Jack Salzman, Cornel West Struggles in the Promised

382 // PATRICIA J.WILLIAMS
Someone else was Romany but "passing" because "people don't trust gypsies." I
learned a lot about wars in Armenia, potato famines in Ireland, civil war in
Ghana, oppression in Latvia, electoral fraud in Palau, independence movements
in Scotland, and the literary tradition of magical realism in South America. The
whole history of the last three centuries of global displacement of indigenous peoples
began to unfold from beneath the serene facade of these very American
friends with their Georgia locutions and New York accents and Midwestern vowels
and San Fernando Valley inflections—the rich, painful, nuanced, complex,
compressed amalgam that is American culture in its most generous sense
It's complicated, this creation of cultural identity, perhaps a more complicated
investment than mere words can capture. As I write, my son, at eighteen
months, rolls on the floor of my office, chattering happily to himself. He eyes the
floor-to-ceiling bookcases of African literature and Japanese poetry and
Encyclopedia Brittanicas and Hindu art with satisfaction, turning his body this way
and that, examining the literary landscape now sideways, now upside down. He
is so extremely comfortable, fascinated, acquisitive. By his gaze, he makes "my"
world his. He invests himself, he becomes part of this room. He rolls and sighs
and examines and pats his stomach. He is learning where he belongs and that
sense of belonging will make a certain property of the familiar.
The familiar is the property of belonging, I guess.
A Ghanaian student, years ago, asked me about the anonymity that I must suf-
fer because of my slave heritage. He could not conceive of such rootlessness, the
not knowing that afflicts both whites and Blacks in America, it frightened him.
He described the songs by which he could trace his family, his tribe, his ancestors,
back for generations. He described it as a system in which there was great respect
not just for one's lineage, but for the memorization and oral recitation of that lin-
eage. Words were so special because they bore the remains of one's ancestors and
loved ones. It was so important to him that words be handled with care, that they
be ordered and precise and caring. He called this the "property" of his life's inheritance.
There was no room for carelessness, for that would be to let part of oneself
die. I said that 1 could not conceive of being so thoroughly known. "Our property
is much more alienable," I said, almost idly, before I heard its import. He
agreed that there was something essentially anti-individualist, even anti-democratic
in this memorizing of one's legacy, but he insisted that wisdom has a particular
worded shape; to alter it is to result not just in blasphemy but in irretrievable
loss.
I do try, from time to time, to imagine this world from which he spoke—a
culture in whose mythology words might be that precious, a realm in which
words were conceived as vessels for communications from the heart, a society in
which words are holy, and where the challenge of life is based upon the quest
for gentle words, holy words, gentle truths, holy truths. I try to imagine for
myself a world in which the words one gives one's children are the shell into
which they shall grow, so one chooses one's words carefully, like precious gifts,