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.
This description of enslaved black peoples’ appetite for fruit and the strategies employed by white people to keep them from taking it is similar to the plot of Charles W. Chesnutt’s story “The Goophered Grapevine.” In that tale, a plantation owner employs a black conjure woman to put a spell on a grapevine so that the people who eat from it die, or experience mysterious illness.
In light of his description of the manner in which Sophia Auld is corrupted by her role as a slave mistress, one might ask if Douglass’s rhetorical purpose is to reach other black people with his account of slavery or appeal to a white person who might have been able to imagine herself in the place of Sophia. Passages like this one make it seem evident that Douglass is trying to present the horror of slavery not just to those who could relate to captive black people, but also, to those who could relate to the enslavers, and were in a position to abolish the peculiar institution.
Douglass suggests that there was an inverse correlation between his desire to read and his master’s desire for him to remain ignorant, and that his master’s opposition made him even more convinced that reading could be useful to him. While it seems evident that one purpose Douglass had in mind was to use the skill to make progress in the material world, and obtain his freedom, in Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, Harriet Jacobs tells the story of a pious, older black man who was willing to assume the risk of learning to read illegally so he could decipher the words of the bible.
These two examples are relevant to the debate surrounding the “Gateway of Death” theory, or the disagreement about whether or not black people sang songs that seemed to be about spiritual matters– but were actually coded references to, and sometimes directions for, escaping from enslavement on earth–or if the references to freedom in black spirituals actually had to do with the freedom they expected to feel when they were released from their lives, into heaven.
When Douglass writes about how the masters tricked people into being “slaves to rum,” he echoes points made by Harriet Jacobs about the lies white people would tell enslaved black people, in order to make them content with slavery. In particular, Jacobs says a slaveholder once told her that a woman she knew who escaped to the North was starving, and so miserable that she’d begged to be taken back to her former master. Jacobs says she visited the woman later, however, and found out that the story was a lie, a device used–like alcohol during Christmas–to make black people think slavery was better than freedom.
Although William McFeely says Douglass “placed the blame squarely on slavery” for the fact that he wasn’t close to his mother (6), the historian also cites a reason for Douglass to resent her. McFeely writes, “To be sure, even frequent visits would have been a poor substitute for the constancy of a daily life together, but Harriet did not make them at all” (7).
In his biography of Douglass, William McFeely indicates that the man referred to as “Captain Anthony” is Aaron Anthony, who was “hired to be [Lloyd’s] chief lieutenant” and ranked just above the overseers in the plantation hierarchy. (14)
This quote about an “obdurate heart” is from a poem by William Cowper called “The Task.” Cowper goes on to say that “The natural bond/of brotherhood is severed” when a person “finds his fellow guilty of a skin/not coloured like his own.” In addition to being known for writing hymns, Cowper is known for writing in support of the abolitionist movement.
In response to these first lines, William L. Andrews writes “Here Jacobs seems acutely aware of a paradox informing her situation as an ex-slave autobiographer: the refusal to tell all the truth would be the most effective way for her to parry the charge of not telling the truth.” These lines appear in an article entitled “The Novelization of Voice in Early African American Narrative.”
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.
The excerpt here is from a poem entitled “The Farewell Of a Virginia Slave Mother to her daughters, sold into Southern Bondage.” It was written by John Greenleaf Whittier and published in 1843.