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�In Lazarre-White�s world, mysticism and madness walk hand in hand with the waking reality of so many young Black men in America, a reality that by any rational measure is itself insane.� �Susan L. Taylor
Passage tells the story of Warrior, a young black man navigating the snowy winter streets of Harlem and Brooklyn in 1993. Warrior is surrounded by deep family love and a sustaining connection to his history, bonds that arm him as he confronts the urban forces that surround him�both supernatural and human�including some that seek his very destruction.
For Warrior and his peers, the reminders that they, as black men, aren�t meant to be fully free, are everywhere. The high schools are filled with teachers who aren�t qualified and don�t care as much about their students� welfare as that they pass the state exams. Getting from point A to point B usually means eluding violence, and possibly death, at the hands of the �blue soldiers� and your own brothers. Making it home means accepting that you may open the door to find that someone you love did not have the same good fortune.
Warrior isn�t even safe in his own mind. He�s haunted by the spirits of ancestors and of the demons of the system of oppression. Though the story told in Passage takes place in 1993, there is a striking parallel between Warrior�s experience and the experiences of black male youth today, since nothing has really changed. Every memory in the novel is the memory of thousands of black families. Every conversation is a message both to those still in their youth and those who left their youth behind long ago. Passage is a novel for then and now.