The Language Lane

After maneuvering and maneuvering, I finally ran out of shelf space for books at home. Definitely wasn’t going to win that competition with the library. So to clear space for any new works, I figured I had to donate some of the old. Or so it seemed. The very first shelf was a problem. I couldn’t let go of anything written by Du Bois. Some sort of third consciousness would have to kick in for that to happen. Besides, he has so much that I still need to consult. Neither is Chin

Every knowledgeable boxing fan has Sugar Ray Robinson rated among the top 5 boxers who ever competed. Many consider him, pound for pound, to have been the best, having possessed an unmatched blend of speed, power, skill, and style. The outlines of his biography are familiar: Born Walker Smith, Jr. in Georgia, taken by his mother to Detroit while he was a child, on to New York by the time he was a teenager, acquired the name Ray Robinson after borrowing a card to participate i

Only on rereading Langston Hughes’s The Big Sea for my course on African American Autobiography did I ponder name and geography connections. Hughes identifies his paternal great-grandfather as Sam Clay, a white man who lived in Henry County, Kentucky. Sam Clay, Hughes suggests, was a relative of Henry Clay, who was a Senator, Secretary of State, and several times a candidate for President. On this reading, Clay in combination with Kentucky made me think of another famous Clay