The Language Lane

I have been unsuccessful in my attempts to eulogize Andrew Vachss, my brother, mentor, and biggest supporter for more than 50 years, who passed away December 27. Fortunately, voluminous words in public spaces indicate his phenomenal achievements, though he was mainly about the work and not much about garnering praise. Andrew would say just be sure to make your ripple in the pond, and the rest will sort itself out. I think the poet Vallejo wrote something to the effect that “t

Seems the Color Purple movie is a quiet staple of holiday-season television. Many see it as an inspirational story of a journey to selfhood. The frenzied controversy of bygone years, especially in the immediate aftermath of the holiday-season release in movie theaters in 1985, is hardly known to new generations of viewers. They must dig in the archives to discover the hot takes on the Phil Donahue Show, in the New Republic, in scores of newspapers, and at literary sessions su

While Coop and I were talking about my recent post on the Class of 1953, we mentioned several New York City backcourt men we admired back in the day, namely, Dean Meminger, Tiny Archibald, and Charlie Scott, all born in 1948, all playground legends, all members of NBA championship teams, all actors in each other’s stories. So I’m thinking that these facts are the core of another documentary. Dean Meminger (5/13/1948--8/23/2013) Although a native of South Carolina, Dean “The D

“Wonder how Rittenhouse gon do with the whole Stevie thing?” “Semple, you know I try to understand you the best that I can. But I am really lost on this one.” On an unseasonably warm day in November, the two men were back on one of their favorite park benches discussing recent news. The sunshine beamed conspicuously bright and flitting birds seemed especially playful. “Find yourself, Junior Boyd. You was a little nappy-headed boy just like me. Stevie singing about those days

I never tire of teaching Their Eyes Were Watching God because I’m always interested in characters who emerge from relative voicelessness to become powerful language users. This is the trajectory of Janie, who has little say as her grandmother pushes her toward the well-to-do Logan Killicks and into a marriage of (in)convenience. She escapes that marriage, while still a teenager, by running off with husband number two, who appears to be kinder than the man who demanded her hum

I start by apologizing to my good friends Glenn Cooper and the late Leroy Charles. Both were born in 1953 and were very good high school basketball players in New York City. But when I think of their age peers---and my idea for an ESPN 30 for 30---I don’t consider them. I think of the intersecting narratives of Mel Utley, Fly Williams, Larry Fogle, Phil Sellers, and World B. Free. You could have found numerous scouts to claim that each of these players possessed the most pote

To illustrate the point of textual conversations in American literature, I had students read Toni Morrison’s Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination. In addition, I had them read some of the novels that Morrison writes at length about, namely, Willa Cather’s Sapphira and the Slave Girl, Edgar Allan Poe’s The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket, and Ernest Hemingway’s To Have and Have Not. They understood Morrison’s idea about an Africanist presence

As we know, somebody will always come to your party, eat up as much food as possible, kill all the liquor, and then tell you how you should have made the party better. I won’t do that after working through the 1100-pageAfrican American Poetry: 250 Years of Struggle & Song. I sincerely appreciate the effort of the editor, Kevin Young, who underplays his own contributions, by the way. Nonetheless, he does a great job representing a tremendous tradition and including a fair numb

Semple hadn’t talked to his good friend in a while. Texting felt too clumsy, so he went old-school and called him on the phone, land line no less. After greetings and small talk, Semple got to what was troubling him. Man, Junior Boyd, I’m all the way messed up over here. I’m stuck on that Raising Kanan and don’t even wanna dig it that much. I watched an episode myself, Semple. But the Southside drug angle doesn’t hold me captive. That’s what I’m saying. I wanna be free, too.

I mentioned in the last post that I once commented about the need for a literary movement for Larry Holmes. I thought those remarks, made in ” Konch” magazine years ago, were still available online. However, I was told that they aren’t. So, because people asked---and because of another Muhammad Ali documentary---I include some of them on “The Language Lane.” Ishmael Reed says Larry Holmes had been a greater boxer than Muhammad Ali. I’m not going for that one. Nor is Vorris Nu

As Manny Pacquiao nears the end of his boxing career, we are hearing the story of his greatness more and more. Hype, after all, is what announcers are paid to do. And Pacquiao has made it easy, having won recognized world titles in six weight divisions. (I don’t count Ring magazine.) He has been a champion at 112, 122, 130, 135, 147, and 154 pounds. It’s an incomparable feat. Almost. If you put pressure on the semantics of “world title,” you figure that if different sanction

When Leroy Howard Dewer, Jr. hit Senior Lieutenant Richard Maroney with a two-piece in A yard at Attica Penitentiary on the afternoon of September 8, 1971, it was the spark that lit a powder keg that was long in the making. As part of a rising tide of consciousness nationwide, inmates had been requesting and then demanding improvements in prison conditions. They wanted more favorable work arrangements, enhanced medical care, reduction in exorbitant commissary prices, and adeq

Semple was perplexed as he sat on Boyd’s sofa engaged in the news streaming from the flat screen on the wall. He had not tried to focus this much on television since the Olympics. He sensed all the human tragedy in Kabul. But being who he was, he could not quite grasp all the reportage. “One thing I don’t get, Boyd. They keep saying the fall of Kabul. I don’t get the language. It’s not like an earthquake hit and all the buildings toppled over.” “Of course not, Semple. It’s ju

After a wait of more than three decades, we have a new installment of Ishmael Reed’s The Terribles. Long intended to be a trilogy, if my recall of a Reed interview is correct, the first entry was the 1982 The Terrible Twos, a futuristic take on matters such as Christmas commercialism, ethnocentrism, settler colonialism, environmentalism, religion, and Washington politics---all conveyed through the metaphor of ruling-class America as a two-year-old, impulsive, selfish, always

Junior Boyd approached Semple, sitting in a familiar spot on the park bench, with excitement, “I just heard that the Cleveland Indians are changing the name to the Cleveland Guardians.” “Is that right?” responded Semple in a low-key manner. “I don’t know what they guarding. Not no championships lately, that’s for sure. But it’s the right move. They got rid of that dumb Chief Wahoo logo a while ago, so it’s a good move to go all the way. It’s sort of a Prince move, the basebal

“Perhaps the black intellectual we still have the most to learn from is David Walker.” This perhaps is the pivotal statement in Jesse McCarthy’s “Language and the Black Intellectual Tradition,” an essay included in his engrossing Who Will Pay Reparations on My Soul? For McCarthy, Walker is a key apostle of the prophetic criticism that calls for a radically restructured and more just America. Indeed, Walker’s 1829 classic, An Appeal to the Coloured Citizens of the World, but i

Next month, Amistad, an imprint of HarperCollins, will release The Minister Primarily, a novel by John Oliver Killens. The manuscript remained unpublished when Killens died in 1987. Ishmael Reed has written a knowledgeable and spirited introduction. Of course, I’m eager to read the book. I’m also reviewing comments I made when I read the manuscript more than a decade ago. I suspect the novel will hold up better than my comments, which are included in my biography of Killens p

“Wait, Junior Boyd. You’re fading out. You must be moving around. Oh, that’s better. Watch the playoff game with y’all? That’s kinda cool. Everybody needled up. But I don’t know what I’m looking at anymore. I can’t keep score.” “I don’t understand, Semple.” “Well, I’m watching the game the other night and the guy scores 40 points. Great game. Then it got greater. He had 15 assists and the announcer said he was responsible for 70 of the team’s 100 points. But I saw a teammate

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

My introduction to the energetic, charismatic wordsmith DMX was in the winter of 1998. I, like many others, became familiar with him from his verse on the now infamous LL Cool J song “4,3,2,1,” which featured him and other artists including Method Man, Redman, and a then-unknown Canibus. Following that song, I would be introduced to one of my favorite mixtapes of all time, Canibus vs DMX. In many ways, DMX captured the complexity of urban street culture, and he did so with w