A black character who is described, in passing, as “the nigger drummer” says “Hahre you” for “How are you?” and “Thaats good.” This deliberate effort on Hemingway’s part to depict the character’s mangling of English is an example of the mnemonic minstrel mask described by Houston Baker (Modernism and the Harlem Renaissance). In other words, even though it’s possible to extract meaning from the way the character’s speech is written, black language is sometimes depicted as mnemonic, nonsense that only has meaning as a representation of the people to which it refers; meaninglessness that represents “blackness.”