Izzy found the passage and called out: “‘O, there’s a great deal to be said on both sides of the subject... I’ve been south, and I must say I think the negroes are better off than they would be free.’”

Victoria’s gaze flew back to her students. “Yes, Izzy. And the woman asks her to imagine if her own children were taken from her. This forced the reader to ask themselves the terrible question: What if it were my children? And when that wasn’t enough, Stowe actually breaks the fourth wall and addresses her audience directly. Upon learning of her and her child’s fate, Lucy becomes desperate and tosses herself overboard. She’d rather choose death over another plantation. Stowe takes the time to inform the reader that the trader isn’t surprised because ‘as we said before; he was used to a great many things that you are not used to.’ The reader has no choice to take part in his dark world, because in many ways, they’re already a part of it in real life.”

The students scribbled that into their notes. Not Braden though. Braden sat there unmoved by Harriet Beecher Stowe’s words regarding motherhood.

“Braden, take out your earbuds,” Victoria said in a sharp voice.

The young man sat up and heaved a sigh before pulling the earbuds away from his head. He wrapped them around his neck and continued to stare into space.

“Stowe’s sudden shift to second person, to address her audience is a literary device called apostrophe,” she said as she made her way back to the whiteboard. She wrote the word in large block letters and put an asterisk beside it. “The guilt a reader should feel should be counted as pathos. Stowe employs it regularly while Douglass lets the facts, or logos, do most of the heavy lifting.”

When she turned around, she was met with a raised hand from the front row. A young man beside Braden asked, “So Douglass was relying on logos rather than pathos?”

“He did both,” she corrected. “But he used his writing style in such a way that made the events more like a catalogue of atrocities. He took great effort to list each overseer on his plantation, but all of the descriptions are still vivid enough for the reader to feel something.”

Satisfied with her answer, the young man wrote the information in his notebook.

“I’m going to cut it short today,” Victoria announced, which began the immediate shuffle of papers and books. “Because I want to use the next class to cover the Negro spirituals. We’re going to listen to a few before breaking into smaller groups to analyze the lyrics.”

As students packed up and filed out of the classroom, Victoria spied Braden trying to be among the first to leave. Which was pretty easy since he hadn’t unloaded his belongings or taken off his outerwear.