82 pages • 2 hours read
Jean ToomerA modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more. For select classroom titles, we also provide Teaching Guides with discussion and quiz questions to prompt student engagement.
“Seventh Street” opens with an epigraph about money, bootleggers, and fast cars. It sets the stage for the uniquely urban setting of this story: Washington, DC. The story does not have a clear narrative but is a series of exclamations, rhetorical questions, and random musings: “Wedges rust in soggy wood…Split it! In two! Again! Shred it!...the sun” (52). This chaotic chapter describes Seventh Street in DC as a “bastard of Prohibition and the War” (51). It is an African American area where jazz music and the bustle of urban life abound. The chapter itself has a sense of rhythm, made possible partly by repetition. At various points, Toomer repeats “Who set you flowing?” as a kind of refrain. This “flowing” references flowing blood, flowing liquor pre-Prohibition Era, and perhaps an overall worked-up mood of the chapter’s unspecified addressee. “Seventh Street” describes the coexistence of poverty and the upper-class: “in shanties, brick office buildings, theaters, drug stores, restaurants, and cabarets” (52). Toomer also plays with alliteration, using the “w” of Washington as a guide for naming other “w” words, such as “war” and “wedge.
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