In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

282 7 Personalizing Tradition On Storytelling by an African American Father and Son Eugene Powell answered my knock on his rickety door with little emotion . He had not known I was coming just then, but he confidently said to me, “I’ve been expecting you. Come on in and sit.” The row of black faces assembled in his parlor looked suspiciously at us. Eugene felt their stares and offered, “He’s here to learn about me!” With that, the men broke into quips and smirks. Once Eugene had vouched for me, they relaxed, and as happened so often that summer, Eugene stepped forward from the crowd. I heard one man remark, “Yeah, he should figure you out, ’cause you sure are different, Red.” That elicited laughter. A quiet man in a corner interjected, “Talk to him, Red; you’re a talker when you get rolling with them stories!” Why tell stories? The question seems basic, but we have far more inventories of tales than explanations of why they are told. Venerated for being passed down from generation to generation, folk narratives recorded in collections rarely if ever account for what one generation does with the previous one’s legacy or how the narratives become part of individual tellers’ personality profiles. Collection, the common scholarly term for the data of oral tradition, implies the gathering of stories as static objects that can be accumulated. Collectors typically offer stories as representations of the whole society; narratives are seen as common knowledge rather than a source for the psychological response of a few. One reason for this bias is the intellectual construction that telling stories is instinctual—that is, people tell tales because they have to, and they rely on an accessible storehouse of information. If this is the case, On Storytelling by an African American Father and Son 283 then it is not crucial to show the special circumstances in which storytelling is needed or the people for whom it is necessary. It may even lead to the false universalist conclusion that a limited number of plots exist, and tellers adapt them to the culture of which they are a part. To show that folklore is an expanding, living force, instinctually minded scholars point out that everyone tells some form of story as plotted narration in the process of making conversation and relating events of the day—so much so that many people are unaware that being a storyteller is a distinctive part of being human (Nicolaisen 1990, 9–10). Stories thus appear to be diffused through a culture instead of being performed by ritual specialists on structured occasions. In the vernacular, most people reserve the storyteller label for folks who draw attention to their stories or themselves. Often, the connotation of storytelling is the performance of a fictional set piece that listeners appreciate as a “good story.” The question “Have you heard this one?” or the cue “I’ve got a good story to tell you” braces the listener for a narrative with a beginning, middle, and end. There is a sense that stories attach to certain places, situations, and people (and, as I argue in chapter 5, ages) more than others. As authorities on traditions, folklorists position stories, help identify when and how people break into stories , and often classify them by the group in which they are told. The narratives they collect might fall under ethnic, regional, occupational, or religious groups, but the social-interactional assumption is that the praxis we might call storying provides an esoteric consciousness that lends identity to those in the know. Stories in the social-interactional view are a result of people coming together and a reason to get together. In this social frame, stories are appropriate to occasions and settings such as holidays, “sessions,” or bars to comment on the group’s tradition and to bond the people participating in that tradition to one another. If storytelling has a social function, that is not to say that the consequence of bonding explains storytelling in the sense of providing a cause for narrative behavior. As part of the understanding of function as purpose rather than as cause, though, stories serve the group’s desire to define itself culturally, and they serve the needs of an occasion (Bascom 1954; Oring 1976). Life without stories would therefore be unimaginable. Folklorist W. F. H. Nicolaisen even asserts, “Without stories we could not survive; without stories we would be disoriented; without stories we would be...

Share