Racism, Dehumanization, and Hypocrisy Theme Analysis

Those white boys, Huck and Tom, watched me. They were always playing some kind of pretending game where I was either a villain or prey, but certainly their toy. They hopped about out there with the chiggers, mosquitoes and other biting bugs, but never made any progress toward me. It always pays to give white folks what they want, so I stepped into the yard and called out into the night,

“Who dat dere in da dark lak dat?”

“But what are you going to say when she asks you about it?” I asked.

Lizzie cleared her throat. “Miss Watson, dat some cone-bread lak I neva before et.”

“Try ‘dat be,’” I said. “That would be the correct incorrect grammar.”

That evening I sat down with Lizzie and six other children in our cabin and gave a language lesson. These were indispensable. Safe movement through the world depended on mastery of language, fluency.

[…]

“White folks expect us to sound a certain way and it can only help if we don’t disappoint them,” I said. “The only ones who suffer when they are made to feel inferior is us. Perhaps I should say ‘when they don’t feel superior.’”

“Well, yes, but all men are equal. That’s my point. But even you have to admit the presence of, shall we call him—it—the devil, in your African humans.” Voltaire adjusted his position and held his hands to the fire.

“You’re saying we’re equal, but also inferior,” I said.

“I’m detecting a disapproving tone,” he said. “Listen, my friend. I’m on your side. I’m against the institution of slavery. Slavery of any kind. You know that I am an abolitionist of the first order.”

“Thank you?”

“You’re welcome.”

I had already come to understand the tidiness of lies, the lesson learned from the stories told by white people seeking to justify my circumstance. […] And so, after all these books, the Bible itself was the least interesting of all. I could not enter it, did not want to enter it, and then understood that I recognized it as a tool of my enemy. I chose the word enemy, and still do, as oppressor necessarily supposes a victim.

My name is James. I wish I could tell my story with a sense of history as much as industry. I was sold when I was born and then sold again. My mother’s mother was from someplace on the continent of Africa, I had been told or perhaps simply assumed. I cannot claim to any knowledge of that world or those people, whether my people were kings or beggars […] I can tell you that I am a man who is cognizant of his world, a man who has a family, who loves a family, who has been torn from his family, a man who can read and write, a man who will not let his story be self-related, but self-written.

With my pencil, I wrote myself into being. I wrote myself to here.

“What you’re saying is that if someone pays you enough, it’s okay to abandon what you have claimed to understand as moral and right.”

“When you put it that way,” he said.

“When I put it that way what?”

“They wanted a constitution that would justify their behavior. If I hadn’t written it for them, someone else would have. What in the world would be different if that had happened?”

I looked at him. “You tell me,” I said.

I could believe it, I thought, pretending, in slave fashion, not to be there. After being cruel, the most notable white attribute was gullibility. As evidenced by Huck’s reaction. He said, “You fellers are amazin’.”

“Yes, but them people liked it, Jim. Did you see their faces? They had to know them was lies, but they wanted to believe. What do you make of that?”

“Folks be funny lak dat. Dey takes the lies dey want and throws away the truths dat scares ‘em.”

[…]

“I reckon I do that, too,” the boy said.

“What say?”

“I kin see how much you miss yer family and yet I don’t think about it. I forget that you feel things jest like I feel. I know you love them.”

“Thank you, Huck.”

The Duke swung his belt and caught me at my knees. It did hurt. He laughed and did it again. I didn’t wince.

“You see that?” the King said. “I say, did you see that? They don’t even feel like no human man.”

[…]

“Don’t tear him up too much,” the King said. “We gotta be able to sell him. We cain’t get a dime fer him if’n he’s torn all asunder.”

“Hell, man,” the Duke said. “He ain’t no proper people. He don’t feel pain like we do. He need a lesson he kin remember. Nextwise, he’ll get it into his head to run again. That’s the way these creatures is built.”

“White folks watch us work and forget how long we’re left alone in our heads. Working and waiting.”

I smiled. “If only they knew the danger in that.”

“I don’t believe they even know we talk to each other,” Easter said.

“They can’t accept it. They won’t accept it. And they’re always surprised.”

I made eye contact with a couple of people in the crowd and the way they looked at me was different from any contact I had ever had with white people. They were open to me, but what I saw, looking into them, was hardly impressive. They sought to share this moment of mocking me, mocking darkies, laughing at the poor slaves, with joyful, spirited clapping and stomping. I looked at one woman who might have been intrigued by me or taken with me, the entertainer. I saw the surface of her, merely the outer shell, and realized that she was mere surface all the way to her core.

Slaves didn’t have the luxury of anxiety, but at that moment, I had felt anxiety. Slaves didn’t have the luxury of anger toward a white man, but I had felt anger. The anger was a good bad feeling. In addition, my feelings about Daniel Emmett were complicated, confused. He bought me, yes, but reportedly not to own me, though he expected something from me—my voice, he claimed. I wondered what he would do if I tried to leave. In my head I could hear him shouting, “But I paid two hundred dollars for you.” A man who refused to own slaves but was not opposed to others owning slaves was still a slaver, to my thinking.

“We’re slaves. We’re not anywhere. Free person, he can be where he wants to be. The only place we can ever be is in slavery.” She looked at Norman. “Are you really a slave?” she asked.

“I am.”

“And you’re colored,” she said.

Norman nodded.

“Who can tell?”

“Nobody,” Norman said.

“Then why do you stay colored?”

“Because of my mother. Because of my wife. Because I don’t want to be white. I don’t want to be one of them.”

“Imagine it all as a state of war,” Locke said. “You have been conquered, and so long as the war continues, you shall be a slave.”

“When does the war end?” I asked.

“Does it end? That’s the question. Who gets to say that it’s over? A war continues until the victor says it’s over.”

“If I am in a war, then I have the right to fight back. That follows, doesn’t it? I have a right, perhaps a duty, to kill my enemy.”

“Well, now.”

I had exacted revenge. But for whom? For one act, or many? Against one man, many men or the world? I wondered if I should feel guilty. Should I have felt some pride in my action? Had I done a brave thing? Had I done an evil thing? Was it evil to kill evil? The truth was that I didn’t care. It was this apathy that left me wondering about myself—not wondering why I didn’t feel anything or whether I was incapable of feeling, but wondering what else I was capable of doing. It was not an altogether bad feeling.

“Why on earth would you think that I can’t imagine the trouble I’m in? After you’ve tortured me and eviscerated me and emasculated me and left me to burn slowly to death, is there something else you’ll do to me? Tell me, Judge Thatcher, what is there that I can’t imagine?”

[…]

“Are you going to kill me?”

“The thought crossed my mind. I haven’t decided. Oh, sorry, let me translate that for you. I ain’t ’cided, Massa.”

I had never seen a white man filled with such fear. The remarkable truth, however, was that it was not the pistol, but my language, the fact that I didn’t conform to his expectations, that I could read, that had so disturbed and frightened him.