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Journal of American Folklore 117.464 (2004) 205-206



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Sitting Up with the Dead: A Storied Journey through the American South.By Pamela Petro. (New York: Arcade Publishing, 2001. Pp. xviii + 412, storyteller index.)

Written by a professional journalist, Sitting Up with the Dead: A Storied Journey through the American South, is an unusual travel memoir comprised of folktales told to her by regional storytellers. Lacking footnotes or bibliography, it is not an academic tome aimed at providing an in-depth analysis. Yet, the author is sensitive to variation in storytelling techniques and other behavioral aspects of folklore transmission. She therefore structures the book around the tellers, not the tales: "Storytellers are often their own stories. They certainly became mine" (p. xviii).

Traveling from her home in Massachusetts, Pamela Petro made four trips to explore the "place-bond" of storytellers, from Appalachia, to the Louisiana bayous, on to Selma, Alabama, and back to the Atlantic seaboard (p. xv). Petro's definition of "place-bond" is similar to "sense of place" among folklorists. In each place, she focuses on stories that "provide the connective tissue of a community" (p. xiv). The book is divided into four sections, each representing one leg in the author's journey. It is unclear whether the preponderance of supernatural tales that she includes reflects the author's thematic concern, thus inspiring the title. The South, she admits, is a region that she had stereotyped as a "scary place" (p. xv). To her credit, Petro does not sugarcoat what she sees and hears. For example, in Natchez, Mississippi, she poses for a photograph in front of "Mammy's Cupboard," a restaurant housed in a round building built to represent the skirt of [End Page 205] a buxom, dark-skinned woman with a bandana-wound head.

For the most part, the twenty-seven chapters are named after individual storytellers whom the author interviews. In "Akbar's Tale," a professional African American storyteller reveals the origins of his career: He began as a traveling puppeteer until the day that his suitcase stage collapsed beneath him and he was forced to tell the story he had intended his puppets to perform. In "Minerva's Tale," the storyteller intends to tell "The Flying Africans" but when a listener asks about "the civil rights time," Minerva tells a personal narrative. After encounters like this one, the author's understanding of storytelling is altered, because "listening to Minerva made me wonder where the news ended and storytelling began" (p. 195).

Petro grapples with the complexity of folklore transmission in the final chapter, "Granny Griffin's Tale," which also reveals the significance of the book's title. A storyteller named Vickie tells family folktales in her deceased grandmother's clothes and later gives Petro an eight-inch stack of original manuscripts: "There were hundreds of scrawled-over pages and each one of them was a protest against the fixedness of writing. I could almost hear countless, long-dead Griffins and Hamms murmuring beneath the black and white pages. . . . Historically, we talk about a moment when the suppleness of orality gave way to the rigidity of the written record, but we no longer expect to find traces of the battle in the present day. Vickie's stories literally showed me what it looked like" (p. 401). Petro learns that Vickie's family knew many variants of the folktale "The Dead Man," which leads her to conclude that Granny's granddaughter is a "different kind of storyteller, one with experience of both worlds. She grew up with ghost stories but has grown accustomed to the nightly news" (p. 409).

Although the difference between traditional and revivalist storytelling is never made clear in this book, Petro's contribution is an unusual travelogue that presents tourism as the antithesis of travel. Travel is the art of storytelling. The reader may find it distracting that the author tells anecdotes about her own Welsh heritage to elucidate rural American storytelling, but the book's strength lies in her recognition of the complex issues of...

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