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.
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).