Chaos Theory
No matter how bad an authoritarian rule may be and no matter how sweet the promise of freedom maybe, there is always to be expected some period of anarchy once the authority is toppled. That is the suggestion made by the novel in light of the demise of Henry Townsend. A former slave who now owns slave may seem the worst possible of all worlds, but even this degradation is divulged as having some form of stasis that when lost thrown everything into chaos. The death of Townsend upsets the status quo to the degree of societal disintegration as formerly freed men becoming slaves, miscegenation and, as always, the imposition of white supremacy.
Sex and Slavery
The connection between sexuality and slavery is a dominant theme of the novel whenever its female characters are featured. The message is that sexuality is at all times—whether slavery is involved or not—a transactional relationship. Men are always ready to offer something for women in exchange for sexual favors and women are always being pressed to name their price. The suggestion that there is always a price may strike some as sexist, but within the antebellum world of Dixie it is very much worth remembering that white gentrification and all those who wished to attain it were engaged in a transactional lifestyle by definition.
The True Genesis of Slavery
The fact that this novel is about a freed black slave who becomes a slaveowner himself assigns the definition of slavery well outside the confines of its racial motivation. The true nature of slavery and the genesis that drives every human being to wish to own another is simple control. Control and dominance of every aspect of the life of another living creature exists far outside any quaint confines of racial superiority; the novel suggests that slaveholders are a special race of contemptible human beings so desperate to be viewed as superior that race ultimately has no place in the discourse of castigation.
No One Is Free in the Land of Slavery
That discourse of castigation does have a place for discussion on how any society that condones the ownership of slaves is populated entirely by slaves. The novel makes it quite clear as the “peculiar institution” of the South touched everyone that no one was really free. The slaves suffered the worst individual indignity, true, but nobody living in that world really experienced any true freedom. The plantation owners were slaves to the very slaves they owned; without them, their crops would wither and die and with them their faux aristocracy. Those who did not known slaves, but nevertheless worked or fought to ensure its continued existence became slaves to history; eternally condemned to a legacy of disgust and repulsion. The very reprehensibility of owning other human beings allowed even those who neither owned them nor fought for the right to keep them to become forever condemned by virtue of their inaction.
