Word: slave
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...black man arrives on a slave ship 300 years ago, knowing one English word: "Nigger." It is, or might as well be, his New World name. But Niger, the river, is his origin, his blood flow, which Calvin Baker, 24, a writer for PEOPLE magazine, traces through generations to the brackish wash of present time. Naming the New World (St. Martin's Press; 118 pages; $18.95) is a writer's gamble, a brief, fast-changing swirl of prose sketches, prose-poetry, and poetry standing naked. Such a recitation--it could be chanted, to drum beats, in an evening--might dissipate...
Baker writes of blood, mixed now with white; slave rebellion; slave capture. "Me, Ezra, and Mamma was all hid in a tunnel behind the wall of the cabin when light flashed between the slits in the board..." A few pages and generations later, a young American black man, well dressed, we assume, money in his pocket, we assume, watches poor blacks in the Caribbean and thinks, "I wanted a connection to these people, wanted to share pots of curried goat and warm lager in Trenchertown because I was one of them." Imagining: "Black people gonna rise up." Knowing sheepishly...
...kind, makes a jail visit. His junkie brother, guilty of a senseless killing, has managed to kill himself by driving a hypodermic needle into his heart. Rage, love, disgust, self-loathing--there are the beginnings here of a dozen strong novels to come, bound by racial memory of the slave ship: "At night I hear their voices, huddled close to each other. The memories beat louder and louder against my skull. Above it all, I hear the wailing, see the water...
...work of Darger's life was a saga titled The Story of the Vivian Girls, in What is Known as the Realms of the Unreal, of the Glandeco-Angelinnean War Storm, Caused by the Child Slave Rebellion. He wrote it in longhand, and then typed it out; the typescript ran to more than 15,000 pages. It is a seemingly endless, repetitious and obsessively detailed narrative of child martyrdom, massacre and Edenic innocence set on an imaginary planet largely populated by moppets...
...Book Tech, 50 percent of sourcebooks costs are copyright fees. Whether such stringent copyright laws are valid or not is debatable, but the laws are enforced and it is understandable to obey them. The other 50 percent is profit and expenses. "We're not making $100 sneakers with slave labor in Taiwan," Mr. Shepard reminded me. Certainly not--the production of Xeroxes of Voltaire's letters for Harvard students in Winchester, Mass. by a well-paid staff isn't really comparable to the practices of particular shoe companies. We accept Mr. Shepard's point, even if it is not entirely...