Letter from the editor

By Dan Mahoney

No matter what class it is, at the very top of each syllabus I write: If you don’t know where you are, you don’t know who you are. It’s taken from the novel Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison. A novel that reckons with—among other things—the uprooted invisibility of being a Black man in the US. When I first started using the quotation, I misattributed it to the great poet/novelist Wendell Berry… It sounds like Berry: simple, profound, insightful. You could swim a lifetime in the waters of that quotation: Where am I? Who am I? 

The attribution confusion springs, apparently, from Wallace Stegner’s 1986 essay, “A Sense of Place,” where he erroneously credits the line to Berry. Funny that an older white male writer would credit a line to another older white male writer; funny as in it happens all the time. 

Ellison uses the line toward the end of Invisible Man. Mr. Norton—an elderly, wealthy Bostonian liberal who supports Black colleges financially but considers Black students as little more than notches on his “Mr. Norton’s great works of virtue” scorecard—is lost and looking for help, but not from other white folks. The unnamed narrator of the novel sees Mr. Norton walking his way and says, Maybe there’s an embarrassment in it if he admits he’s lost to a strange white man. Perhaps to lose a sense of where you are implies the danger of losing a sense of who you are. That must be it, I thought—to lose your direction is to lose your face. So here he comes to ask his direction from the lost, the invisible.

As the narrator and Mr. Norton speak, the narrator says, Mr. Norton, if you don’t know where you are, you probably don’t know who you are. When asked by Mr. Norton exactly who he thinks he is addressing, the narrator informs him, I’m your destiny, I made you… 

After Stegner uses the line in “A Sense of Place,” he says of Berry, He belongs to an honorable tradition, one that even in America includes some great names: Thoreau, Burroughs, Frost, Faulkner, Steinbeck. Lovers of known earth, known weathers, and known neighbors both human and nonhuman. He calls himself a ‘placed’ person.

When Berry owns that line in Stegner’s context, he lays claim to a very specific lineage. When Ellison fashions that line in the context of Invisible Man, we see that same lineage as a continuum of erasure… The same words, differently. You could swim a lifetime in the waters of that quotation.

Dialogue is a practice, a way of doing, a relationship with material and process. It’s a point on a line, any line. It’s: Where are you going? It’s: Where have you been?

Dan Mahoney
Editor