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).
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).
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).