In the seminal Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave (1845), Frederick Douglass writes these two sentences on page 12:
He whipped, but seemed to take no pleasure in it. He was called by the slaves a good overseer.
Douglass is referring to a slave overseer who succeeded a particularly savage one on his plantation. The ironic contradiction of describing a "good overseer" as taking no pleasure but still engaging in whipping follows a gut-wrenching description of how this overseer's predecessor felt extreme enjoyment in swearing and sweating as his whip tore through the flesh of slaves, all the more aggressively as their cries grew louder and more of the same precisely where their blood most flowed. The power of these sentences is in the false sense of relief they give the audience after reading pages of barbaric, inhuman treatment.
Picking up this book decades after reading it as a college student remains an extraordinarily jarring sensory experience as expressed by an eyewitness in the plainest language possible.
