The Spark in Julius
One of the subtle elements of the stories featuring Uncle Julius and John is the self-possessed superiority of John. John is, to his credit, not outright racist, but he is informed with the prejudice of whites feeling naturally superior to blacks. The longest paragraph in the story is found in the framing device and gives much insight into John. His rumination on the quality of Julius to see the world in a complex way ends with an extended—a very extended—metaphor that is ironically far more revealing about John than Julius: “But in the simple human feeling, and still more in the undertone of sadness, which pervaded his stories, I thought I could see a spark which, fanned by favoring breezes and fed by the memories of the past, might become in his children's children a glowing flame of sensibility, alive to every thrill of human happiness or human woe.”
The Ham Necklace
The ham is rich in metaphorical meaning, but its greatest significance becomes most clear once it is no longer part of the story. Once Dave’s punishment has ended after six months, he’s become so used to the ham hanging around his neck that he actually begins to miss it. This element of the story transforms the ham into a wide-ranging metaphor for slavery and bondage that helps to explain why some people might come to regret being freed from such a situation. When you become used to a state of affairs, even an improvement in that state can sometimes seem like a step backward rather than a step forward.
"'Did yer knowed I wuz turnin' ter a ham, Julius?'
When Dave starts believing that he is actually turning into a ham, it begins the construction of a very complex metaphor. Julius takes the statement literally, but a specific figurative interpretation suggests that he is not turning into the smoked ham, but rather another ham: the son of Noah who in racist mythology has been turned into the father of all black races. Since Ham was punished in the story of the Flood, this interpretation also endows his descendants with being inferior. The wearing of the ham has opened Dave’s consciousness to the fact that he is at least the equal of even his white master, yet is being punished for being a latter-day Ham, son of Noah.
Ham and Slavery
Ham in the abstract—as opposed to specifically that which Julius eats in the framing portion of the story or the stolen ham in the narrative flashback—is also richly metaphorical. Pigs are often utilized as animals to denote the lowest order of species. Ham is also—like fried chicken and watermelon—intensely associated with racist attitudes toward African-Americans and thus the connection is made implicitly that blacks are the pigs of the society and thus a metaphorical image of dehumanization. This dehumanization is taken to another level when the pig is deprived of it low-level sentience and slaughtered into meat. Now the pig has become—through being “cured” of its assumption of esteem—mere meat meant for the consumption of others. Ham is revealed to be the perfect metaphor for the dehumanization of American slavery.
Black History
The entire story becomes a metaphor for how black history is told, taught, and learned. Julius is relating a story about Dave to John who becomes the author of that narrative. Thus the African-American experience is filtered through the perspective of white authority before being passed into society as history.
