was interpreted through symbolism, scars that
could arouse sympathy or disgust. That history
was imposed by some other voice, one that made
the speaker of the poem submissive. With a pen
and ink, though, the story can be better repre-
sented, in words that tell a story that is closer to
the truth, as the speaker conjures them through
his own voice. The irony is that the pen, as the
speaker clarifies it, helps to dull the marks (and
therefore the previous history) of the whip. The
master now, who once was the primary voice, is
put in a subjugated role because the pen allows
the freed slave to find his own voice. If consid-
ered in isolation, the whip would seem more
powerful or lethal than the pen—but as symbols,
the pen, which finally gives the speaker a voice,
proves to be the more powerful. This is because
the pen tells the truth. People can look at a
slave’s back and think that the slave was
whipped because he did not obey his master or
because he had done some dreadful wrong. At
the same time, the slave might know that the
scars on his back are a sign of injustice. The
whip marks, in other words, can be interpreted
in many different ways. They are abstractions of
events that are not clearly defined. They also are
only read when and if the slave removes his shirt,
which means that not many people ever see
them. But when the slave writes his story down
on paper, there is not such a wide margin of
interpretation. Words are more specific. If pub-
lished, they also are communicated to a wider
audience. Whereas the whip insinuates that the
master is the more powerful, the written story of
a slave can tell another side of the story. The
slave has feelings. The slave is human and is
deserving of civil rights. So with a pen and the
knowledge of written language, the slave turns
out to have a much more powerful weapon than
the master had with his whip.
In the second verse, the speaker points out
the irony of his freedom. He has been released
from the plantation; but he has found that he is
in the hands of yet another master. This one is
the army sergeant, who yells and demands that
the freed slaves obey him under threat of yet
other punishments. How free is he, the speaker
wonders, if he must bend himself to the ser-
geant’s demands? And although he is in the
army, he is not really a soldier, as he is not
given a gun. Instead he is handed a shovel to
dig ditches. The irony here is that he is given
the title of soldier and yet he is no more than a
laborer, as he was before when he was still a
slave. In actuality, he has neither more freedom
nor more responsibility or trust. His title has
switched from slave to soldier, but this changes
only the name of things. He is still belittled by
derogative words and still discriminated against
in terms of food and salary. As the poet ends this
verse, Trethewey brings out the fact that the
speaker, a black freed slave, has confiscated a
Confederate man’s journal, writing his story
over the white man’s. The two lives do not par-
allel one another, but rather they intersect,
barely touching one another, only momentarily
crossing. Both men have lives, and they are both
human, but they do not seem to share much
common ground. An irony here, then, is that
the two men do share a degree of common
ground, as the rest of the poem will reveal.
Their lives are very much the same, especially
as the Civil War rages on.
In the third verse, the speaker comments on
the irony of his having taken a ship called the
Northern Star, a ship that transports him to Ship
Island, where Fort Massachusetts awaits him.
Both theNorthern Starand Fort Massachusetts
remind him of the North of the United States,
which stands as a symbol of freedom for slaves.
It is the slave’s dream to be taken out of bondage
and freed in the North, where people supposedly
await with open arms, ready to take off the
chains and shackles from the slave’s feet and
hands. But these Northern names do not mean
freedom for the speaker. The ship merely trans-
ports the speaker from one form of slavery to
another. The fort might shelter the speaker from
the rain, but it does not remove his shackles. It is
at this point in the poem that the speaker sees the
irony of life, how all the soldiers, white or black,
freed or never enslaved, are all entrapped by
their fate and are therefore equal.
Another ironic situation, perhaps the most
ironic of all in this poem, is the fact presented in
the fifth verse, where the speaker ponders the
weird position in which he finds himself—that
of guarding former white slave masters. Who
would have imagined such a situation just a few
years ago? What slave would even have dared to
think of it? Added to this ironic situation is the
fact that the speaker, a short time ago a slave, is
now recording these white soldiers’ words and
thoughts because he, the former slave, is literate
and the white soldiers, his people’s former mas-
ters, are not. The white prisoners cannot even
sign their names. These white men, who not longNative Guard