrs. Dalton’s thinking in that kind of social situation, and this makes her and other white people figuratively blind, in the same way that Mrs. Dalton his literally blind.

Native Son – 10

“To Bigger and his kind white people were not really people; they were a sort of great natural force, like a stormy sky looming overhead…” This can be compared to the Kantian notion of sublimity, and furthermore, to the idea that people delude themselves into believing that they are sublime by brutalizing other people.

Native Son – 11

Bigger likes hearing about brutal dictators or perpetrators of genocide because he believes this brutality offers “possible avenues of escape” from the “tight morass of fear and shame that sapped at the base of his life.” Maybe this “escape” is sought by others who try to make themselves sublime by abusing people.

Native Son – 12

Bigger feels secure in the fact that Mrs. Dalton won’t ask him certain questions about her daughter because “She would be ashamed to let him think that something was so wrong in her family that she had to ask him, a black servant, about it.” This maintenance of distance between people that is based on race and class keeps Bigger from being suspected of his crime. It keeps him Invisible.

Native Son – 13

The word “invisible” comes up often as Bigger thinks about what he’s done. Bigger reflects on the fact that by killing Mary, “he had shed an invisible burden he had long carried” and that the act had made him realize that “his hands held weapons that were invisible.” Of his girlfriend, Bigger says “Bessie, too, was very blind” and he has a similar impression of his family, becoming emboldened when he sees “how blind they were.” Other people’s “blindness” makes him invisible.

Native Son – 14

Bigger is proud of the agency he feels behind his invisibility. He boasts to his girlfriend, Bessie, that people won’t suspect him of his crime, saying “They won’t think we did [it]. They don’t think we got guts enough to do it. They think niggers is too scared…”

 

Native Son – 15

Bigger feels something akin to Kant’s sublimity when he makes his girlfriend, Bessie, worried. Wright writes “He was enjoying her agony, seeing and feeling the worth of himself in her bewildered expression.”

Native Son – 17

In what might be regarded as a reference to DuBois’s symbol of The Veil, Bigger is separated from the white man who he’s tried to frame for his crime as “huge wet flakes of snow floated down slowly, forming a delicate screen between them.”

Native Son – 18

As Bigger hears Mrs. Dalton’s grief over the disappearance of her daughter, he feels safe because he knows he’s “invisible” to her, but he also “felt that he was living upon a high pinnacle where bracing winds whipped about him.” This can be compared to Kant’s notion of the sublime.

The Fire Next Time – 1

Baldwin says his father was “defeated long before he died because, at the bottom of his heart, he really believed what white people thought about him.” Is it double consciousness if you believe what other people think about you, or only if you know what they think but have a separate, doubled, since of self?

The Fire Next Time – 2

Baldwin suggests that he doesn’t just take issue with the fact that white people have committed the crimes they’ve committed against black people, but that they insist on a certain form of innocence, in spite of their crimes. “But it is not permissible that the authors of devastation should also be innocent.It is the innocence which constitutes the crime.”

Native Son – 3

Baldwin assures his nephew that America is his country, the black man’s country, asserting that “we can make America what America must become.” How do we relate this point to Langston Hughes’s idea that we should “Let America be America Again,” or Trump’s idea that he could “Make America Great Again”?

The Sun Also Rises – 7

Bill says, “You’re an expatriate. You’ve lost touch with the soil. You get precious. Fake European standards have ruined you.” This commentary is interesting not just as it applies to Jake, but also, as a description of the entire generation Hemingway is describing.

The Sun Also Rises – 8

Montoya admires the bullfighters who have “aficion” or passion for the sport, and they all stay at his hotel. He differentiates them from the mediocre or “commercial” bullfighters. The aficionados are incredulous about the idea that an American can have aficion, but they always appreciate Jake after he proves he is passionate by passing what he describes as “a sort of oral spiritual examination.”

 

The Sun Also Rises – 9

As Jake reflects on the behavior of his friends, he thinks “That was morality; things that made you disgusted afterward. No, that must be immorality. That was a large statement.”

The Sun Also Rises – 10

When Jake sees the young bullfighter, Pedro Romero, he thinks, “He was the best-looking boy I have ever seen.” This description could make Romero a representative of the natural world that is being threatened by the encroachment of Jake and other American expatriates. Romero represents something from the Old World that is beautiful, strong and natural, but Jake and his friends seem to represent something that is overly-civilized and decadent, in keeping with Bill’s description of expatriates.

The Sun Also Rises – 11

As he talks to Brett, Romero indicates that there is something disgraceful about the fact that he speaks English. He says, “It would be very bad, a torero who speaks English.” This reference to public perception about English corresponds with the idea that American culture, or the culture of other English-speakers, clashes with Spanish tradition. Romero goes on to indicate that Spanish people don’t like English “yet,” and he suggests that for the time being, bullfighters are expected to be more traditional.

The Sun Also Rises – 12

Pedro Romero presents the ear of a bull to Brett Ashley in front of the crowd, after he kills it, but her lack of regard for this totem seems apparent when she leaves the ear “shoved far back in the drawer of the bed-table that stood beside her bed in the Hotel Montoya, in Pamplona.” This could represent her lack of regard for tradition; her indifference to the customs that are important to Romero.

The Sun Also Rises – 13

After their affair has ended, Brett indicates that Romero was ashamed of her because of her style, saying “He wanted me to grow my hair out. Me, with long hair. I’d look so like hell.” Apparently, Romero feels like Brett isn’t sufficiently feminine because she has a short haircut. He symbolizes the traditional male and her modern style defies traditional gender roles.

Of Mice and Men – 1

The first description of Lennie emphasizes his animal-like characteristics. He is described as having “sloping shoulders” and he “walked heavily, dragging his feet a little, the way a bear drags his paws.” When he stops to drink from a lake, Steinbeck writes that he “flung himself down and drank from the surface of the green pool…snorting into the water like a horse.” In this same scene, Lennie’s hand is described as a “paw.”

Of Mice and Men – 2

When Lennie tries to keep a mouse hidden in his pocket, away from George, Steinbeck compares him to a dog, writing, “Slowly, like a terrier who doesn’t want to bring a ball to his master, Lennie approached, drew back, approached again.”

Of Mice and Men – 3

George loses his temper with Lennie and reflects aloud on how different his life would be if he didn’t feel responsible for him, saying “God a’mighty, if I was alone I could live so easy.” As he elaborates on this thought, what he expresses seems to typify the determinism that is characteristic of naturalist literature, or the idea that forces outside of a person’s power control their life.

Of Mice and Men – 4

After he loses his temper at Lennie, the solution George imagines is one that dehumanizes his friend. He says, “I wisht I could put you in a cage with about a million mice an’ let you have fun.”

Of Mice and Men – 5

When George is trying to get Lennie hired at a new work-site, he brags about his physical capabilities, saying he’s “Strong as a bull.” But the boss is suspicious because Lennie doesn’t speak for himself, and says “Then why don’t you let him answer? What are you trying to put over?” The fact that George thinks and talks for Lennie at the same time that he emphasizes Lennie’s physical capabilities makes the two of them a good example of the body/mind dichotomy.

Of Mice and Men – 7

After his elderly dog is killed, an old man named Candy says “When they can me here I wisht somebody’d shoot me.” This lament accompanies Candy’s request that Lennie and George take him along to the ranch that they imagine they’ll own one day. He buys in to their dream that they’ll find something more than the mundane routine that typifies their lives.

Of Mice and Men – 8

The black “stable buck,” Crooks, threatens Lennie’s sense of security by asking cruel hypothetical questions. After asking Lennie what he’ll do if George abandons him, Crooks answers the question for himself, saying, “Want me ta tell ya what’ll happen? They’ll take ya to the booby hatch. They’ll tie ya up with a collar, like a dog.” This point reinforces the animal-like way in which Lennie is characterized throughout the novel. But the fact that Crooks himself is referred to as a “stable buck” is somewhat dehumanizing as well, so one interpretation of this scene might be that Crooks abuses Lennie because misery loves company.

Of Mice and Men – 9

Crooks, a black character, disparages Lennie and George’s dream of owning land and compares their dream to ideas about heaven. He says, “I seen hunderds [sic] of men come by on the road an’ on the ranches, with their bindles on their back an’ that same damn thing in their heads…Nobody never gets to heaven, and nobody gets no land.” If Crooks’s disillusionment can be associated with modernism, does his perspective support Toni Morrison’s idea that “Black people were the first modernists,” the first to be disillusioned as a result of their experience in America?

Of Mice and Men – 10

When Crooks asks Curley’s wife to leave his room, she checks him by asking, “You know what I could do?” Crooks backs down but she continues, saying “Well, you keep your place then, Nigger. I could get you strung up on a tree so easy it ain’t even funny.”

Of Mice and Men – 11

When Lennie accidentally kills Curley’s wife, Candy says, “You don’t know that Curley. Curley gon’ta wanta get ‘im lynched.” This reference to lynching creates an association between dehumanized Lennie, who’s often described as if he’s an animal, and black people who were dehumanized, described as if they are animals and lynched.

Of Mice and Men – 12

The last description of Lennie is unmistakably animalistic. Steinbeck writes, “Lennie came quietly to the pool’s edge. He knelt down and drank, barely touching his lips to the water,” and when a bird makes a noise, “his head jerked up and he strained toward the sound with eyes and ears until he saw the bird, and then he dropped his head and drank again.”

To the Lighthouse – 1

Mr. Ramsay is described as brutally honest, in light of the “uncompromising” nature of reality and “lean as a knife.” James, the Ramsays’ young son, who appears to be fully in the grips of his Oedipal complex, believes his mother is “ten thousand times better in every way” than his father and he fantasizes about killing him.

To the Lighthouse – 2

Mrs. Ramsay feels protective towards men because of the boyish reverence “something trustful, childlike” they offer her and other women. In reflection, she contrasts this with what she thinks her daughters feel, the “infidel ideas which they had brewed for themselves of a life different from hers; in Paris, perhaps; a wilder life; not always taking care of some man or other.” This association between Paris, the mecca for Western expatriates, and the rejection of traditional gender roles goes to the very heart of modernism.

To the Lighthouse – 3

A young, overly-serious man named Mr. Tansley longs for Mrs. Ramsay’s recognition. Woolf writes, “He would like her to see him, gowned and hooded, walking in a procession.” This desire for recognition seems comparable to James’s devotion to his mother. Mrs. Ramsay is literally a mother and the archetypal mother figure.

To the Lighthouse – 4

William Bankes remembers walking along with Mr. Ramsay one day when they happened upon a hen and her chicks. Seeing how this scene affected Ramsay, who said “Pretty–pretty” as he looked at the birds, Bankes associates this image with Mr. Ramsay’s decision to settle into the “clucking domesticities” of life with Mrs. Ramsay and their eight children.

To the Lighthouse – 5

Seeing that Mr. Ramsay is upset, Mrs. Ramsay won’t interrupt him but “She stroked James’s head; she transferred to him what she felt for her husband.” This perhaps unintentional reference to transference can be associated with Freud.

To the Lighthouse – 5

Freud’s family drama is on full display between James and his mother and father. Woolf writes of Mr. Ramsay, “But his son hated him. He hated him for coming up to them, for stopping and looking down on them; he hated him for interrupting them” and by ignoring Mr. Ramsay, James “hoped to recall his mother’s attention.”

To the Lighthouse – 6

When her daughter interrupts their reading, Mrs. Ramsay is somewhat annoyed. Woolf writes, “Mrs. Ramsay went on reading, relieved, for she and James shared the same tastes and were comfortable together.” This description recalls the Lacanian idea of the young child not being fully differentiated from his or her mother. The idea that this sense of unity allows the child to experience an imaginary sense of fulfillment that is impossible later is echoed by Mrs. Ramsay’s thought, in a subsequent scene, that James “will never be so happy again.” This scene becomes even more resonant with Lacan’s idea when Mrs. Ramsay remembers that her husband was angry when he heard her say this. Like the archetypal Lacanian father, Mr. Ramsay is responsible for disrupting the contented sense of unity between the mother and her child, so that the child can develop his ego and become independent.

To the Lighthouse – 7

Mrs. Ramsay’s feelings about God can be associated with a modernist lack of faith. “How could any Lord have made this world? she asked. With her mind she had always seized the fact that there is no reason, order, justice: but suffering, death, the poor.”

To the Lighthouse – 8

Mr. and Mrs. Ramsay alternate between their individual identities and their symbolic, archetypal significance. For instance, in one passage, Woolf writes, “And suddenly the meaning which, for no reason at all…descends on people, making them symbolical, making them representative, came upon them, and made them…the symbols of marriage, husband and wife.”

To the Lighthouse – 9

Nature is described as if it is unconcerned with humanity, as if there is nothing in it for people to appeal to, which seems consistent with the modern worldview. As Mrs. Ramsay puts her youngest children to bed, Woolf writes “she got up, and pulled the window down another inch or two, and heard the wind, and got a breath of the perfectly indifferent chill night air…” Nature’s apparent indifference can be compared to humanity’s philosophical disdain for itself, reflected in Mr. Bankes’s thoughts: “Why, one asked oneself, does one take all these pains for the human race to go on? Is it so very desirable? Are we attractive as a species?”

Their Eyes Were Watching God: 1

On the first page of the text, Hurston writes, “Mules and other brutes had occupied their skins,” as a description of the people who’ve been forced to labor all day. This description can be related to a characterization of black women as “de mule uh de world” that is made later by the main character’s grandmother.

Their Eyes Were Watching God: 5

After seeing her kiss a local boy, Janie’s grandmother contributes to the tree imagery that has become associated with her granddaughter by telling her “Ah wanted yuh to school out and pick from a higher bush and a sweeter berry.”

Their Eyes Were Watching God: 6

Janie’s grandmother offers a distillation of gender and race relations by telling Janie white men rule the world, but they’ve passed their burdens over to black men. Black men, in turn, did the same thing to people over whom they had power, black women. Consequently, black women bear the world’s burdens. As Janie’s grandmother puts it, “De nigger woman is de mule uh de world.”

Their Eyes Were Watching God: 8

After she marries a man she doesn’t love, who her grandmother thinks is suitable, Janie’s first impression of his home is that it looks “like a stump in the middle of the woods where nobody had ever been.” This characterization can be contrasted with the description of a blossoming tree that Janie imagined her love life would be. In particular, after she imagines “the ecstatic shiver of the tree from root to tiniest branch,” she thinks “So this is a marriage!” Later, she cries about her loveless relationship and tells her grandmother, “Ah wants things sweet wid mah marriage lak when you sit under a pear tree and think.”

Their Eyes Were Watching God: 10

Janie leaves Logan Killicks to marry a self-important man named Joe Starks, who becomes mayor of the small town they move to. During the ceremony for the start of his term as mayor, the townspeople ask to hear from his wife, but he says “Thank yuh fuh yo’ compliments, but mah wife don’t know nothin’ ’bout no speech-makin.'” Even though Janie “had never thought of making a speech, and didn’t know if she cared to make one at all,” this incident still “took the bloom off of things” between her and Joe. This scene can be contrasted with her grandmother’s wish for a pulpit, from which it would be possible for her to “preach a great sermon.”

Their Eyes Were Watching God: 11

Janie’s husband Joe has a god-complex. He uses the phrase “I god” frequently, in the same why that other people might say “my god.” He also tells Janie “Ah told you in de very first beginnin’ dat Ah aimed tuh be uh big voice.” This reference to the beginning sounds a bit like Genesis and the “big voice” he mentions can be associated with representations of God from the bible. In the same chapter where this sentence appears, Hurston notes that the phrase “Our beloved mayor” is something people say but don’t mean, much like they say “God is everywhere.” A couple pages after this point is made, a character describes Joe as loving “obedience out of everybody under de sound of his voice.”

Their Eyes Were Watching God: 12

Joe Starks dies after his figurative death results from Janie’s words. During an argument they have in public, Janie contributes to the notion of Joe’s god-complex by saying “You big-bellies round here and put out a lot of brag, but ’tain’t nothin’ to it but yo’ big voice.” Joe strikes Janie after she makes this comment and not long after that, he gets sick. While he’s on his deathbed, Janie tells him they could have had a better relationship if he wasn’t “worshippin’ de works of [his] own hands.” When she keeps talking, Joe says, “Shut up! Ah wish thunder and lightnin’ would kill yuh,” which can be associated with the punishment Zeus is characterized as sending to mortals. Janie goes on though, criticizing Joe’s demand for “All dis bowin’ down, all dis obedience under [his] voice.”

Their Eyes Were Watching God: 13

When Janie meets Tea Cake, he invites her to play checkers on the front porch of her store and she’s pleased that “Somebody thought it natural for her to play.” This can be contrasted with the fact that Janie wanted to engage in the local folklore by telling playful stories with the residents of her town, but “Joe had forbidden her to indulge.”

Their Eyes Were Watching God: 14

Janie talks with a prejudiced black woman named Mrs. Turner who thinks darker black people are inferior. She likes Janie, who is lighter than she is, and her thoughts are characterized by the summary “Anyone who looked more white folkish than herself was better than she was in her criteria.” This character can be compared to a light-skinned black person in Ernest Gaines’s novel A Lesson Before Dying who thinks the same way.

 

Their Eyes Were Watching God: 16

When a hurricane strikes, Janie and Tea Cake are forced to flee and they come into contact with a “massive built dog” sitting on the shoulders of a cow. Tea Cake defends Janie by killing the dog, but when he contracts rabies, she concludes that “that big old dawg with the hatred in his eyes had killed her after all,” by killing Tea Cake. When the disease takes over Tea Cake’s mind, it makes him paranoid and aggressive. He approaches Janie with a gun and she shoots him to defend herself, but she’s heartbroken when he dies.

Invisible Man: 1

In the prologue of the novel, the main character writes “I remember that I am invisible and walk softly so as not to awaken the sleeping ones.” This reference to sleeping people brings to mind the people Ta-nehisi Coates refers to as “the Dreamers” in Between the World and Me. 

Invisible Man: 2

At the start of the novel, the protagonist is “considered an example of desirable conduct” and he delivers a speech on the day of his graduation from high school that emphasizes the idea that “humility was the secret.” This speech and this behavior can be associated with Booker T. Washington, who is regarded as encouraging black people to accept their inferior status in American society in order to gain the right to do menial work and physical labor for white people.

Invisible Man: 3

When the protagonist is awarded a scholarship to a black college, he pauses before a statue of the founder of the school lifting a veil from the face of a kneeling slave. This veil can be associated with DuBois’s concept of the veil that separates people of different races in the U.S., and the fact that the slave has been blinded by the covering ties in to the novel’s themes of visibility and invisibility. Most profoundly though, the protagonist is “puzzled” by the statue, “unable to decide whether the veil is really being lifted, or lowered more firmly in place.”

Invisible Man: 8

The protagonist and Mr. Norton visit a brothel that the patients from a mental institution are allowed to visit. The unruly patients are supervised by an attendant named Supercargo who kicks them down the stairs of the building when they rush to attack him. Supercargo can be associated with Freud’s concept of the “superego,” the aspect of human consciousness that regulates the behavior of the unruly unconscious mind, keeping those primal thoughts suppressed.

Invisible Man: 9

At the brothel, a patient of the mental institution tells the protagonist to watch as he attacks Supercargo, then he says “Sometimes I get so afraid of him I feel that he’s inside my head.” This lends credence to the idea that Supercargo represents the Freudian concept of the superego. After this, the patients repeatedly knock Supercargo unconscious, then revive him “only to kick him unconscious again.”

In addition to sarcasm that is evident here, with Douglass’s reference to the fact that “a very different-looking class of people” has resulted from the sexual assault of enslaved black women by white men, his allusion to the “lineal descendants of Ham” recalls the idea that black people were supposedly condemned to slavery by God. A more biblically-accurate reading of African-American slavery than the one Douglass is mocking would question whether or not bondage indicates that black people are derived from Ham, or if they’re actually derived from Shem, whose descendants–the Israelites–were warned that they’d be transported to slavery on wooden ships if they broke their covenant with the Heavenly Father.

A more-recent of example of what Douglass describes here is evident in the song “Mercy, Mercy Me (The Ecology)” by Marvin Gaye, which features despairing lyrics that overlay whispered prayers about environmental degradation. The sweet melody of the song is juxtaposed with the sadness of the words’ meaning, recreating a form of melancholy that may be reminiscent of the singing Douglass recalls.

In Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, Harriet Jacobs characterizes enslaved black peoples’ singing with the words “If you were to hear them at such times, you might think they were happy. But can that hour of singing and shouting sustain them through the dreary week, toiling without wages, under constant dread of the lash?”

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.”

This description of enslaved black peoples’ appetite for fruit and the strategies employed by white people to keep them from taking it is similar to the plot of Charles W. Chesnutt’s story “The Goophered Grapevine.” In that tale, a plantation owner employs a black conjure woman to put a spell on a grapevine so that the people who eat from it die, or experience mysterious illness.

Enslaved black people who claimed they were content might have just been showing white people what they knew they wanted to see. In Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man, a duplicitous character named Bledsoe castigates the narrator for taking a white university donor to a poor, black section of a southern town, and says “Why, the dumbest black bastard in the cotton patch knows that the only way to please a white man is to tell him a lie!” If Douglass is describing black people who had the same belief as Ellison’s character, this may explain why white people received reports that confirmed their beliefs about black peoples’ supposed acceptance of slavery.

In Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, Harriet Jacobs refers sarcastically to the idea of enslaved peoples’ supposed contentment as she describes the tumult that passed through her town because of Nat Turner’s insurrection. Jacobs suggests that if white people truly believed their slaves were happy, they wouldn’t have been so worried about a revolt.

In light of his description of the manner in which Sophia Auld is corrupted by her role as a slave mistress, one might ask if Douglass’s rhetorical purpose is to reach other black people with his account of slavery or appeal to a white person who might have been able to imagine herself in the place of Sophia. Passages like this one make it seem evident that Douglass is trying to present the horror of slavery not just to those who could relate to captive black people, but also, to those who could relate to the enslavers, and were in a position to abolish the peculiar institution.

Douglass suggests that there was an inverse correlation between his desire to read and his master’s desire for him to remain ignorant, and that his master’s opposition made him even more convinced that reading could be useful to him. While it seems evident that one purpose Douglass had in mind was to use the skill to make progress in the material world, and obtain his freedom, in Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, Harriet Jacobs tells the story of a pious, older black man who was willing to assume the risk of learning to read illegally so he could decipher the words of the bible.

These two examples are relevant to the debate surrounding the “Gateway of Death” theory, or the disagreement about whether or not black people sang songs that seemed to be about spiritual matters– but were actually coded references to, and sometimes directions for, escaping from enslavement on earth–or if the references to freedom in black spirituals actually had to do with the freedom they expected to feel when they were released from their lives, into heaven.

As Harriet Jacobs builds the courage to admit to her grandmother that she is pregnant, she sits down “in the shade of a tree.” The symbol of this tree, which is mentioned at the moment when Jacobs considers the consequences of her sexual relationship, parallels imagery from Their Eyes Were Watching God, in which a pear tree is the site of Janie’s sexual awakening. This parallel is strengthened by the fact that the women have similar confrontations with their grandmothers, after encountering the trees. Harriet’s grandmother tears Harriet’s mother’s wedding ring from her finger and says she is a disgrace. Janie’s grandmother, after witnessing her kissing a boy named Johnny Taylor, immediately proposes that she marry a man who is much older than her. When Janie expresses disgust at the prospect, her grandmother slaps her.

Harriet Jacobs describes a man who, upon gaining control of his new wife’s possessions, wastes the money, impregnates one of her slaves twice, separates the black family members from each other and dies after a night of debauchery. With her comment in response to this situation, Jacobs seems to be making an appeal to white readers, much like Douglass did, about the ways in which they were degraded by slavery. She writes “Had it not been for slavery, he would have been a better man, and his wife a happier woman.”

In the play A Raisin in the Sun, a character named Beneatha is nicknamed “Alaiyo,” which means “One For Whom Bread—Food—Is Not Enough.” This is consistent with the idea that Douglass is willing to relinquish food for learning, when he interacts with the young white boys who inadvertently teach him how to read. Also, in African American literature, it is a recurring theme for people to be depicted as having a choice between food and figurative things that give life more meaning. For example, in this passage, even though he’s hungry and exhausted when he’s being pursued by Covey, young Frederick decides to endure his hunger instead of submitting to the degradation of a beating.

When Douglass writes about how the masters tricked people into being “slaves to rum,” he echoes points made by Harriet Jacobs about the lies white people would tell enslaved black people, in order to make them content with slavery. In particular, Jacobs says a slaveholder once told her that a woman she knew who escaped to the North was starving, and so miserable that she’d begged to be taken back to her former master. Jacobs says she visited the woman later, however, and found out that the story was a lie, a device used–like alcohol during Christmas–to make black people think slavery was better than freedom.

With regard to the blending of ethnicities that resulted from the sexual assault of black women, during slavery, Harriet Jacobs makes a similar statement in Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, writing “Who can measure the amount of Anglo-Saxon blood coursing in the veins of American slaves?” Furthermore, Jacobs makes this point to counter the idea that black people were condemned to slavery by God. As Douglass mentioned, American enslavement was supposedly evidence of the fact that black people are the cursed descendants of Noah’s son, Ham. Some argue instead that black peoples’ enslavement is evidence of the fact that they are descended from one of Noah’s other sons, Shem.

Douglass personifies the trickster in this instance, daring the other boys to do something that will be advantageous to him. This is similar to the tar baby tale, from the Uncle Remus stories, in which a rabbit that is stuck in tar, and therefore susceptible to the fox, suggests that the last thing he wants is to be thrown into a thorn bush. In fact, the rabbit feels at home in the thorns and uses them to escape, when the fox throws him into them.

Their Eyes Were Watching God begins with the words “Ships at a distance have every man’s wish on board.” This passage gives us a sense of an enslaved person’s most fervent wish; to be as free as the boats they see far off in the water.

Jacobs’ desire to see her children dead instead of having them controlled by her enslaver seems similar to what motivated Margaret Garner, the woman who inspired the plot of Toni Morrison’s Beloved, to murder her own daughter instead of seeing her return to slavery. This sentiment is repeated a couple paragraphs later when Dr. Flint throws Jacobs’ son across the room. For a moment, she thinks her son is dead, but when he does open his eyes, she writes, “I don’t know whether I was very happy.”

Of the introductory letters that begin on this page, Robert Stepto writes “In theory, each of these introductory documents should be classic guarantees written almost exclusively for a white reading public, concerned primarily and ritualistically with the white validation of a newfound black voice, and removed from the tale in such ways that the guarantee and tale vie silently and surreptitiously for control of the narrative as a whole.” (17) Even though these letters are contained within the same book, there is potential for them to compete with Douglass’s text for authorial control.

Of Garrison, Stepto writes, “His ‘Preface’ ends, not with a reference to Douglass or his tale, but with an apostrophe very much like one he would use to exhort and arouse an antislavery assembly. With the following cry Garrison hardly guarantees Douglass’s tale, but enters and reenacts his own abolitionist career instead.” (18)

Stepto notes that in light of the tension that developed between Douglass and Garrison in later years, one might be inclined to perceive a battle for authorial control between Douglass’s narrative and this prefatory letter. Yet, with reference to the passage that begins “This Narrative contains many affecting incidents,” Stepto asserts that Garrison “acknowledges the tale’s singular rhetorical power” and “remains a member of Douglass’s audience far more than he assumes the posture of a competing or superior voice” (19).

Of the sentence that begins “My feet have been so cracked,” Robert Stepto writes “The pen, symbolizing the quest for literacy fulfilled, actually measures the wounds of the past, and this measuring process becomes a metaphor in and of itself for the artful composition of travail transcended” (20).

With regard to this homophones “Freeland” and “free land,” Robert Stepto says “Douglass seems to fashion these passages for both his readership and himself” (20). This suggests that if the original purpose for black writers was to prove their humanity to white people, Douglass transcends this goal, writing for his own purposes instead of just to confront the preconceptions of a skeptical white audience.

In response to the sentence that begins “My long-crushed spirit rose,” Stepto writes that effusive writing linked “certain slave narratives with the popular sentimental literary forms of the nineteenth century,” but that “Douglass’s passages of introspective analysis create fresh space for themselves in the American literary canon” (22).

Robert Stepto contrasts Douglass’s discussion of the sorrow songs with that of Solomon Northup. Stepto writes that while the “demands of audience and authentication” meant that Northup expressed little camaraderie with other enslaved people, Douglass’s initial characterization of the songs as “unmeaning jargon” gives way to his eventual ability to hear them differently. (22-23) Hence, Stepto suggests that Northup’s desire to make a particular impression on his white audience resulted in his characterization of himself as alienated from the people who sang black spirituals. Furthermore, Stepto’s reference to “authentication” suggests that he believed Northup thought any expression of kinship with the singers would make it harder for white readers to believe that he wrote his own tale, as if no one who was capable of writing could find anything of value in the sorrow songs.

Stepto writes about how impressive it is that Douglass apparently reproduces this pass from memory and calls it “a veritable roadsign on his path to freedom and liberty” (23-24). The pass is also a rather literal example of the idea that black people had to master written language in order to be acknowledged as people. In The Signifying Monkey, Henry Louis Gates, Jr. writes about the narrative of a formerly-enslaved man named James Albert Ukawsaw Gronniosaw who watches a white man who is reading and believes the book talks to the man, telling him secrets that he then speaks aloud. Yet, when Gronnosaw stands before the book, it “says” nothing to him. In summary of the idea that the book responds to Gronniosaw’s black face with silence, Gates writes “The silent book did not reflect or acknowledge the black presence before it” (149). Because of this snub, Gates indicates that “some forty-five years later Gronniosaw writes a text that speaks his face into existence among the authors and texts of the Western tradition” (150). In light of the trope of the Talking Book and the fact that white acceptance of the idea of black peoples’ humanity was contingent upon evidence of black literacy, Douglass’s writing of a pass that could make him free is a symbolic example of a black person writing himself into human existence.

About this final passage, Stepto writes, “having traveled with Douglass through his account of his life, we arrive in Nantucket in 1841 to hear him speak. We become, along with Mr. Garrison, his audience” (25). Stepto asserts that this last rhetorical move supplants Garrison, reasserting Douglass’s control of his own story.

In light of the fact that Douglass ends his narrative by introducing a poem written by a white minister, Stepto writes, “The tables are clearly reversed: Douglass has not only controlled his personal history, but also” provided authentication for “what is conventionally a white Northerner’s validating text” (26). Lucinda H. MacKethan offers support for Stepto’s point with her own characterization, writing “Here the American slave appropriates the function and strategies of his white guarantor, authenticating the truth and the tone of a poem written by a “northern Methodist preacher” which he then inserts into the text.” Douglass supplants the white people who vouched for him before the start of his narrative by vouching for a white person at the end of his narrative. In both form and content, this literary reversal is a good example of the chiasmus that Henry Louis Gates, Jr. writes about, the “reversal of the master’s attempt to transform a human being into a commodity” (140).

With regard to Douglass’s first autobiography, Winifred Morgan writes, the “first paragraph of his Narrative notes that he had never seen ‘any authentic record’ (47) of his birth.” This is relevant to the idea that literacy and the ability to manipulate written words has historically been regarded as proof of a black person’s humanity. The absence of a written record of Douglass’s birth symbolizes the fact that until he wrote his own record of his life–writing himself into existence–his race kept him from being regarded as a human being.

Winifred Morgan writes “In fact, by contravening Auld’s insistence that he live out his existence as a thoughtlessly contented slave, by making every effort to achieve literacy, and finally by becoming quite unmanageable, Douglass showed how well he understood Auld’s dictates” (78). Morgan says this connects to Auld’s “inadvertent lesson,” that “there would be no keeping” the slave who learned to read.

Winifred Morgan writes “As the youthful Douglass realizes when he reads, rereads, and mulls over his copy of The Columbian Orator, the American rhetorical tradition speaks in terms of universal freedom and the rights of all men” (79). Because the passage involves a black man who persuades a white man to emancipate him from slavery, it also emphasizes the connection between writing and speaking, or rhetoric, and a black person’s ability to persuade someone that they’re worthy of human rights.

As she makes the point that many slave narratives written by men emphasized individuality, as opposed to community, Winifred Morgan refers to this fight, writing, “In the Narrative Douglass appears single-handedly to have beaten Covey to a standstill. (Douglass’s second autobiography, My Bondage and My Freedom, reveals that Caroline, a strong slave woman, could have tipped the balance in his opponent’s favor; however, she chose to stay out of the fight and was later punished for not helping Covey.)” (80). With this observation, Morgan suggests that Douglass benefitted more from the support of those in his community than he indicated, even if this support wasn’t direct and active.

Morgan discusses the secret testimony that results in the discovery of their escape plan as an example of the experiences that undermine Douglass’s feeling of community with others, writing, “Douglass’s first attempt to flee North with two other slaves by using the passes he has written almost ends in disaster because someone, presumably another slave, has warned the owners. The Narrative thus gives the impression that neither slaves nor whites can be trusted” (80). While this is true, Morgan’s more general conclusion that Douglass “and the other slaves in the Narrative live isolated and mistrustful lives” seems to be at odds with the description of camaraderie between him and the men he tries to escape with. Douglass writes “The fact was, we cared but little where we went, so we went together. Our greatest concern was about separation. We dreaded that more than any thing this side of death.”

With reference to the dearth of information about his wife and other women in this narrative, Winifred Morgan writes “The black women in Douglass’s narrative are by nature subordinate to the men. They serve as examples of victimization, such as his aunt, or as shadowy helpmates, such as the free woman he marries” (82).

Winifred Morgan writes “Jacobs’s most important relationship, of course, is with her children, and this keeps her in place when she might otherwise have fled or even committed suicide” (87). In keeping with her point that Douglass’s narrative emphasizes self-reliance and the power associated with literacy, as opposed to community, it’s relevant to consider the fact that when Douglass mentions the prospect of suicide, the thing that saves him is not necessarily the thought of other people, but “the hope of being free.” He feeds this hope by reading, trying to use the dictionary to understand what the word “abolition” means.

In Witnessing Slavery, Frances Smith Foster writes “Moses Grandy attributed the lack of permanent recognition of a slave’s birth to the attitude of the master who considers slaves as chattel and to the denial to slaves of the information with which they could calculate the anniversaries of their existence.”

With regard to the Columbian Orator, Frances Smith Foster indicates that Douglass’s study of this text influenced his development and informed his experience as a public speaker so that “When he wrote his narrative, it was heavily influenced by his training in rhetoric” (56).

In an article entitled “From Fugitive Slave to Man of Letters: The Conversion of Frederick Douglass,” Lucinda H. MacKethan writes “For the slave, however, ‘entitling’ signified a central paradox; one had to know one’s letters in order to be free, but in America, one had to be free in order to learn one’s letters. In this double bind the fugitive slave found the greatest challenge to his achievement of full human status” (56). MacKethan says this reality was emphasized for Douglass when Hugh Auld warned his wife about teaching him to read. Furthermore, the “entitling” MacKethan describes is a former slave’s process of selecting letters to represent themselves as a free person. Hence, the paradox she refers to also relates to the fact that one had to know how to read in order to assert their humanity and give themselves a free name, but one usually had to be free already in order to learn how to read.

MacKethan describes Douglass’s narrative within the context of spiritual autobiographies, suggesting that his feeling that he was “chosen” resonates theologically, and forms an association between spirituality and literacy. Commenting about Douglass’s observation that he was selected from a group in which “There were those younger, those older, and those of the same age,” McKethan writes “What he was chosen for is made quite clear in Chapters Six and Seven, which form the center of the Narrative and deal exclusively with Douglass’s personal discovery of the power of words” (59).

MacKethan suggests that Douglass emphasizes the power of words by juxtaposing his description of acts of violence with the aggressive use of words. She writes “What he takes particular care to note is a use of physical force almost always accompanied by a manipulative language strategy. The overseer Mr. Severe, for instance, was not only a ‘cruel’ man but a ‘profane swearer’ who used words in the same manner and to the same effect that he used his whip” (59).

Lucinda MacKethan writes “In Chapter Five, Douglass was told to bathe in preparation for his new employment in Baltimore; he responded by scrubbing off not just the ‘mange’ of his past life but almost ‘the skin itself’ in a kind of ironic baptism to make himself worthy of the ‘election’ by white masters that he next infers” (60). MacKethan associates this spiritual preparation with literacy, suggesting that Douglass’s baptism relates to the fact that he has been chosen for a situation that will lead to his literacy, which will result in his “salvation from slavery.”

In keeping with Lucinda MacKethan’s assertion that Douglass’s autobiography has religious overtones, it’s worth noting that the “hungry white street urchins” who Douglass bribed “with bread” were enacting a chiasmatic reversal of scripture. Matthew 4:4 reads “But he answered and said, It is written, Man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word that proceedeth out of the mouth of God.” While Douglass is willing to relinquish bread for words, or for the ability to wield words, the boys he learns from inadvertently offer him ability with words, in exchange for bread. Furthermore, MacKethan characterizes this scene as a “‘first communion’ experience complete with consecrated bread” (61).

MacKethan writes “Mastering letters enabled Douglass to write his ‘pass’ and to ‘pass’ into a world where he could no longer be named a slave” (64). Her use of antanaclasis here, or a homonymic pun, aligns MacKethan’s writing with the African American literary tradition, at least according to the criteria Henry Louis Gates, Jr. established in The Signifying Monkey. Hence, Lucinda MacKethan not only writes about the black literary tradition, she also participates in it as she writes about it.

Commenting on Robert Stepto’s opinion that Douglass’s omission of the details surrounding his escape serves to authenticate his tale, Lucinda MacKethan asserts that this omission also gives the narrative greater religious significance. (As MacKethan notes, Stepto’s comments to this effect appear on p. 25 of From Behind the Veil). MacKethan writes “Although this is a perceptive interpretation of Douglass’s intentions, we might also infer that, in terms of the organizing principles of the conversion narrative paradigm, the actual physical removal would not have the inner spiritual significance of certain other events” (66).

In his biography of Douglass, William McFeely says a historian named Dickson Preston determined “from an inventory of his master’s slaves the time of Frederick’s birth–February 1818 (a year later than the date that Douglass himself calculated)” (8).

McFeely suggests that Douglass’s speculation about the race of his father was probably founded on gossip he heard in his grandmother’s cabin, “as people accounted for his difference in color from his brothers and sisters.” This talk related to the fact that Douglass was “‘yellow,'” and that he “had a muted, dull complexion” that was lighter than those of his relatives. (8)

Although William McFeely says Douglass “placed the blame squarely on slavery” for the fact that he wasn’t close to his mother (6), the historian also cites a reason for Douglass to resent her. McFeely writes, “To be sure, even frequent visits would have been a poor substitute for the constancy of a daily life together, but Harriet did not make them at all” (7).

The scenario described, in which a master would feel “compelled” to send his own child away “out of deference to the feelings of his…wife” echoes the story of Abraham and his wife Sarah. In Genesis 21, Sarah sends her handmaid, Hagar, away when she is mocked by the son Hagar bears for Abraham. Likewise, a master might have been compelled to send his child away if a slave mistress felt like the child of her husband and an enslaved black woman made a mockery of her marriage.

Douglass lived on the plantation of a man named Edward Lloyd, a successful farmer and planter who served as both governor of Maryland and a senator. In his biography of Douglass, William McFeely writes “Douglass never explicitly said whom he most suspected to have been his father, but late in life he was still intrigued by the story of a slave son of Edward Lloyd’s who was bitterly resented by a half brother whom he clearly resembled.” McFeely also noted that during moments of passion in the midst of a speech, Douglass had been known to allege that Lloyd was his father. (13-14) This prospect corresponds with Douglass’s comment about “the double relation of master and father.”

In his biography of Douglass, William McFeely indicates that the man referred to as “Captain Anthony” is Aaron Anthony, who was “hired to be [Lloyd’s] chief lieutenant” and ranked just above the overseers in the plantation hierarchy. (14)

Immediately prior to his own quotation from this scene in the autobiography, William McFeely writes “Frederick Douglass was too young when he lived at Wye House to generalize as he would later about the nature of the slave system, but he was precisely the right age for individual acts of physical brutality to become indelibly recorded in his memory.” McFeely contends that the whip was typically used not to promote work but, instead, as a means for white people to express emotions like “anger, frustration” and “jealousy” (17).

McFeely writes that even though the Lloyd family had made its fortune on tobacco, the plantation–which was “self-sufficient” and a “complex economic entity”–was abandoning the crop for wheat when Frederick came to live at its main house, in about 1824. (14-15)

In keeping with Douglass’s account of the bare necessities that were provided for enslaved people, McFeely suggests that comforts were withheld intentionally to make black people work harder, writing “food and clothing were kept sparse” because “those who have little work to survive” (15).

This quote about an “obdurate heart” is from a poem by William Cowper called “The Task.” Cowper goes on to say that “The natural bond/of brotherhood is severed” when a person “finds his fellow guilty of a skin/not coloured like his own.” In addition to being known for writing hymns, Cowper is known for writing in support of the abolitionist movement.

In response to these first lines, William L. Andrews writes “Here Jacobs seems acutely aware of a paradox informing her situation as an ex-slave autobiographer: the refusal to tell all the truth would be the most effective way for her to parry the charge of not telling the truth.” These lines appear in an article entitled “The Novelization of Voice in Early African American Narrative.”

This reference to the wariness of a black person “when speaking to an untried man” is echoed later in the text, in Chapter Seven, when Douglass describes his interaction with two Irish men who advise him to run away. Douglass pretends he doesn’t understand what the men are saying. Because he doesn’t know who they are and he thinks there’s a chance that they “might be treacherous,” he guards against the prospect that they could encourage him to run just so they’re able to catch him and exploit him. Similarly, Douglass characterizes himself and other enslaved black people as hesitant to be forthright with a white person who asked how they were treated by a master, because there was always a chance that their words could be used against them.

Hugh Auld’s words connect Douglass’s tale to a fictional instance of human trafficking. In Ken Liu’s story “The Paper Menagerie,” a Chinese woman tells the story of being smuggled into Hong Kong and “adopted” against her will by a family that made her a servant for their children, beat her regularly and locked her in a cupboard at night. The woman says she was beaten if she tried to learn English, and that the man who made her a captive said “‘Why do you want to learn English…You want to go to the police?'” Much like Hugh Auld understands that Douglass could use his literacy to escape, the man who has virtually enslaved this Chinese woman understands that she will be better-prepared to get away if she learns to use words in a new way.

The story of the Chinese woman also provides a link between Douglass’s narrative and that of Harriet Jacobs. The woman recalls that an older woman pulled her aside and warned her that she could be sexually assaulted in the home where she was being held captive. The older woman said “‘One day, the man who owns you will get drunk, and he’ll look at you and pull you to him and you can’t stop him. The wife will find out, and then you will think you really have gone to hell'” (191). The prospect of sexual assault by one’s “owner” and resentment from the wife of the assaulter associates Liu’s tale with the testimony of Jacobs, who was pursued by her enslaver for several years and harassed by his jealous wife.

William McFeely associates Sandy’s decision to abandon the escape plan with superstition. He writes “Sandy Jenkins, however, was not free of the superstitious power of a misread Bible, a well-rubbed root, or a dream” (52). McFeely then goes on to discuss a dream that Sandy apparently regarded as a warning that Douglass should be cautious.

In his discussion of what he characterizes as Douglass’s complicated relationship with the Aulds, William McFeely writes “By separating the boy from his relatives, the two had unwittingly seen to it that he had no family ties strong enough to keep him from trying to escape from slavery” (39). This relates to remarks Douglass makes early on in his narrative about “The ties that ordinarily bind children to their homes” being suspended for him, and the fact that the absence of his mother and the distance from his grandmother kept him from feeling close to his brother and sisters. McFeely’s observation contrasts Douglass’s experience with that of Harriet Jacobs, about whom Winifred Morgan wrote “Jacobs fears that if she runs away, the Flints, as retribution, would sell her children; yet she takes a chance on breaking the cycle of slavery because she fears even more having Ellen grow up and repeat her humiliation” (87). There don’t appear to be as many comparable bonds for Douglass.

Jacobs feeling that it would be better for her child to die than to continue living in slavery offers a parallel between Jacobs, Margaret Garner and Morrison’s Beloved. Furthermore, Jacobs’ reference to being “broken in,” or the idea of a mother being forced to observe the abuse of her children so regularly that she eventually accepts it, offers insight into something Frederick Douglass wrote. As he describes the first place where he lived, Douglass indicates that there was little to hold him there because his familial connections were disrupted by the business of slavery. Of his siblings, he writes, “the early separation of us from our mother had well nigh blotted the fact of our relationship from our memories.” Much like the daily experience of slavery results in Jacobs observation of mothers who’ve been traumatized to the point that they express little, as they watch their children being beaten, disruption of families during slavery severed the basic ties between relatives, resulting in situations like the one Douglass described.

In “The Story of O.J.,” Jay-Z raps, “Please don’t die over the neighborhood that your mama rentin.'” This highlights the irony of the fact that black people are currently willing to kill each other over territory that’s owned by white people, much like enslaved black people fought about who had the best master, as Douglass notes.

Douglass’s reading lessons are supported by his observation of how the pieces of a ship are labelled. If we consider the role that sea vessels played with regard to bringing black people to captivity in the New World–the start of their slavery–it’s worth noting that the ships referenced here are relevant to the end of Douglass’s slavery, which is intertwined with his learning to read.

The idea of being ranked amongst animals brings to mind the Great Chain of Being, or the notion that all sentient beings–and, indeed, all substances on earth–are part of a hierarchy that spans from basic minerals, at the bottom, to God, who is at the top. While normally people would be situated above animals in this scheme, however, Douglass notes that he and the other enslaved black people are “ranked with horses, sheep and swine.” In the article “‘The Great Chain of Being Come Undone’ Linking Blackness and Animal Studies,” Calista McRae discusses several studies that address the overlap between depictions of blackness and depictions of animality.

The excerpt here is from a poem entitled “The Farewell Of a Virginia Slave Mother to her daughters, sold into Southern Bondage.” It was written by John Greenleaf Whittier and published in 1843.

The bible verse alluded to at the bottom of this page is Luke 12:47. Ironically, the two verses that proceed it read:

But and if that servant say in his heart, My lord delayeth his coming; and shall begin to beat the menservants and maidens, and to eat and drink, and to be drunken;

The lord of that servant will come in a day when he looketh not for him, and at an hour when he is not aware, and will cut him in sunder, and will appoint him his portion with the unbelievers.

So even though Captain Auld referenced this passage to justify his treatment of black people, the chapter could be said to convict him, a purported servant of God who will be punished by his “lord” for beating other servants.

This reference to “a thief in the night” alludes to Christ’s coming, in keeping with 2 Peter 3:10 and 1 Thessalonians 5:2, but Douglass’s description of Covey’s snake-like cunning is more consistent with a description of Satan.

This description of a broken spirit and an intellect that languished under the crushing weight of work recalls Black Like Me, the account of a white man, John Howard Griffin, who changed his physical appearance so he could experience blackness in the American South. In this account, Griffin writes that his “face had lost animation” after several weeks and that his mind dozed “empty for long periods” (p. 117; New American Library edition).

If we accept this testimony, we’re acknowledging that it’s possible to create in any person the mental conditions that supposedly justified enslavement of black people. In other words, while in the past it was a common belief that slavery was justified by black peoples’ mindlessness, Griffin’s account suggests that any supposed blankness of mind resulted from slavery, as opposed to being present in black people before they were enslaved.

The words “You have seen how a man was made a slave; you shall see how a slave was made a man” comprise a famous example of chiasmus, or an expression that crosses itself–like the Greek letter for X, “Chi”–from which the literary figure derives it’s name. In the same way that the words cross themselves in this kind of statement, chiasmus can also be used to represent a crossing, or a reversal, of power dynamics, according to Henry Louis Gates, Jr. He writes, “Rather, the texts of the slave could only be read as testimony of defilement: the slave’s representation and reversal of the master’s attempt to transform a human being into a commodity, and the slave’s simultaneous verbal witness of the possession of a humanity shared in common with Europeans” (140).

Douglass’s description of himself sounds like the prophet Isaiah’s description of Israel after it has forsaken God. Characterizing the people as if they are a body, Isaiah says:

From the sole of the foot even unto the head there is no soundness in it; but wounds, and bruises, and putrifying sores: they have not been closed, neither bound up, neither mollified with ointment.

The idea of using excess to make an enslaved person disgusted with the thing they want is paralleled in a short story by Charles Chesnutt called “Dave’s Neckliss.” In this story, a hardworking and honest black man who is wrongfully accused of stealing a ham is forced to wear one around his neck at all times. As a result of this excessive exposure to thing he supposedly craved, his reputation suffers, he struggles in various ways and he eventually loses his mind.

This reference to white workers being “thrown out of employment” recalls Black No More, in which a white labor force is manipulated by their employers into being preoccupied with race, so that it’s possible to exploit them. George Schuyler writes “…so long as the ignorant white masses could be kept thinking of the menace of the Negro to Caucasian race purity and political control, they would give little thought to labor organization” (p. 44; Modern Library edition).

In an essay published in 1900 entitled “Lynch Law in America,” Ida B. Wells-Barnett describes lynch law as a form of justice that emerged in light of the exigencies of westward expansion. As white people moved further away from settlement and civilization on the eastern seaboard, they established an ad hoc method of dealing with criminality. Suspects were tried by a small group of men and hung because there were no courts that would have made it possible for them to receive due process of law. Later though, this process appeared in the south where, as Wells-Barnett puts it, “No emergency called for lynch law.” Despite the fact that there were formal institutions that would have made it possible for people to be tried in a more standard and legitimate manner, lynch law emerged as a way of addressing supposed black criminality. Ironically, in the instance Douglass describes, the law would have been applied to him in a region of the country that had been settled for some time. Despite the fact that there was a fully functioning justice system in Baltimore, Douglass could have easily been at the mercy of a mob that intended to apply it’s own form of law.

Then again, a conservative might believe the fact that President Obama was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize—commendation by an international council before he took office as the leader of a sovereign nation—was an indication that he was in the pocket of the world government. Yet, Martin Luther King, Jr.’s receipt of the award could lead to a similar allegation, which just plays into the trope that black leaders in our country are always being directed by some more-powerful, more-strategic, hidden white person.