Clara Ann Thompson's poem, Uncle Rube on the Race Problem, uses examples of what Houston Baker calls "mastery of form" and "deformation of mastery" as a rhetorical strategy to commission the reader to see Rube's strong racial standpoint and beliefs. The poem starts "in medias res," right after Uncle Rube is asked how he would solve the race problem. The dialect poem then follows with a lengthy argument on racial questions asked by a group of whites to Rube, the first person narrator. Thompson uses Rube to manipulate the stereotypes whites had of blacks, and as a way to counter the oppression of her race via the minstrel mask or trope. These strategies are most prominently illustrated in Booker T. Washington's Up from Slavery and W.E.B. Du Bois's Souls of Black Folk.
             Webster's dictionary defines the word rube as an "unsophisticated country person, and not very intellectual" (Guralnik 648). Thompson lets the reader know the character of Uncle Rube by his name and his diction. In the first two stanzas, the reader is told about slave times where "de white man wus de lo'd," (Thompson 322) and the abuse the slaves beheld by their masters. A couple lines later, Uncle Rube says the way to solve the Negro problem is "to let the black man be" (322). By using Uncle Rube in this conversation with the silent white speakers, Thompson's minstrel mask is one of unseen intelligence to the naked white eye. Rube is asked how he would solve the race problem, probably in jest by bored white people to harass him as he passes by. Uncle Rube lets go with a brilliant display of answers to their questions speaking directly to both the white readers, "you white-folks," (323) and the unseen ones in the poem. Thompson uses this style of "mastery of form" to great success in order to be heard. She is literally "speaking back"...