the sons of Ham

The sons of Ham is a biblical expression whose history in Passing shows how scriptural interpretation could be recruited to naturalize racial hierarchy. The phrase connects Clare Kendry’s childhood treatment by her aunts with Irene Redfield’s later inward sense of racial burden: what appears as religious language carries the weight of social history, domestic discipline, and an imposed racial identity.

Biblical History and Racial Meaning

The expression refers to Ham, one of Noah’s sons, and to the biblical account in Genesis in which Noah curses Canaan, Ham’s descendant, after Ham sees his father uncovered. The passage was frequently invoked by proslavery advocates as scriptural justification for enslaving Africans in the American South. That use depended on a racialized interpretation of the story: a religious genealogy was made to seem like an explanation, and even a warrant, for social subordination. The novel’s use of the phrase therefore recalls not simply a biblical episode but the history of its deployment in support of slavery and racial hierarchy.

This history illuminates a broader conflict in the passing narrative. Racial classification is represented as socially and legally consequential, even as the novel unsettles claims that race can be reliably identified through physical signs. The idiom of Ham’s descendants helps give racial status an apparently ancient and sacred authority, while the passing plot exposes how such status is produced and enforced through custom, law, and everyday speech. The phrase’s theological register can make hierarchy sound inherited and inevitable; its historical use reveals that this inevitability is constructed.

Clare’s Childhood and the Aunts’ Lesson

Clare explains that after her father’s death, her aunts gave her a home but expected her to earn her keep through housework and washing. They treated hard labor as appropriate for her because she had Black ancestry, and their talk drew on the idea that Ham’s descendants had been destined to toil. Religious instruction and moral lessons accompanied this treatment, so the phrase entered her life not as remote biblical history but as part of the household’s account of what she deserved.

Clare says this was more than a joke: at sixteen, she experienced it as a hard life, even though she had food, clothing, and shelter. She recalls deciding to escape the position of being treated as charity or a problem and to become a person in her own right. Her aunts’ public piety sat uneasily beside their effort to conceal the family history that made Clare Black; they could condemn the sexual wrongdoing associated with her parentage while treating Black ancestry itself as the unforgivable stain. The biblical allusion thus belongs to a wider pattern in which religious language and racial prejudice reinforce one another in the domestic sphere.

From Inherited Stigma to Irene’s Inner Language

The phrase returns in a different form in Irene’s private response to the burden of race. When she considers the bind created by Clare’s marriage and her own knowledge of Clare’s Black identity, Irene wishes, for the first time, that she had not been born Black. She resents being made to suffer both as an individual and as a member of a race, and her thought draws on the language of Ham’s dark descendants. The biblical association that Clare remembers as a justification for imposed labor has become, in Irene’s consciousness, a compressed expression of collective and personal suffering.

The recurrence joins two distinct experiences without making them identical. Clare recounts how others used the story to assign her a subordinate place; Irene’s inward language registers the weight of a racial burden she cannot simply set aside. In both cases, the religious idiom makes visible the distance between a supposedly sacred explanation and the lived consequences of racial hierarchy. Irene’s thought also shows how language once used to discipline can persist as a framework through which racial oppression is felt and named.

Narrative and Historical Significance

The expression links the novel’s family scenes to the longer history of slavery and its aftermath. In the wider argument about passing, race is bound to social privilege, legal status, and the policing of racial boundaries; the language of blood and inherited identity can make those boundaries appear natural, while the narrative tests their instability. The biblical phrase is one means by which racial ideology enters ordinary conversation and family memory rather than appearing only as formal law or public doctrine.

Its significance is sharpened by the novel’s attention to reproduction and family belonging. Clare recalls fearing that her daughter might be dark, while Gertrude Martin describes a similar anxiety about a child’s complexion and the possibility that ancestry might become visible across generations. Against this fear of inherited difference, the phrase’s history shows how inherited status was also imposed through interpretation: racial meaning was not merely read from bodies but attached to them through social beliefs and institutions. The sons of Ham therefore carries both the old authority claimed for racial subordination and the novel’s critique of the uses to which that authority was put.