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.
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.
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).