When Solomon first starts working for Epps, he becomes ill and uses a simile to capture the intensity of the illness:
It was now the season of hoeing. I was first sent into the corn-field, and afterwards set to scraping cotton. In this employment I remained until hoeing time was nearly passed, when I began to experience the symptoms of approaching illness. I was attacked with chills, which were succeeded by a burning fever. I became weak and emaciated, and frequently so dizzy that it caused me to reel and stagger like a drunken man. Nevertheless, I was compelled to keep up my row.
Solomon’s description of himself as “stagger[ing] like a drunken man” helps readers to visualize the severity of his condition. By describing all of the different types of challenging work Epps forced him to continue doing while staggering around due to sickness, Solomon hopes that readers will feel shocked and enraged, coming to question the very existence of slavery.
At this time, Southern enslavers often claimed that enslaved people were treated well and enjoyed their work. But this description clearly communicates how false that was—not only were they beaten and treated horribly on normal days, Solomon implies, but they were forced to work even when feverish and emaciated.
When Bass finishes his work on Epps’s house and it’s time for him to leave the plantation, Solomon is filled with despair about losing his friend, and communicates this via a simile:
I had clung to him as a drowning man clings to the floating spar, knowing if it slips from his grasp he must forever sink beneath the waves. The all-glorious hope, upon which I had laid such eager hold, was crumbling to ashes in my hands. I felt as if sinking down, down, amidst the bitter waters of Slavery, from the unfathomable depths of which I should never rise again.
By comparing himself to a drowning man clinging to a floating platform, Solomon shows how Bass kept him alive and gave him a real hope of freedom for the first time.
Solomon goes on to add a metaphor that describes how, with Bass leaving, the floating platform of hope onto which he was holding was “crumbling to ashes” in his hands, leaving the waves of slavery to drown him. This is a powerful image that Solomon hopes will communicate to readers his desperation to be free. Slavery, he suggests, is similar to death: by staying enslaved, he feels he will sink to “unfathomable depths.” This extreme language is meant to inspire readers to understand that slavery is a devastating institution that must come to an end.
