Sitting Up With the Dead: A Storied Journey Through the American South. Pamela Petro
of old movie theatre marquees (the above quartet was all advertised on the same sign). These simple things are unknown to me at home in Rhode Island, but for the electric marquees, which only appear in the rural corners of the state, and rarely at that.
Things took an ill turn in Asheville. My devil-may-care approach to lodging – basically, drive until I came to a sign advertising a cheap chain motel – was thwarted by a nest of converging highways. Every time I glimpsed a likely sign, it was on a route that I was either passing over, under, or paralleling, never the route I was actually on. Nearly an hour of this put me in a fierce and rather desperate mood, and I resolved to simply exit and take whatever I found. Unfortunately, I exited on the city’s south side and wound up in the shadow of the Biltmore Estate: the largest private mansion in America, built by one of the Vanderbilt clan in imitation of a chateau from the Loire Valley. For a $30 entrance ticket I could ogle a handful of the two hundred and fifty rooms – names like Ming, Wedgewood, and several Roman numeralled Louis jumped from the furnishings brochure – and all seventy-five acres of formal gardens, if I so chose. I didn’t really want to do either, but lots of other people did, which meant rich tourists, smart hotels, and high prices. I picked one, blanching at the cost, but was so eager to eat my vegetable quesadilla and drink my convenience-store beer in comfort that I stayed.
That night I sent an e-mail to Vickie Vedder, reminding her that we’d talked so much the other day that neither of us noticed she hadn’t told me a story. I proposed that perhaps she could send me one on tape, or even over the Internet: I would check my ethereal mailbox for a reply.
THERE ARE ALL KINDS OF ORAL STORYTELLERS, who tell stories for all kinds of reasons. Pre-literate cultures told stories not only for entertainment, but, like Vickie’s family, as a way of codifying the communal past and passing it from generation to generation. The Druids – the priest class of the early European Celts – instructed initiates by requiring them to memorize Druidic lore in the form of linked three-part narratives, called triads. Anglesey, a large flat island off the coast of North Wales, functioned as a kind of university for would-be priests, where students spent eighteen years committing the mythos of an entire culture to heart. Even when Celtic tribes picked up writing from the Romans, still the Druids clung to mouth-to-ear learning, not trusting knowledge not internalized in the human memory.
(While memory is tenacious, what the Druids didn’t count on were the Roman legions that stormed Anglesey in AD61. The legionnaires lined up with their swords and shields on the mainland side of the Menai Straits, a narrow inlet that separates Anglesey, or Ynys Môn in Welsh, from the rest of Wales. When the tide was high, the Druids and their followers – faces painted blue, hair streaked with lime, waving torches and hurling curses – struck such fear into the troops that they almost ran from their posts; but then the tide turned and the Romans got hold of themselves, waded across and slaughtered everyone on the island, effectively wiping out a civilization in an afternoon. When the stories a culture tells about itself disappear, when there is no one left to listen and no one to tell, then not even ghost stories are left. There is, simply, no more culture.)
I learned the story about the Romans and Druids from Tacitus, who helpfully wrote it down. Many people who practice storytelling today get their information the same way – from books or recordings – which may actually broaden their art rather than diminish it, untying the parochial knots of family and geography and bringing new experiences to bear on old situations. These people value the spoken word, whatever its source. They enjoy performance and the verbal acrobatics it entails, and are seduced by the intimate bond between listener and teller. A few years ago I went to a Ghost Story Concert in Tennessee, and sat in a park with hundreds of other people, listening to storytellers populate the darkness with haints and blood-sucking ghosts and dancing corpses that wouldn’t die. Their words came over an invention of this century – a microphone – but I’ve never before felt such kinship with the tens of thousands of generations that preceded mine on earth. We were obeying a human impulse as old as fear, just as they had done: make the dark hours better by filling them with voices.
These ‘book-learned’ tellers often perform in untraditional venues, such as schools, museums or organized festivals. But what interests me about the South, more than any other region of the country, is that it provided ‘natural’ contexts for tale-telling long before the modern storytelling revival ever got underway. In Storytellers: Folktales and Legends from the South, John Burrison identified three traits that have historically made the South a hotbed of the storyteller’s art: a socially-instilled reverence for the spoken word; a population base with roots in West Africa, Ulster (the wellspring of the Southern Scotch-Irish), and Southern England, all of which are rich in storytelling traditions; and finally, physical isolation in a rural landscape. To these I would add the lingering poverty of the Great Depression, which ensured that much of the Southern population remained rural and remote throughout most of the technologically plugged-in twentieth century.
These are the very conditions that create the parochial knots of family and geography that – for good or ill – are the wells from which traditional tellers haul up their tales, still dripping with the rich, distinctive murk of the Southern soul. Shucking corn, keeping the kids quiet, entertaining neighbors: whatever the incentives that brought stories to their lives, these Southern Druids – minus the face paint, though not beyond the occasional hurled curses – learned their art the old way, mouth-to-ear. They first heard most of the tales they now tell themselves, or like Vickie, learned telling techniques and then applied them to stories of their own. Some tell family tales, or personal anecdotes. Others tell legends, or trickster tales, like Akbar’s story of Brer Rabbit, or even ‘jokelore’, which is Colonel Rod’s stock-in-trade. Many tell folktales; a few, the most isolated tellers, furthest from outside influences, tell very old folktales. And then there is Ray Hicks. Ray tells Jack Tales.
When I woke up in Asheville, I knew I was within an hour or two of Ray Hicks’ home. This was so exciting that I splurged on biscuits and sausage gravy for breakfast (one of the perks of lodging well), nodding between bites as an old man told me how he’d worked in the dairy up at the Vanderbilt Estate when he was a boy. His job was to jump off the milk wagon and run bottles to customers’ houses, racing to catch up with the horse if he’d had a big delivery. Now the dairy is a winery: most people prefer Chardonnay to milkshakes these days, though I doubt Ray Hicks would endorse the change.
In 1983 the National Endowment for the Arts made Ray a National Heritage Fellow – a very grandiose title for a man who probably couldn’t care less. I had book-learned a few things about ol’ Ray, as people called him, although I had never met him: he is nearly eighty; he stands seven feet tall; he rarely leaves his Appalachian home on Beech Mountain, in a remote corner of the Blue Ridge; he speaks with a vestigial accent that, according to a New Yorker profile ‘preserves Chaucerian and Elizabethan locutions’; and that these stories are his birthright, the current expression of an oral, family tradition that in this country, at least, goes back to around 1760, when a certain David Hicks, Sr. arrived in America from an unknown village in Somerset, England.
I had read that Ray is ‘the patriarch, the classic American storyteller’. I’d read, too, that once when his truck broke down and he’d been unable to pay for repairs, he’d prayed to Jesus for help, and that night an illuminated map of an internal combustion engine had appeared on his bedroom wall. He fixed the truck easily the next day. Isolated up on his four-thousand-foot high mountain, Ray was to Anglo-American storytelling what Picasso was to visual art: a master, a genius to whom narrative digression came as naturally as shopping lists do to people with empty cupboards. I’d further read that Ray was on record as claiming that he learned everything he knew from his alter ego, Jack.
You know Jack too, and so do I: Jack and the Beanstalk and Jack the Giant-Killer are two of his better-known exploits. Jack is the hero of a cycle of English wondertales so ancient that they were already part of the folk-culture when first set into rhyme in the 1400s. Several centuries later, Jack emigrated to the New World with David Hicks, Sr., and became a Southern mountain lad. Meanwhile, back in Britain, even though the giant never got the best of him, nineteenth-century editors did, and trapped