MacKethan writes “Mastering letters enabled Douglass to write his ‘pass’ and to ‘pass’ into a world where he could no longer be named a slave” (64). Her use of antanaclasis here, or a homonymic pun, aligns MacKethan’s writing with the African American literary tradition, at least according to the criteria Henry Louis Gates, Jr. established in The Signifying Monkey. Hence, Lucinda MacKethan not only writes about the black literary tradition, she also participates in it as she writes about it.