All language is a code — this word represents this thing. Even those of us whose business is language perhaps sometimes take for granted the amazing gift it is. Language allows us to think; it gives us place and meaning and memory. As Annie Sullivan says in The Miracle Worker, "I wanted to teach you – oh, everything the earth is full of, Helen, everything on it that’s ours for a wink and it’s gone, and what we are on it, the light we bring to it and leave behind in words, why, you can see five thousand years back in a light of words, and everything we feel, think, know – and share, in words, so that not a soul is in darkness, or done with, even in the grave." That’s what makes the last scene of the movie so powerful: we realize what it is that Annie has given Helen, what desolation it would mean if she never understood what words are.
The climactic final scene of The Miracle Worker:
Coded language takes it a step further — the code within the code; the word that means not only what it seems to mean, but something more. Poets, by definition, work with coded language – that’s what a metaphor is, after all: a code not only for a thing, but for a feeling. As a poet, you hope that the reader gets the inference you intend, but the wonderful part of poetry is that the reader supplies her own inferences, too. Metaphor is a code of layers, the meaning of which is varied and complex and intensely personal – which is why we poets love it so much. To use Orson Welles’ phrase about directing a movie, if you’re a language person, fooling around with metaphor is like being allowed to play with the world’s biggest toy train set.
Sometimes, however, coded language is only obvious to those in the know. On a superficial level, it can be away of establishing "coolness," of membership in the group. Think of teenagers, who have since days of yore created their own terms and expressions that have left generations of parents scratching their graying heads: "Cool" means "hot;" "sick" means "fabulously cool"; and so on. (When my own sons were teens, I made it a rule that my students had to serve as translators for me, so that at home I could at least maintain the illusion I knew what was going on.)
More significantly, coded language can provide a cultural identity for people in danger of being absorbed into or abolished by a larger, more powerful group. The rich cultural history of African-Americans is an example of this phenomenon. For enslaved African-Americans, the metaphor of the Israelites in bondage in Egypt provided both an outlet for expression and a way of communicating within the group (not for nothing was Harriet Tubman called "the Moses of her people"). Talk of freedom was expressly forbidden; on the other hand, church services and Bible stories were actively encouraged by a white ruling class as a way to save "heathen" souls and to remind slaves of their place. As a poet, I find it fascinating that most slaveholders seem to have completely missed the possibility of any other meaning in these stories. The slaves, on the other, got the metaphor and used it to maintain a cultural identity distinct from the one the slaveholders sought to impose on them. Is this because many of these enslaved people came from cultures in Western Africa that have a rich history of poetry and storytelling? I don’t know enough to answer this, but I can recognize poetic justice when I see it.
African-American culture continued (and continues) to provide this enriching layering of language. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the blues recordings of the 1920s, in particular the "Blues ladies," who sang the most sexually explicit lyrics without ever saying a dirty word. For those who got the code, it must have been hysterically funny to listen with those who didn’t. Two of the most raunchy lyrics are "My Handy Man," written by James P. Johnson and sung by Ethel Waters; and "Kitchen Man" by Bessie Smith.
Ethel Waters
In "My Handy Man," Waters sings of the wonderful fella who "shakes my ashes, greases my griddle,/churns my butter, strokes my fiddle," who, "when my furnace gets too hot/[is] right there to turn my damper down:"
Sometimes he’s up long before dawn
Trimming the rough edges on my front lawn.
Ooh, you just can’t get away from it – he’s such a handy man!
He never has a single thing to say
When he’s working hard.
I wish you could see the way
He handles my front yard!
My ice don’t get a chance to melt away.
He sees I get a fresh piece every day.
Lord, that man is such a handy man!
As for "Kitchen Man," sung by the redoubtable Bessie Smith, I leave it to you to decode:
His jelly-roll is so nice and hot,
Never fails to touch the spot.
Oh, I can’t do without my kitchen man!
His frankfurters are oh so sweet,
Crazy ’bout his sausage meat –
Oh, I can’t do without my kitchen man.
Bessie Smith
You get the idea. (You can listen to both these recording at a wonderful website – Red Hot Jazz . It contains an extensive archive of pre-1935 blues and jazz recordings. The direct link to Ethel Waters’s page is here ; for Bessie Smith, click here .)
But these songs, and the others by the great Blues ladies of the era, are not just about singing raunchy lyrics and putting one over on the stuffed-shirts who might be listening. They are expressing female sexuality in the only acceptable way at the time – with humor and in code. Sometimes, that is the only way we are able or willing to hear things.
There are times, however, when coded language is used to express things that are unacceptable on another, more sinister level. With the election approaching, there has been a lot of discussion about what the candidates really mean. When Obama says McCain is "erratic," does he mean "unstable," or perhaps "too old"? What does McCain actually mean when he asks, "Who is Obama?" and calls him "that one"? Below is a clip from the August 3 edition of ABC’s "This Week with George Stephanopolis," in which David Gergen, former advisor to Presidents Reagan, Bush Sr., Clinton, and the current Bush, describes what as a Southerner he sees as being code for "uppity" in anti-Obama commericals:
So where do we get our secret decoder rings, so we can unravel all this mystery? All I know is that language matters. Meaning, coded or not, matters. "Be aware," as Sister Rose of Assisi, my 9th grade English teacher used to say.