Around the Stove : BEST...
When winter dusk fell in our remote Appalachian valley (this was 20 years ago, before they brought the phone lines in and invented the TV satellite dish), all the old bachelors and widowers would gather at the store, Slim’s Groc. Slim didn’t do much business after dark--a soda pop or two, a can of Redman--but he stayed open as long as anyone wanted to talk. The spot of honor was the ancient barber chair, where Slim still gave occasional haircuts (25). The men who took that chair as their right were the storytellers.
“I was up on Sounding Knob t’other evening, hunting bear . . .” one might begin. Or, “Have you ever seen a raven caught in a trap?” They told of men and women long dead; they repeated the jack tales that came down from their Celtic ancestors, peopling them with local names we all knew. They laughed about “Honey-Pet” Kincaid and marveled at Benson Hupman, who jumped up from his drinking to cry, “The White Horses!” and fled up the mountain, where they found him three days later, stone dead.
In her introduction to “Best Loved Stories Told at the National Storytelling Festival,” Jane Yolen says, “In some places of the world . . . people live closer to the story that lies within the word history. And surely they are made stronger by their association with the past. Their ghosts are not dead but alive . . . not stuck in the musty long ago, but breathing beside them.”
In recent years, there’s been a revival of the storytelling art, with hundreds of storytelling events all over the country and some 500 storytellers listed in the National Directory of Storytelling. There are therapeutic storytellers, tellers who specialize in tales of wood witches and hairy men, Native American and African-American tellers and at least one woman who specializes in stories from the Republic of Georgia.
“Best Loved Stories . . .” is a sampler, 37 stories from 20 years of storytelling at the National Festival in Jonesboro, Tenn. One story is drawn from the Venerable Bede (AD 730); another is a Nisquali Indian tale; one is a traditional Japanese tale; there are well known American tales such as “No News” as well as the Appalachian tales I’m more familiar with.
“Best Loved Stories . . .” was clearly designed as a “brag book,” demonstrating the breadth of the storytelling impulse, and since there’s something for every taste, there’s something that that same taste won’t care for. I skipped over most of the kings-and-princesses stories, but a modern version of just such a story made me laugh out loud. “Cinder Ellie” is a retelling of the classic tale set in a black neighborhood in East Baltimore. Here’s how the wicked stepmother makes her move:
“One hussy, the boldest of them all, had a heart as hard as a rock. The milk of human kindness had curdled in her breast. But she did have a pretty face, big legs, and great big hips. Oooh-wee!”
The famous ball of the original is transmuted into the inauguration ball for Baltimore’s first black mayor, and the magic coach and horses becomes a gold Mercedes Benz driven by “two seven-foot-tall white chauffeurs dressed in shining gold uniforms with fancy gold caps.” Of course the mayor’s son, Toussaint, falls in love with Cinder Ellie at the ball. “Toussaint and Cinder Ellie were married in the biggest Baptist church in East Baltimore and the reception was held in the Convention Center. And they lived happily, happily forever after.”
Donald Davis’ story collection, “Barking at a Fox-Fur Coat,” comes straight from the storytelling tradition we enjoyed on those evenings at Slim’s Groc., and it’s easy to picture storyteller Davis leaned back in the barber chair, weaving his magic. Donald Davis was a North Carolina minister for 20 years before he retired and took up professional storytelling, and I’ll bet Preacher Davis’ sermons packed the house.
Uncle Frank, the hero of most of these stories, is a wonderful character, a wise mountain patriarch equally adept at holding onto the votes of the Ratherton clan or solving the problem of the two sisters who clogged up the party line so bad, Uncle Frank paid for his telephone four months before he was able to use it.
This is Uncle Frank talking: “Son, don’t ever be afraid of getting caught. . . . Some people are so afraid of getting caught and embarrassed that they won’t even begin to do the first half of what it takes to make life worth living. You can’t buy adventure with shyness, son.”
And here’s Uncle Frank running a scam on a hitchhiking college boy: “ ‘You killed a friend of yours?’ Little Buchanan did everything but roll over with his feet in the air as he wiped the sweat from his forehead with the sleeve of his red blazer.
“ ‘Well, son, you don’t think I would kill somebody I don’t even know do you? I know better than that; I go to Sunday School!’ ”
Davis’ book is witty, generous of spirit and offers some very sophisticated insights into the human condition. The best storytelling is always about a particular place, a particular people, and you’ll get more pleasure the more you know and love the place that houses the story. It matters that Davis tells stories about rural North Carolina. It matters that he understands the significant social distinction between a dairy farmer and a tenant farmer, and I am sure that Davis has seen the feed salesmen come down the road with a big new truck full of their marvelous new manna. His Uncle Frank, in “Uncle Frank and the Crown Feed Boys,” knows just what to do with salesmen too.
Readers accustomed to collections of literary fiction may be disconcerted by storytelling collections, even ones as good as these. These stories are meant to be heard, not read. They are meant to be understood first time around. In the best of them, you can hear the storyteller’s voice in your mind’s ear. Told stories are relentlessly linear, and the interwoven density of our modern short story is absent. But these told stories are among our original sources of life information and entertainment; they are ur-stories, the source of all our more complicated fictions.