Sitting Up with the Dead, page 31
“One thing I’ve always known about myself,” she thought, “is that I would be a fine queen.”
Just before they were wed, the king added one condition: she must never butt into his business. She never explicitly agreed, and one day, sure enough, when he made an unusually poor decision, she butted in. In a rage the king ordered her to leave, to go back to her daddy’s house. She meekly assented, but before she left she begged to cook him one last meal and to take one souvenir of having been queen. He agreed, and she fed him so many sweets and so much wine that he fell sound asleep.
When she could tell the king wasn’t going to be waking up anytime soon, the farmer’s daughter loaded him into the wagon and she hauled him on down to her daddy’s house. When they got there she dragged the king inside and dumped him in the bed that had been hers as a child. Then she climbed in bed beside her husband and slept till morning. When the king woke up and saw her in bed beside him, he said, “What are you doing here? I told you you were supposed to go on back to your daddy’s house! Now why are you here?” And she said, “Honey, maybe you ought to look around and see just where you are.” And the king looked around. “Where am I anyway?” “Don’t you remember? You told me that I could take one thing on back to my daddy’s house with me, and there isn’t a single thing I like more about being queen than being with you …”
The king was so moved by her having chosen him as a souvenir, especially when she could have had any of the treasures in his palace, that they made up, went back home, and ever afterward she butted into his business with impunity.
“It’s not critical,” Mary said, after we’d returned from our ride, sitting on the sofa in her parents’ darkened living room, “that I take you into my memory when I tell stories.” She explained that when she tells a tale she knows the minutiae of its landscape, the color of a character’s hair, her perfume, the cast of the sky, but she is careful not to enforce those details on her listeners. She didn’t want to be what Karen Vuranch has called a storytelling Nazi. Although desperately sleepy (I had been musing out of Karen’s window the night before, and had driven six hundred miles in the course of the day), I roused myself to consider her methodology. Travel writing, I said between deep yawns, was exactly the opposite. To pull flesh and breath out of narrative memory, it was critical to report the details: that she was curled up on one foot, playing with her hair; that she was giving me the bed she had slept in as a little girl, in a room full of stuffed animals.
When performing for an anonymous audience, I believed Mary did precisely as she said — she offered outlines, and let her hearers color them in. A single listener, however, was captive to her memory. The following morning she drove me a few miles down the road to Big Spring, an abandoned village clustered at a backroads intersection, fast receding into memory. Its shops were empty and crumbling. One in particular, the former general store, was refined even in dilapidation, its façade a puzzle of oblong windows, crowned by a humble wooden pediment that for all its modesty claimed a tracery of diamond shingles. Two screen doors hung at awkward angles at the entrance like crooked front teeth.
This is where one of Mary’s favorite stories — “The Ghostly Young Woman in Brown” — was set. (I knew the tale as “A Mother’s Love,” from The Moonlit Road.) These are the basic elements: a traveling woman and her baby are found dead, and are buried by the local community. Afterwards a young woman approaches a dairy farmer seeking milk, or in Mary’s version, she petitions the owner of the general store. She receives the milk and then disappears. Eventually someone follows her to the cemetery and hears a muffled cry. Her coffin is opened and her baby, mistakenly left for dead, is healthily crying inside, holding a fresh cup of milk.
Mary had told me this tale the day before, and as she spoke my mind had followed her words with pictures. I saw the young woman walking beside the sea, approaching a weather-beaten shop on Cape Cod. I knew the cemetery as well: it was sandy and grown over with the wild tea roses that bloom in June.
I didn’t mind in the least being kidnapped by the daemon of Mary’s mind’s eye. But I thought it intriguing that a storyteller in this family of storytellers (“Making everything a long story is the Hamilton in you,” someone had said at dinner), ultimately didn’t trust words. She used them marvelously — Mary was easily one of the most fluidly engaging tellers I met — but she and her parents betrayed a nagging urge to anchor their words in the physical world. Besides Karen Vuranch, none of the other storytellers had thought to underline their tales in witnessed landscapes; no one else insisted on such concreteness. I put it down to the driving practicality of this landlocked place, wonderfully caught in “The Farmer’s Smart Daughter.” Unlike Jack, or Brer Rabbit, the farmer’s daughter wins the day through cleverness steeped in practicality, not through cunning. I had expected her to challenge the king through a metaphysical game of words, to play cat and mouse. But instead she had taken his riddles at face value and solved them with the material things of ordinary life: a nanny goat, a blanket, a quail. Nothing fancy, just serviceable items in a land squabble. The boy who would climb a silo to see what the neighbors were doing, “then do that,” and so run the farm in the event of his father’s death, was clearly a relative of the farmer’s smart daughter.
It was also evident, however, that this belief in the seen world, as opposed to the ever-encroaching invisible world of the seaboard, had not been bred from an immunity to coastal-style disasters. In addition to the 1937 flood, Bobby had spoken the previous evening of a tornado that touched down unexpectedly in 1974. Thirty-one had died in a town of only three thousand. He recalled the winds uprooting tombstones; he had been among the rescue crews that carried bodies to a gymnasium-turned-morgue. But events like these did not seem to inspire ghost stories. They were anomalies within man’s beneficent partnership with the earth. The story record rather stressed heroism, humor, and family. The one ghost story that Mary told was not only a tale borrowed from Georgia, it pivoted on domestic sentiment and love from beyond the grave: very, very different stuff from “The Gray Man” and “Lavinia Fisher.”
The one truly scary moment I had at Mary’s, I am ashamed to say, was self-inflicted. The previous evening I had fallen asleep immediately, but woke in the middle of the night, opened my eyes, and looked up at the ceiling. Directly above the bed floated a giant green skull, winking at me. I bit the blanket rather than scream — a decision I now applaud — and forced myself to understand what I was seeing. Finally, after about ten horrible seconds, I figured it out. The answering machine was signaling that a call had come in while we were at dinner by flashing its green indicator light. This shone up through the interior hardware of Mary’s bedside lamp, and the chartreuse shadow cast on the ceiling just happened to resemble a death’s head. Honest.
Just as I was leaving Hidden Spring Farm — I had arranged to meet a Japanese storyteller named Oyo in Danville, Kentucky, three hours drive back east — Mary stopped me. There were two more things I had to see. One was simple: the barn where Bobby’s tobacco leaves had been hung up to dry. She walked me into an open shell of a building so unexpectedly beautiful it made me gasp. The tobacco leaves, hanging from the ceiling and on pegs along the side walls, conjured up an impossible concept: an ephemeral cavern. The leaves were each about two to three feet long. Their edges curled like lace, but otherwise they hung straight down in shades of yellow and brown like a clutch of paper-thin, fragile stalactites. The barn had a reedy smell, something between freshly mowed grass and an unlit cigarette. “I’ve never smoked,” said Mary. “You should see the gum that comes off on your hands from just touching the leaves.”
The other thing she wanted to show me was a little more complicated. Mary wanted me to see Flaherty High, where she and her siblings and parents had gone to school. She wanted me to see St. Martin of Tours church, a place of comfortable holiness, with stained light pouring through the windows and a faint odor of grape juice, where she had been confirmed. She wanted me to see the cemetery where her ancestors lay. “Thats my uncle,” pointed Mary, “and over there, see? Those are my grandparents, and there are my great-grandparents.”
I could practically see roots curling out from the soles of Mary’s feet into the Kentucky soil. But the real reason she wanted to show me St. Martin of Tours was to give substance to another tale, an unfinished story she calls “The Baptist Boyfriend.” Mary once had a suitor who lived just over the hill on a nearby farm (“When I first called and said it was Mary Hamilton, his mother asked, ‘Of which Hamiltons? The Hamiltons from over the hill?’ That meant us: the Catholic Hamiltons.”) She had invited the boyfriend to Christmas Eve service at her church. She remembered, she said, having been so proud of the purple vestments, the decorated statue of Christ, the music, the splendor of the holiday pageant. He had gone stiff with horror. “You worship monuments,” he told her later. That anyone could use the word “monument” to refer to Christ on the crucifix flagged his speech, she thought, as some kind of foreign language.
“He thought we were heathens. You know, you think you have a shared geographical experience — I mean, he lived in the very next valley. But we didn’t share the same spiritual reality at all. I guess the point of this story is that we can’t imagine we know someone else’s experience, just because we’re neighbors.”
Flannery O’Connor wrote a short story that makes a similar point. In “Everything That Rises Must Converge,” two women meet on a bus shortly after desegregation, one white, one black, both wearing the same Godawful ugly purple-and-green hat. The white woman — elderly, living in a half-imaginary memory of a paternalistic South — offers the black woman’s young son a shiny penny, and his mother takes umbrage and strikes out with her handbag. Moral: even though they wear the same hat, the women perceive the world in vastly different terms. And yet, desegregation was an umbrella over both of their heads. They rode the same bus, just as Mary and her Baptist boyfriend did, day in, day out, on their way to Flaherty High School.
Oyo’s Tale
I ARRIVED EARLY AT THE YMCA on Danville’s main street, and took a moment to survey the town. It looked a sturdy, prosperous, profoundly unexciting place, full of solid citizens in solid houses, the latter built when construction crews used plaster instead of wallboard. I was wallowing in the happy discordance of finding a Japanese storyteller there, when a voice from inside the Y shouted, “Hey, you Pam? Come on in here, girl!”
My jaw dropped like a nutcracker’s. “Are you Oyo?” I asked.
“Sure am. Come here and have a seat.”
Framed by a rainbow of children’s hands imprinted on the wall behind her was a large African-American woman in a brown and purple caftan incongruously paired with thick, white running shoes, her hair bound up in an open turban with cornrows running out the back. Her magnificent smile drew every feature of her face into a gesture of such warmth and welcome that I instantly forgave her for not being Asian.
“I thought you’d be Japanese,” I said in a small voice. “You know, your name, Oi-o …”
Oyo laughed so hard her cornrows came to life, dancing every which way behind her head.
“It’s ’O-yo.’ Now tell me: do I look Japanese?”
I had to admit she did not. Oyo was Kentucky’s gift to me that afternoon. Smart, and so down-to-earth she was practically subterranean, I realized after half an hour in her company that I had taken my shoes off, put down my notebook, and shown her the gray roots beneath my suspiciously dark hair (I honestly can’t recall why I did this). She told me a Yoruba creation myth from Africa — “I’m wearing this outfit for your benefit, girlfriend. I usually wear jeans” — but in spite of checking my tape player several times to make sure it was recording, when I tried to play it back I found the tape completely empty. In a way I was relieved. Oyo’s best story was Oyo: a creation unequaled by any narrative.
Oyo had been born in Kentucky and raised in Ohio by Cousin Anne. “A part-time voodoo woman and bootlegger … The IRS did a sting on her. When Cousin Anne went to prison, I came back home.” Instead of returning to her mother and six brothers and sisters, however, she went to live with two old women. “Why I was the chosen one, I never understood,” she said, but although she wasn’t raised by her mother, the two became close later in life.
“My mother always talked in code. Things like, ‘A woman can run further with her dress up than her pants down.’ I never knew where she got this stuff… Another favorite was, ‘You’ve been married once — you’re a Mrs. — so now every ship will sail under the same flag.’ That was a reference to my tribing with other men I didn’t marry, and having their children.”
A few years ago Oyo performed a slave wedding for Kentucky’s public broadcasting television station. Slave weddings had not been legally binding, but were important events on the plantation, traditionally overseen by “the Missus.”
“Everyone would attend, white and black, so we got a crowd of about eighty to a hundred people together. And they would have brought tons of food, so we did that too, just like in the old days. Old fashioned food like Hoppin’ John [black-eyed peas and rice] and Corn Pone [cornbread mixed with onions and corn kernels]. But was it hot? It was hot. Too hot for couth. I always say, any time we try to do anything ethnic, God heaps the heat on us. Can you imagine working in the fields in heat like that? I’d have chopped off my feet and hands before I’d have picked cotton …”
Oyo had played the role of the Griot, or storyteller, who initiates the wedding ceremony. First, there was drumming, and then a calling of names, when she had asked everyone in the community to call upon the spirits of their ancestors. “You know,” said Oyo, “to keep things holy. Did I mention that it was hot?”
As Oyo spoke and smiled — it was almost one gesture — her eyes turned up at the outside corners, forming the lovely arc of a second smile on the upper half of her face. It filled the dingy, cavernous room with warmth, outshining the overhead fluorescent lights. Because the YMCA management had decided to close the facility, it was nearly empty: just a pool table and some bookshelves and chairs standing around awkwardly in the center of the room, as if awaiting their next incarnation in life.
The chief feature of the slave wedding, said Oyo, was Jumping the Broom. Diane Williams, a storyteller I had met briefly outside Jackson, Mississippi, had also talked about this custom — the act that indicated a slave couple was actually married. Diane had researched its origins, and found that in Africa jumping over a broom was considered bad luck. “So it’s indigenous to the States,” she had said, “with regional variations. In Virginia, for instance, they jumped three times; in Kentucky, only men jumped.” In Oyo’s ceremony, the broom had been laid on the ground, and the couple jumped backwards over it. “The idea was whoever landed first would rule the house.”
“Who landed first?” I asked eagerly. “The bride or groom?”
“They tied. Did I make it clear to you it was Godawful hot that day?”
Oyo picked up something that had been lying on the desk in front of her and absently started flipping it. Her crimson nail polish glinted under the lightning-white lights. It looked like a shoehorn with hair.
“What’s that?” I asked.
“A cow-tail switch from Uganda. It’s a symbol of authority. I got it from a cookie lady in Louisville.”
Oyo had lived in Louisville for many happy years, “a real cultural hub,” as she described it, where she and a group of friends used to get together to cook and then “lay around on the floor like a bunch of sated lionesses.” But she had moved to Danville for work. “If the world should ever end,” she said, “this is the place to be. Danville will give you another decade of good living.”
I asked her if she got along with folks here. She gave me a look that took me straight back to Granny Griffin. A real, you-don’t-know-what-door-you’re-opening-girl look.
“Well, I kind of rocked the boat immediately,” said Oyo, who proceeded to tell me the following tale. When she had first come to Danville and was looking for a place to live, someone had put her in touch with the local black Baptist church. Because its current minister owned his own home, the manse was unoccupied. So they offered it to her for a minimal rent. Oyo hadn’t been there long when she discovered varmints in the fireplace, and so called the deacons, who were in charge of maintaining the property. The deacons brought in a fumigator named Buddy — “a little old white guy,” as Oyo described him. While the deacons were seeing to other matters, Buddy put his hand on Oyo’s back and started rubbing it up and down. “Do you ever fool around?” he whispered.
Oyo threw what she called a dignified fit, and asked the deacons to escort Buddy out. Then she brought up the matter before one of the church committees. The response was, “Oh, let’s just keep this quiet. I’m sure he’s never done anything like this before …” Oyo threw a bigger fit — “Like that’s true,” she said in disgust — and lodged a complaint with the local NAACP.
Shortly afterward, two of the deacons arrived at her front door. “Now don’t get mad,” they said to Oyo, “but do you ever, you know, do woo woo?”
“Do I do what?” asked Oyo.
“You know, woo woo,” they said mysteriously, bringing their hands close to their faces and wiggling their fingers while they made Twilight Zone noises. “Did you woo woo Buddy?”
Oyo was mystified. Finally one of them whispered, “Voodoo. You know, spells. Buddy the Fumigator was never sick a day in his life, and yesterday he just up and died. We were wondering if, maybe …”
Oyo had laughed so hard she slid down the wall in the entrance hall. “You think I killed Buddy?” she managed to blurt out between seizures. “I’m Catholic, for God’s sake!” Finally, seeing that they weren’t laughing, she picked herself up and said calmly, “I would not put a spell on a bug man. Now, see Bank One right down the street? If I were going to put a spell on anything it would be that bank, and you’d see dollar bills floatin’ down here right this minute to my house.”
