Jacobs’ desire to see her children dead instead of having them controlled by her enslaver seems similar to what motivated Margaret Garner, the woman who inspired the plot of Toni Morrison’s Beloved, to murder her own daughter instead of seeing her return to slavery. This sentiment is repeated a couple paragraphs later when Dr. Flint throws Jacobs’ son across the room. For a moment, she thinks her son is dead, but when he does open his eyes, she writes, “I don’t know whether I was very happy.”
MacKethan suggests that Douglass emphasizes the power of words by juxtaposing his description of acts of violence with the aggressive use of words. She writes “What he takes particular care to note is a use of physical force almost always accompanied by a manipulative language strategy. The overseer Mr. Severe, for instance, was not only a ‘cruel’ man but a ‘profane swearer’ who used words in the same manner and to the same effect that he used his whip” (59).
Immediately prior to his own quotation from this scene in the autobiography, William McFeely writes “Frederick Douglass was too young when he lived at Wye House to generalize as he would later about the nature of the slave system, but he was precisely the right age for individual acts of physical brutality to become indelibly recorded in his memory.” McFeely contends that the whip was typically used not to promote work but, instead, as a means for white people to express emotions like “anger, frustration” and “jealousy” (17).
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 bible verse alluded to at the bottom of this page is Luke 12:47. Ironically, the two verses that proceed it read:
But and if that servant say in his heart, My lord delayeth his coming; and shall begin to beat the menservants and maidens, and to eat and drink, and to be drunken;
The lord of that servant will come in a day when he looketh not for him, and at an hour when he is not aware, and will cut him in sunder, and will appoint him his portion with the unbelievers.
So even though Captain Auld referenced this passage to justify his treatment of black people, the chapter could be said to convict him, a purported servant of God who will be punished by his “lord” for beating other servants.