In today's Atlanta Journal-Constitution newspaper, there is a feature
article by Leonard Pitts, a Black American writer (Universal Press
Syndicate)whose ancestors were brought over from Africa as slaves. He
underwent DNA testing to find clues to his heritage and traveled to Africa
in hopes of finding his roots. In Sierra Leone he recalled that his " mother
used to use the word 'ninny ' and that it did not mean fool. The way my
mother and other black women of her age and Southen upbringing used the
word, it meant a woman's suckling breast. 'Give that baby some ninny', they
might say if an infant were squalling.

Playing a hunch, I ask somebody about it. It turns out that in the Mende
language, 'ninny' means breast.

My mother never traveled outside the United States.  Never heard of the
Mende.  Yet that word surfaced in her vocabulary and thus, in mine.  Call it
evidence that in the midst of brutalization and humiliation, even when one
is ripped away from every cultural sanction, from everything and everyone
that you know, somehow, some things survive to be passed on.  Small things.
Things you wouldn't think about twice under ordinary circumstances.  Except
that there are so few of them.  So you treasure every one."

Anne Grider, IBCLC, Marietta, Georgia, USA

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