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Literary Devices
Part 2, Chapter 1
Explanation and Analysis—Haunting Seventh Avenue:
As they eat together, Brian tells Irene that he doesn't know why, but men like Clare's husband (racists) and people like Clare (people who "pass") both insist on continuing to orbit around Harlem. He uses Harlem-inflected dialect to do so:
It's always that way. Never known it to fail. Remember Albert Hammond, how he used to be for ever haunting Seventh Avenue, and Lenox Avenue and the dancing-places, until some 'shine' took a shot at him for casting an eye towards his 'sheba?' They always come back. I've seen it happen time and time again.
The words “shine” and “sheba” here are important, because Brian is using them to criticize white men’s behavior in the language that the same men often use to criticize Black folks. "Shine" as it’s used here is a derogatory word for a Black man, and "sheba" refers to a Black woman. These expressions are part of the vernacular of jazz-age New York, but like most things in this novel, they also have a second meaning and purpose. When Brian uses them, they aren’t fiercely derogatory. However, he’s imagining what Hammond would have said when other white men ask why he no longer goes to Harlem dance halls. In this context, “shine” and “sheba” become slurs, as if Hammond was using racial epithets to describe why he stopped spending his evenings in Harlem.
Related Themes:
Part 2, Chapter 3
Explanation and Analysis—Harlem Vocabulary:
Larsen uses the motif of colloquial expressions from early 20th-century Harlem English to enhance Passing's realism for the reader. In this passage, Irene and Hugh discuss the unusual experience of meeting a white woman passing as Black. Irene says:
Well, take my own experience with Dorothy Thompkins. I’d met her four or five times, in groups and crowds of people, before I knew she wasn’t a Negro. One day I went to an awful tea, terribly dicty. Dorothy was there. We got talking. In less than five minutes, I knew she was ‘fay.’ Not from anything she did or said or anything in her appearance. Just—just something. A thing that couldn’t be registered.
The Black community of New York has a vibrant and longstanding linguistic tradition, which Larsen celebrates throughout the novel. Her use of words like "dicty," meaning snobbish or condescending, and "fay," Harlem slang for a white person derived from the Latin word for "foe," immerses the reader in the social environment of Harlem during the early 20th century. It enables them to get a sense of how people might have actually sounded as they communicated.
The passage also thinks carefully about the complexities of identity within the Black and white worlds of New York. Usually when people "pass" in this society, it’s Black people passing in the white world for their own safety or benefit. Irene's realization that Dorothy is white—which isn’t based on any overt action or appearance but rather on "just something"—shows how complicated and insidious the racial dynamics of the period were. By describing Dorothy as "fay," a slang word specific to the Black community of Harlem, Irene emphasizes her own Blackness while decrying the other woman’s whiteness.
Related Themes:
