ABSTRACT
It still bothers me—what those impressive immigrant workers did in Cobden Illinois in 1980. I’ll start with my sadness—a sadness that I explored a few years ago in my Vernacular Eloquence. 1 That sadness came back strongly as I revisited Illegal Alphabets to write this little essay. But I’ll go on to describe some completely different reactions I had during this recent writing—and finally my perplexity at feeling whipsawed between contradictory reactions.
