MT was an iconoclast, and this image seems powerfully to attack or reconstruct the familiar icon of the kneeling slave/standing master. As Roxy, "the heir of two centuries of unatoned insult and outrage, look[s] down on" her supposed master, "Tom Driscoll," she says: "Fine nice young white gen'l'man kneelin' down to a nigger-wench! I's wanted to see dat jes once befo' I's called." It's impossible to blame her for wanting to see the stereotype subverted, but it's also, finally, hard to see the image in such revisonary terms. "Tom" is in fact her son, as "black" as she is, and a slave, and by switching babies in the cradle Roxy herself created the "fiction" of Tom's status as a white master, so this reversal of roles can hardly atone for 200 years of whites enslaving blacks. And visually it's impossible to see race in this image at all. This image is another example of how difficult it is to "see" what MT's books are saying or suggesting about American slavery as a fact of our history.
The Barrett Collection, UVA PS 1317 .A1 1894