Drylongso: A Self-Portrait of Black America

To title this superb oral history, collected in the early '70s and published in 1980, Gwaltney chose a word that means "ordinary," but that also, unlike many terms in black English, has never quite crossed over into general use in American English. The conversations he shares have those same qualities: even though he was an academic anthropologist, Gwaltney came to his speakers not as some neutral outsider but as a friend and a fellow black American, gaining their trust through shared bonds of "kinship and amity." The results are vivid, individual, thoughtful, and frank, self-portraits of solidarity and ingenuity and of weariness and frustration. As one of his respondents puts it, "I have grown to womanhood in a world where the saner you are, the madder you are made to appear."