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.
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.
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.