On the Need to Touch Grass

Midway through Ralph Ellison’s novel, Invisible Man, the nameless black hero, in flight from the oppressive South, finds a street vendor in Harlem selling hot yams. “A stove pipe reeled off a thin spiral of smoke that drifted the odor of baking yams slowly to me, bringing a stab of swift nostalgia. . . . At home we’d bake them in the hot coals of the fireplace, had carried them cold to school for lunch; munched them secretly, squeezing the sweet pulp from the soft peel as we hid from the teacher behind the largest book, the World’s Geography.” Driven by memories of his boyhood, he buys one yam after another and devours them. Feeling, for the first time in the novel, uniquely himself, confident and empowered, he cries, “They’re my birthmark. I yam what I am!” The allusion, of course, is to Popeye—and, as Popeye’s creator intended, to Yahweh—but Ellison adds a profound twist. He makes an individual’s singular, irreducible sensory memory the essence of identity itself.