Breaking Chains: Brother Blue, Storyteller

I think we're all like frost on the window; we blow away so quickly, you know. So every time I go anyplace, I always hope that whatever I've done is for real, so in case I never appear again, you've got something you can use for life.

Brother Blue

Coming out of the subway in Harvard Square one cold February afternoon, I noticed a crowd gathered on the sidewalk. That fact alone was nothing unusual in and around the Square. Groups of passersby often stop to listen to musicians or political harangues, to appraise the jugglers, or to pick through the wares—spread out on an old army blanket—of a young, half-frozen peddler, squatting indifferently nearby. Harvard Square has the feeling of a medieval place, of somewhere cut out of present time, even during rush hour on an ordinary winter's day.

Yet today, at the center of this crowd, a man was dancing. He wore a thin blue turtle-neck, decorated with ribbons, bells, balloons, and butterflies that drifted down over his blue trousers and slippers and hovered over his black face and blue knit cap. He held aloft a multicolored umbrella with one hand and shook a fool's bells in the chilly air with the other. His lithe body moved with energy and grace despite the numbing cold. Every gesture seemed both spontaneous and deliberate. Behind him, and a part of him, was the force of black dance, from the shaman and the tribal celebrant to the scatman, the tapper, the prancer. He touched the air with broad and subtle strokes of mime genius—Chaplin, Keaton, Marceau. This dancing man was telling a story—groaning it, mugging it, tickling and slapping it into being.

He was sweating in the freezing afternoon, like a Tibetan initiate in the middle of a frozen lake in the dead of winter, who thaws and dries a pile of icy garments with his own body's heat and then draws on layer after layer of the now-supple clothing, in an act that calls for absolute concentration and, in the same moment, forgetfulness. There was, unmistakably, something of that same spirit and warmth that could challenge the cold in what the man was doing that day, as his body whirled and stomped and his snapping fingers burst with sound, a living punctuation mark. Those onlookers near the center of the semi-circle hung on each word, rooted in the charmed and magic place until the last syllable had been spoken to release them. The hecklers and the spellbound were equally held by that ever more rare phenomenon: the sheer presence of one man and his story.

That was my first glimpse of Brother Blue seven years ago, and he was the first Brother Blue I met. Soon he seemed to me to be everywhere around Cambridge and Boston: telling stories on the late-night jazz radio stations or on the children's program, "The Spider's Web"; on television doing three- and four-minute stories for pre-school children for "Playmates, Schoolmates"; and as the subject of frequent "local color" articles in the Boston papers. It wasn't until a year or so later that I encountered a different Brother Blue and began to know the other man behind the persona of the storyteller who had thawed the ice in Harvard Square.

I remember a long conversation we had in an elementary-school cafeteria. It happened that we were neighbors, living only a block apart. He often dropped into my daughter's school to say hello, tell a story, or talk with the children and any parents who could reconcile themselves to the idea of a black man, "gotten up" in a bizarre costume, spending his days working at, of all things, storytelling. That day he was at rest. In fact, he seemed to be exhausted. He pulled his body slowly over the tiled floor and slumped into a tan folding chair. But his mind was awake, as he spoke in low, ardent tones about the oral tradition and the Yugoslavian bards, Huizinga and ludic man...