That thing just fascinated me. I would find myself going around London doing all sorts of other things and at odd times I would see in my mind’s eye, almost as if it were projected in my head, the Rosetta Stone. To me, it just had some kind of special significance, but I couldn’t make head or tail of what it might be. Finally I was on a plane coming back to this country, when an idea hit me. It was rough, raw, crude, but it got me to thinking. Now what this scholar worked with was language chiseled into the stone. What he did was to take that which had been unknown and match it with that which was known, and thus found out the meaning of what hitherto had been unknown. Then I got to thinking of an analogy: that story always told in our family that I had heard on the front porch in Henning. The unknown quotient was those strange phonetic sounds. I got to thinking, now maybe I could find out where these sounds came from. Obviously these strange sounds are threads of some African tongue. My whole thing was to see if maybe I could find out, just in curiosity, what tongue did they represent. It seemed obvious to me what I had to do was try to get in touch with as wide a range of Africans as I could, simply because there were many, many tongues spoken in Africa. I lived in New York, so I began doing what seemed to me logical. I began going up to the United Nations lobby about quitting time. It wasn’t hard to spot Africans, and every time I could I’d stop one. I would say to him my little sounds. In a couple of weeks I stopped a couple of dozen Africans, each and every one of which took a quick look, quick listen to me, and took off. Which I well understand; me with a Tennessee accent trying to tell them some African sounds, I wasn’t going to get it.

I have a friend, a master researcher, George Sims, who knew what I was trying to do and he came to me with a listing of about a dozen people renowned for their knowledge of African linguistics. One who intrigued me right off the bat was not an African at all, but a Belgian. Educated in England, much of it at the School of Oriental and African Studies, he had done his early work living in African villages, studying the language or the tongue as spoken in those villages. He had finally written a book called in French, La Tradition Orale. His name: Dr. Jan Vansina, University of Wisconsin. I phoned Dr. Vansina and he very graciously said I could see him. I got on a plane and lew to Madison, Wisconsin, with no dream of what was about to happen. In the living room of the Vansinas that evening I told Dr. Vansina every little bit I could remember of what I’d heard as a little boy on the front porch in Henning. Dr. Vansina listened most intently and then began to question me. Being an oral historian, he was particularly interested in the physical transmission of the story down across the generations. I would answer everything I could and I couldn’t answer most of what he asked. Around midnight, Dr. Vansina said, “I wonder if you’d spend the night at our home,” and I did. The following morning, before breakfast, Dr. Vansina came down with a very serious expression on his face. I was later to learn that he had already been on the phone with colleagues, and he said to me, “the ramiications of what you have brought here could be enormous.” He and his colleagues felt almost certain that the collective sounds that I had been able to bring there, which had been passed down across the family in the manner I had described to him, represented the Mandinka tongue. I’d never heard the word. He told me that that was the tongue spoken by the Mandingo people. He then began to guess translate certain sounds. There was a sound that probably meant cow or cattle; another probably meant the bow-bow tree, generic in West Africa. I had told him that from the time I was knee-high I’d heard about how this African would point to a guitar and say ko. Now he told me that almost surely this would refer to one of the oldest stringed instruments among the Mandingo people, an instrument made of a gourd covered with goat skin, a long neck, 21 strings, called the kora. He came finally to the most involved of the sounds that I had heard and had brought to him – Kamby Bolongo. He said without question in Mandinka, bolongo meant river; preceded by Kamby it probably would mean Gambia River. I’d never heard of that river.