Stepto writes about how impressive it is that Douglass apparently reproduces this pass from memory and calls it “a veritable roadsign on his path to freedom and liberty” (23-24). The pass is also a rather literal example of the idea that black people had to master written language in order to be acknowledged as people. In The Signifying Monkey, Henry Louis Gates, Jr. writes about the narrative of a formerly-enslaved man named James Albert Ukawsaw Gronniosaw who watches a white man who is reading and believes the book talks to the man, telling him secrets that he then speaks aloud. Yet, when Gronnosaw stands before the book, it “says” nothing to him. In summary of the idea that the book responds to Gronniosaw’s black face with silence, Gates writes “The silent book did not reflect or acknowledge the black presence before it” (149). Because of this snub, Gates indicates that “some forty-five years later Gronniosaw writes a text that speaks his face into existence among the authors and texts of the Western tradition” (150). In light of the trope of the Talking Book and the fact that white acceptance of the idea of black peoples’ humanity was contingent upon evidence of black literacy, Douglass’s writing of a pass that could make him free is a symbolic example of a black person writing himself into human existence.
In light of the fact that Douglass ends his narrative by introducing a poem written by a white minister, Stepto writes, “The tables are clearly reversed: Douglass has not only controlled his personal history, but also” provided authentication for “what is conventionally a white Northerner’s validating text” (26). Lucinda H. MacKethan offers support for Stepto’s point with her own characterization, writing “Here the American slave appropriates the function and strategies of his white guarantor, authenticating the truth and the tone of a poem written by a “northern Methodist preacher” which he then inserts into the text.” Douglass supplants the white people who vouched for him before the start of his narrative by vouching for a white person at the end of his narrative. In both form and content, this literary reversal is a good example of the chiasmus that Henry Louis Gates, Jr. writes about, the “reversal of the master’s attempt to transform a human being into a commodity” (140).
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.
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).