Sitting Up with the Dead, page 14
Even more amazing than the story’s potential for difference, however, is its constancy: “Taily Po” is told throughout the South by groups who have historically defined themselves in reaction to, indeed against, one another. Not only is the story told by these disparate groups — highlanders and lowlanders, blacks and whites — it has become so expressive of their cultures that its origins are claimed by them as well. One says it’s an old Irish tale, another that it grew out of the African-American tradition. Whatever its real birthplace, in becoming Southern “Taily Po” became accessible to all who live in the South; by becoming enamored of it, the sometimes warring factions of Southern society, despite their enduring distinctions, betray that they, too, have become Southern. And that through centuries of living in the rural oven of the American South, fending off varmints and cutting back kudzu, they have come to share enough similarities to express their lives, fears, and fantasies through the same simple tale. One room or two, Smitty’s or Aggie’s, “Taily Po” will always take place in a cabin. A poor man’s house. The owner must always hunt for his dinner. Animals are held close and depended upon. Fear is a constancy. Death is a consequence of poor planning, or poor judgment. Stories like “Taily Po,” and there are hundreds of multiversion stories haunting the South, are spoken palimpsests: roadmaps of overlaid identities, all on their way to meeting at a middle ground, all on their way to becoming Southern.
Suzannah Lessard once wrote of a tidal estuary on Long Island, much like the northern beaches that silt up my memory, “The landscape was a map of my spiritual reality. It represented feeling that I could not feel and as art it expressed what I could not express. It was a substitute for an interior to which I had no other means of approach: it was a map of me.” Perhaps in a similar way, for a region imaginatively dependent on narrative rather than scenery, stories are the spiritual maps of the South. Into them are poured the elemental experiences dealing with weather and topography, disease, hunger, darkness, light — the ahistorical, very human responses to place — that pride and conscious selection tend to overlook in forging the collective self-image of a social, racial, or economic group. In stories there is room enough for everyone.
Considering “Taily Po” — or rather “Tail Een Po” — on its own terms, if the tale truly hails from Ireland, as Chuck Larkin’s “Folk Lorest” claimed, it is chilling to realize that a story conceived centuries ago in the rural Irish countryside still fits an existing profile in contemporary America (it is hard to imagine the tale taking root anywhere else in the country but the South). “Taily Po’s” popularity is a glimpse not only into the knitted threads of Southern culture, but of how very old the ways of the New World can sometimes be.
“You know, Smitty’s my dad,” said Veronica, coming out of the recording booth, letting the door soundlessly close behind her. “That’s his name: William Smith. He lives in California and loves to hunt and fish. So I borrowed him.”
I gave her a tired laugh. I had wrenched my back at home in Rhode Island — starting the lawnmower, of all the unglamorous things — and ached to lie flat. Just as I was leaving, however, the four of us got into a compulsive storytelling jag about pet near-death experiences. I don’t know, perhaps it was human revenge on the “Taily Po” creature. We couldn’t stop: Veronica led off with a miraculous hamster revival; I told a squashed hamster story; Henry added an account of a fish reanimation. We were all yawning desperately as the others talked, but we couldn’t help ourselves. It was like a game of pickup football, but played with stories, mostly for fun, a little competitive. I rounded off the night with the tale of Wilma, the Mean Siamese Fighting Fish, who had once jumped out of her bowl attempting to attack my finger, slid down a burner on our gas stove, and landed in the bowels of the oven. She had been out of water ten minutes when we finally recovered her body, shrouded in bits of ancient charcoal. The coda is that after floating on the surface for a while, she survived to swim another six years, ornery as ever, with a net over her bowl.
Kwame’s Tale
IDROVE THROUGH ROLLING FARMLAND to Columbia, the capital of South Carolina, in agony. Every twenty minutes or so, the sensation of being scored by a hot knife from my lower back to my left thigh would become so overwhelming I would have to stop the car and do stretching exercises. These greatly amused passing truckers, who would unfailingly hoot, honk, or whistle. One waved his undershirt out of the window. Adding to my increasingly bad mood was the fact that I was driving on Strom Thurmond Parkway (Thurmond, the notoriously conservative senator from South Carolina, will be one hundred when his term is up in 2002; he has used the filibuster so often, setting a record in 1957 by speaking for over twenty-four hours against civil rights legislation, that the Capitol could have been heated with his hot air alone).
As I rolled into Columbia, a church marquee asked me, Who Was the Last Man to Actually See Jesus? I was too hungry to give this question serious thought, and drove instead along an avenue of towering palm trees — seemingly out of place in the center of the state, far from the subtropical coast — along a strip well-stocked with used car lots and fast-food concessions, straight to Maurice’s Gourmet Barbecue. Maurice’s (also known as “The Piggy Park”) had been recommended to me on account of its unusual barbecue sauce. Instead of the typical sweet-and-tangy, brown, sometimes bourbon-laced sauce that holds sway throughout the South, Maurice had invented a mustard-based sauce that looks exactly like the reflective, neon-yellow paint used on no-parking lines. A label told me it included apple cider vinegar, mustard seeds, water, tomato paste, sugar, soya oil, peppers, salt, powdered onion, molasses, turmeric, paprika, spices and herbs. I ordered the “Little Joe Basket” which came with two hush puppies, french fries, coleslaw, and two ounces of pulled pork with Maurice’s barbecue sauce, served on a bun.
In local hangouts like Maurice’s, I confess to drawling my vowels and dropping my g’s. It is an almost unconscious gut instinct: the urge to blend. Unfortunately, anybody sounding like a South Carolina native would not have had to ask what hush puppies were. The waitress had both suspicion and pity in her eyes — maybe she thought I was an amnesiac — when she answered, “Fried corn batter, girl. Everybody knows that.” Later I read that hush puppies were reputedly invented by hunters or fishermen, and are ideally fried in the same fat used to cook fresh fish. The name comes from tossing leftovers to howling hunting dogs, ravenous at the smell of anything frying, to hush them up.
Later, sitting in a booth and tucking into my pulled pork, I wrote on my napkin, “Good taste — sweet yet piquant, complex — enough pork to prevent sauce building up too high a crescendo on tongue.” While I reviewed my meal, country and western music throbbed through nearby loudspeakers. All the tunes were curiously upbeat. Country notoriously indulges in the “tears in ma cigarettes and whisky” school of songwriting, but no one misbehaved in these songs; instead, they were about things like “staying up all night to watch my lover breathe.” For the first time since my meal arrived, I stopped eating long enough to take in my surroundings. The parking lot was actually a working, 1950s-style drive-in, outfitted with menus and speakers under a chain of individual carports. I had never seen one in person before. Above the carports rose an immense neon sign topped by a pig in a “Little Joe” tee-shirt, who wore a curiously world-weary expression, something like the tragic tough guy in an old movie. On the far side of the drive-in was the Piggie Park Employment Office, draped in an American flag and a banner that read, Christ Is the Answer. A sign in front of the building added, For All Have Sinned and Fallen Short of the Glory of God. I recalled the Jesus Was a Vegetarian notice from Georgia, and assumed there was some self-laceration involved.
There wasn’t much to see in Columbia that dated before 1865, the year the city was burned to the ground by Sherman’s men on their destructive trek from Atlanta to the sea (Sherman’s systematic destruction of the Georgia and South Carolina countryside was probably the first example of “total war” in modern history, and it effectively ended Southern resistance; Nazi strategists reputedly studied the Union Army’s methods in developing the blitzkrieg). One of the few complexes Sherman left standing was the University of South Carolina, a genteel-looking compound of bisque-colored buildings draped with bougainvillea, where my next story lay in wait.
Kwame Dawes had been recommended to me by the South Carolina Arts Commission as a storyteller “not to miss.” When I called him from Rhode Island, he sounded frantically busy, but agreed to tell me a tale. When I demurred, he said, “No, no. I’ve resigned myself to a crazy summer. You’re just fitting into a picture that’s already misdrawn.”
I liked his thinking, and agreed to meet him at the Welsh building — another good sign, I thought — on campus, where he teaches in the English Department (I later discovered he is also an award-winning poet, having received Britain’s Forward Prize for Poetry in 1994). I found Kwame in a white, utilitarian box of an office, lit by unforgiving fluorescent light. As twilight turned into darkness, the beautiful campus disappeared from his window, at first commingling with, then replaced by images of us, our mirrored selves growing ever more substantial, like two ghosts gaining confidence, in the blackening glass. Kwame’s reflection was contradictory, his casual polo shirt at odds with his close-cropped hair and full beard, clipped tight in a way that flattered his square jaw. The effect gave him a benign, Shakespearean dignity: Othello in his thirties, as Associate Professor of English.
“Fundamentally, at heart, I am a storyteller. I tell stories any chance I get, in whatever mode available to me.” Kwame targeted his essential self in the rhythmic clip-clop of a Jamaican accent. He had been born in Ghana, moved to England, lived in Jamaica through his schooling years, including university, put in a stint in Iowa, and received his Ph.D. in the cold and unlikely setting of Fredrickton, New Brunswick, in Canada. “Storytelling — not just me telling stories, but exchanging them, learning other people’s stories — is a way for me to get inside a culture. How people listen to my stories, too, is as important as the stories I collect from others; the questions they ask are clues to their thoughts, their culture … Storytelling, more than anything else, is a dialogue, and through dialogue you can discover what needs to be told. Minorities, especially, need to tell their stories, because if they’re not heard, they’re not part of the national consciousness. They don’t exist.”
A phrase from a novel I had been reading — Night Letters, by Robert Dessaix — bobbed up, begging consideration. “One of the advantages of being Australian,” he wrote, “is that you are a kind of blank to other people … and so of little interest to them until they have written on you.” So far this summer I’d had scant experience with dialogue. Narrative had flowed only in one direction: I listened, but I rarely told. The storytellers I met were nothing if not likeable, but on the whole they were an incurious lot. Like Dessaix, I was a blank to them, especially coming from Rhode Island (the name had a magical property in that it caused people’s mouths to drop open in looks of clueless incomprehension; the phrase “near Boston” snapped them shut again). I wondered what unspoken stories had been written on me, or whether the old, self-protective, isolationist instinct of the South manifested itself in the present as an indifference to lives lived elsewhere. Maybe I had simply been left blank.
I remarked to Kwame that he’d had rather a lot of experience with new cultures. “That’s why I have so many stories,” he laughed, explaining that in order to tell them all he’d become a playwright, poet, novelist, teacher, author of short fiction, teller of oral tales, and singer in a reggae band. But fundamentally, through all these incarnations, he was, simply, a storyteller.
THE STORY OF THE GIRL AND THE FISH
This is the story of the girl and the fish. Now a lot of people don’t know how we got water lilies. You see water lilies all over the place, and you think, How lovely! But the question is, where did these water lilies come from? Well, this is a simple story, and I’ll tell you, but you have to pay attention because it’s very sad. A very sad story.
Once upon a time there lived a man and his daughter and two sons. The two sons were very, very untruthful. They were terrible. They used to compete to see who could burp the loudest and who could fart the loudest, and that kind of thing. Now the daughter was a wonderful daughter. She was the oldest. Well, it turned out that after a while the father began to think he had to marry off this girl, as you know fathers tend to do. And so he went around the town asking all the men what kind of sons they had, so he could marry off his daughter.
Now she didn’t want to get married. She had other things in mind. So as soon as her father started that she became very sad. She’d go down to the river and she’d sing a sad song, and she’d say, “Hello trees, hello water, hello spirits. I’m sad today, I’m sad today.” The women who were washing the clothes down by the river would hear this sad song blowing through and they’d start to cry. Because they knew what was going on.
Well, the father tried and tried, and he finally found someone. A fellow who spent money. Knew money very well. Rich boy. The father came over and said, “You’re going to marry him.” And she said, “No, No! Not him! That is a terrible boy. That boy have no sense. That boy don’t know how to talk to people. That boy is a fool.” The father says, “You are, and that’s the end of that. In four months the wedding should happen.”
But it is almost as if all the elements conspired against this marriage. Because as soon as the father said that, it stopped raining. The first month, no rain. And this was the rainy season. The second month the ground was hard, tough, nothing could grow. And you know, the girl felt funny, because on one hand she was thinking, if it goes on like this there’s no way there can be a wedding, but on at the same time she could see people suffering … The third month, no rain. And father was getting very upset. There was no water in the house … The girl was the one who would go to the river and try to dredge up whatever water she could. One day she went to the river and everything was dry, bone dry. Just a little mud. And she started to cry. And she was crying, crying, crying, crying, and all of a sudden she heard somebody say, “Hey, you, what you doing up there?”
And she looked around and she saw nobody. She said, “I must be losing my mind!” So she started crying again. She said, “Now I’m losing my mind too!” And she heard, “Hey, stop that noise up there!” Then she looked, and she said, “Who is that? Who is that?”
Said, “Me, look down here.” And when she looked down on the ground in the bed of the river there was a fish. A fish sticking his head out of the mud. And she said, “You’re a fish.” And he said, “Yes, go to the top of the class.” So she said, “But you’re talking.” And he said, “Oh, you’re a really bright one.” She said, “But you’re a fish, you’re not supposed to be talking.” He said, “Well you are the idiot because you’re talking to me.” And she started to cry again.
The fish said, “Oh my goodness, why don’t you take your crying and go somewhere else with your crying. You know it’s hot out here, and I’m trying to get a little rest, and, and …”
She was crying, she wouldn’t stop crying. And she said, “You’re so mean and you’re so wicked and you don’t care …”
“Okay, okay, what’s the problem?”
So she told him the whole story, and the fish felt really bad. A nice fish. That’s the beautiful part. A nice fish.
“Give me the bucket.”
“My bucket?”
“Yeah, give me the bucket.”
So she gave the fish the bucket and Poof! So she waited. No fish, no bucket. And she said, “Oh my goodness, now I’ve lost my bucket to a fish. How am I going to tell everybody I lost my bucket to a fish?” So she started to cry again, and she heard, “Hey YOU!”
And up came the fish with a bucketful of the coolest, clearest water you ever saw in your life. And she said, “Where did you get it?” He said, “That’s for me to know, and you to find out. Take the water.” So she said, “Thank you.” And he said, “Hey, any time you need water, come down here.”
So she took the water home and gave it to her father, and her father said, “Thank you! Nice. Where you got it?” She said, “Oh, down by the river.” And her father said, “Okay, good, give me the bucket.”
And what the father did was he poured half the water for home use, and poured the other half in a huge vat. Everyday she’d come with three or four buckets of water and the father would pour half for home use, and half in the huge vat. And the vat was getting fuller.
Now you’re probably wondering what all this has to do with water lilies.
I nodded my head vigorously.
Time will tell.
So anyway, the vat began to get higher and higher, and ah, the girl and the fish became closer and closer. Ah yes, they’d sit down for hours and talk. Oh, it was beautiful, they were just loving it. Because you know, fish, they actually have some fantastic stories to tell, because they’re stories you wouldn’t know about, because they’re under the ground, in those deep waters. And she would sit, oh it was beautiful. And she would sing, “La, la, la, la, la,” and the women who were down by the river would hear this voice and say, “What a beautiful voice, what is going on?” And their hearts would be lifted up, they’d be so happy.
Well, after about four months, the father said to her, “You’re getting married next week.” And she said, “But Daddy, Daddy, we can’t get married! There’s no water, no water to bathe …”
“No, no, no, no,” he laughed. “Look over there in the vat.” And she saw all that water that her father had been saving. And the father started to make plans. Well, she was so upset, she ran down to the river and she was crying and bawling, and the fish came up, and the fish said, “What? What?”
