After thirty years and 106 issues, the question that lingers for many who encounter Callaloo, and which the journal has never sought to answer beyond printing a recipe and a brief reflection in its inaugural issue, is: what is it? To what does callaloo refer? Simply, not a thing. Begun in 1976, the journal itself is the record of a three-decades-long process of making concrete a sound, to feed an aesthetic. What lies behind that sound are metaphor, translation, invention, and the processes by which people satisfy the hunger of a new rootedness. Charles H. Rowell's seduction by a word that neither he nor assistant professor Leila H. Taylor could spell leads us thirty years later to a unique exploration of the relationship between material practice, aesthetic culture, and oral tradition in the African Diaspora.