Words You Can't Utter

But distant threats cast fearful shadows on Jack’s bucolic setting, chief among them the war they called “Cold,” and with it the nagging knowledge of every child and adult that in one blinding flash, extinction might fall from the sky. Red Russians were to blame, the grown-ups told him, and they branded their children’s psyches with the need to stop them at any cost. In grade school Jack’s air-raid drills were garnished with gruesome newsreels of atomic death, and he met his friends’ empty-eyed brothers as they returned from the Korean War, aware that in a few years his Chestnut Street gang would take their place. It was all too real. Barely on Jack’s radar in his compact boyhood universe were extreme poverty and hunger, unashamed imperialism, clerical atrocities, seldom-mentioned lynchings, dirty justice, and the majority opinion in all forty-eight states that blacks and natives should stay in their assigned places, be grateful white men were in charge, and accept the labels they were given. The common lexicon for African Americans varied with geography but had changed little since Reconstruction: “Negro,” “colored,” and in the South, “nigrah,” were intended as neutral and at times respectful appellations, while “nigger,” “niggah,” “coon,” “darkie,” “black,” and dozens more were not.

–p. 11

"One of the hardest things in life is having words in your heart you can't utter."

–James Earl Jones

The power of words, nearly impossible to exaggerate, has been eloquently described and praised. From Americans’ first days and their congenital embrace of chattel slavery and years later, mass immigration, a tidy dictionary of words and phrases could be collected to demonstrate how one group of Americans brands another. In the recent past, sensitivity and awareness of the labels we assign to one another has reached a high level, engendering new professions to deal with those terms. Certain nouns and pronouns are especially scrutinized. As the linguist John McWhorter and etymologists declare, words are living things, which like their speakers’ minds evolve through each generation.

The first chapters of A Traveler Came By reveal that our protagonist, Jack Shea, an older teen raised by his immigrant family in a remote Eastern lumber town, knows and speaks one dialect, a hybrid of the echo of Appalachian Scots-Irish and the Standard General American of radio and the new marvel, television. In his native tongue, the words “Negro” and “colored” respectfully and interchangeably refer to African Americans. No others need be used. Of course, he’s aware of the N word and several of its nasty companions, but his parents explained why they forbid such jargon, so he dutifully and rationally omits it.

When Jack becomes The Traveler on his first solo trip into the Deep South, he’s exposed to a host of more derogatives as well as behavior he finds at first strange, and then obscene. Since boyhood, Jack’s reason for being is to play baseball, and his first was is a black Brooklyn catcher named Campanella. He meets many Negro players in the ubiquitous pick-up games to be found throughout the rural south, and he’s pleased to learn that they have a counter-lexicon, less voluminous but nearly as nasty.