Legree, Massa

   A transferred name in The Middle Man, by David Chandler. A man says to a woman: ‘Don’t ever try to see my wife again.’ We are told that the woman to whom this was addressed ‘pretended to cower’. She then replies: ‘Yassuh, Massa Legree, Ah sho won’t.’ Use of the name is an allusion to Simon Legree, the brutal owner of a cotton plantation in Uncle Tom’s Cabin, by Harriet Beecher Stowe. He purchases Uncle Tom and allows his men to bestow a fatal whipping on him.