Keeper
of the Stories
“In
both the traditions I come from, Mexican-Spanish by birth, and immigrant
Hungarian by adoption, the telling of story is considered an essential spiritual
practice. Tales, legends, myths, and folklore are learned, developed, numbered and
preserved the way a pharmacopoeia is kept. A collection of cultural stories, and
especially family stories, is considered as necessary for long and strong life
as decent food, decent relationships, and decent work.”
Clarissa
Pinkola-Estes, Ph.D. (The Gift of Story: A Wise Tale About What Is Enough,
p.3-4, Ballantine Books, 1993)
If you
have never heard Clarissa Pinkola-Estes tell the stories of her culture, I’m
sorry. She is a master cantadora in the Latina tradition. According to her, every
family has a keeper of the stories, and that person is “a combination of researcher,
healer, linguist in symbolic language, teller of stories, inspiratrice, God
talker and time traveler.” In my family, we all have stories, and we grew
up listening to and telling them. The mountain people of North Carolina are born
storytellers of the old-world sort. My cousin Sandy and I team up on this
front. She is the fact-collector who comes up with the photos and background,
and I am the weaver of the narrative to make stories hang together from what
she has found.
I
wonder who the storyteller is in your family. My friend Ellen tells fabulous
family stories. She grew up in Citronelle and Eight-Mile, Alabama, down near
Mobile, so you know she had to have an imagination or just turn to dust. The
tales of her relatives—about a great niece singing Chestnuts Roasting on an
Open Fire at a family funeral, a cousin hanging himself from a barn-beam
wearing dirty overalls, much to the horror of the family (not the hanging, but
the dirty overalls) and her own adventures while sleeping in the “Christmas
tree room” at her aunt’s house in the middle of a hot Mobile summer—can render
me helpless with laughter.
Family
stories serve a purpose—not just to entertain us, but to bind us together into
a single unit. They help us to claim our place in tribe and clan, until we can
see how we became who we are. There was a scrawny, old woman in my family,
Carrie, who looked a little like Granny Clampett on the Beverly Hillbillies. She
was that healer Clarissa speaks about, as well as mid-wife to the community. She
was a gardener par excellence and a maker of unguents, salves, and remedies. She
ruled her sisters—all four of them—her five brothers, and several generations
of the tribe with an iron fist. Storytellers are almost always half-wild and verge
toward the witchy side. They like to put a little scare on you when they can.
If you
are the keeper of the stories in your family, then we have a shared purpose. I wave
across the miles to you and know that you are an asset and a slightly scary
member of your clan. Don’t worry about that—just keep on gathering stories and
writing them down; keep on speaking and freaking and letting your family know
how they got to be who they are. That’s your job and it’s a sacred obligation.
In
the Spirit,
Jane
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