I’ve Known Rivers: Lives of Loss and Liberation, by Sara Lawrence-Lightfoot, Penguin Books (New York), 1995, 644 pp., $14.95 (U.S.), $19.99 (Canada) softcover
There exists one book, which, to my taste, furnishes the happiest treatise of natural education. What then is this marvelous book?
–Jean Jacques Rousseau
Sara Lawrence-Lightfoot’s “I’ve Known Rivers: Lives of Loss and Liberation” is the 20th-century answer to Rousseau’s 18th-century question, “What is this marvelous book?” After considering the works of Aristotle, Pliny and Buffon, Rousseau wrote in “On Education” that he decided on Defoe’s “Robinson Crusoe.”
A wise choice, however, for today’s readers — particularly African Americans seeking that evanescent formula for success, and others who do not shun the periphery of voyeurism to gain insight — is Lawrence-Lightfoot’s collection of case studies of six achievers who have successfully negotiated the currents and undertows of the American dream. Assuming the posture of a social scientist, she acts as a recorder of testimony about human survival and a conduit for the griot-like conveying of wisdom to forward generations.
In her lightly edited transcriptions of their stories or “lessons,” Lawrence-Lightfoot presents a nearly scientific sampling of three women and three men — all African American — who have made it, often against considerable odds. They have bared their lives, suggests Lawrence-Lightfoot, so that others might learn the strokes critical in swimming America’s turbulent tributaries of racism, self-hatred and poverty.
Several of Lawrence-Lightfoot’s modern-day griots convey their knowledge of the treacherous currents of racism through tales of tragedy and survival. Katie Cannon, a professor of theology and a Presbyterian minister, for example, provides one of the cruelest lessons learned about the vortex of racism. Through the true story of five-year-old Donnary Butler, her favorite student in a North Carolina Head Start program where she was a teacher early in her career, Cannon recounts how the youngster was enticed into a lake “for whites only” by older, white boys who let him drown because they thought it was fun. According to Cannon, “Nobody did a thing because Black people knew nothing would be done [by the authorities]”.
