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.
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.