The story in the story

...is what needs the attention here. This story, told better here, here and here, is about the scholar as much as it is about the scholarship. There is too much made of the language of the Sea Islands, an easy fascination even more easily taken to romanticism of pure folk roots, or maroonism, or something in between. We leave thinking more about the prodigious personal will of Lorenzo Dow Turner, who took an English degree and ,on the one hand, shaped it into an interdisciplinary knowhow and made sense of someone else's ways of knowing and, on the other hand, administered more than one university during the course of a career.