Author’s Note:
The Promise of Language has a different purpose than my previous memoir writing, most notably Voices of the Self: A Study of Language Competence (1991). In that book, I created a narrative that served as a data set for analysis as I intervened in conversations about relationships between formal schooling and speakers of African American Language. Then, drawing on the fields of education, linguistics, psychology, and sociology, I performed the analysis. Decades later, I shift rhetorical gears. The focus in this present book is on my evolution as a writer who has produced not only scholarship but poetry, fiction, and popular essays. The storytelling angle has shifted. Virtually all the dialogue and scholarly apparatus are gone. What remains is the central drama: my emergence through family, community, and school experiences against the backdrop of the Cold War and of the civil rights, Black Power, and Black Arts movements. This book is a prequel to all that I have accomplished in academe and is a contribution in the tradition of African American letters on how language shapes lives and how lives shape language.
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