The Language Lane

As a kid, one of my favorite movies was the 1989 boxing documentary Champions Forever. According to my parents, by the time I was about three or four I could quote the entire movie word for word. I decided to watch the doc over this past weekend. The film is mostly 80 minutes of hero worship for Muhammad Ali, but that’s not all that it is. The documentary does include some general background on the careers of a handful of other former heavyweight champions: Larry Holmes, Ken

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