It was not at all unusual for the white population to consider black people as property or a degraded human species, if nothing else. Stowe presents the reader with the raw, unvarnished truth of a slave's life. He describes the beatings and torture they are forced to endure, while also mentioning the uncertainty they face throughout their lives. Early in the book, Shelby tells the dealer that "circumstances, you well know, forced me" to sell Tom, in the hope of gaining reassurance that Tom would be treated fairly. But the merchant responds mercilessly by saying: "Wal, you know, they could please me too." This shows how inhumane the entire system was: a game that rewarded the most selfish without any regard for the slave's personality. Auctioneers and slave traders separated mothers and children on the principle that they were incapable of feeling the loss, at least not like whites. It is in recounting the cruel life of a slave that Stowe refers to what DuBois later introduces in The Souls of Black Folk as the existence of double consciousness. African Americans have the task of uniting these two contrasting identities. Tom could never truly be "just" an American, because the social condition of the United States did not allow it. Stowe's undistorted description of the harshness of slavery provides a reminder of the difficulties of juggling these merging identities in the time of slavery, and as DuBois makes clear, even after