Suddenly They Heard Footsteps

by Dan Yashinsky

  I include myself in this alliance of storm fools, and this tradition continues, except that today’s storm fools don’t get around by dog team. We go by subway, car and plane. Our audiences may not be separated by weather and desolate terrain, but other forces can be equally isolating and soulchilling. I’ve been to countless North American suburbs where the nearest sign of life was the mall three kilometres away. The highways are packed every morning and evening with parents commuting to work. What family time they can poach from the global economy is usually spent staring at screens. The names of the streets in these raw subdivisions echo with lost history: “Wildflower Way” and “Apple Grove Circle”—these are the developers’ epitaphs for the flowers and trees they uprooted or paved over. In Mississauga, Toronto’s westernmost bedroom community, there’s a street called “Folkway Avenue.” Ironically, you’ll never see a human being walking there. Real folkways are kept alive through direct human contact, through daily conversation, through a shared sense of purpose and identity—things that are hard to find in a world of non-stop rush hours and distant shopping malls. Mississauga itself is named after a tribe of the Anishnabe First Nation that once lived in these lands. They’ve since moved on, taking many thousands of years of folkways and stories with them. When I go tell stories to the children in these farflung communities I feel like an ambassador either from the distant past or, on cheerful days, from a possible future.

  The marvel is that the same children who spend so many hours in front of screens and so few hours conversing with parents and grandparents are still such avid listeners. They have never lost their deeply human hunger for wonder, and they are ready to listen to every story their teachers, librarians, parents, grandparents and occasional storm fools can tell them. It always amazes me how quickly they are able to step from the fluorescent-lit gym into the reverie of storytelling, to move from clock-time to story-time. After a storytelling session, the teachers will often tell me afterwards that they’ve never seen the children sit still for so long. They tell me about the students—the one who has zero attention span, the 50 percent who speak English as their second language, the one who interrupts all the time—and say how amazed they were that they all listened to a forty-five-minute fairy tale without wiggling once.

  I think I know why they listen so well. I take little credit for their miraculous transformation. It is the experience of hearing good stories told by word of mouth, spoken by a storyteller who is there in person that turns them from distracted, unsettled children into dedicated listeners. The stories are being given to them directly. At a gut level they know that if they can remember them, the stories are theirs. Alice Kane once wrote in a letter to me: “I love storytelling because it is so intensely individual. The storyteller chooses her own story and tells it as she sees it and feels it. The listener brings his own different background and experience to the story and interprets it in his own way. To both the story becomes their own and grows and is enriched as they themselves grow.”

  I always make sure to tell the children traditional folk and fairy tales. I know that after I leave, these stories will travel out into the schoolyards, down the streets, back to their kitchens. The stories will be retold in Tamil, Russian, Chinese, Spanish, Greek, Arabic, Hindi. A new oral tradition is being kindled, which will eventually be a new way of connecting to each other, to the land, even to the mallcentred world around them. Through their shared and multilingual stories, the future “folkways” of the outer suburbs are being born.

  Storm fools not only bring stories to these isolated areas, they also remind their listeners that they, too, have stories worth telling. In 1993 I developed a curriculum project I call a Telling Bee. It begins by having each class create their own talking stick. My talking stick is a sawed-off broomstick that an artist decorated with ribbons and rattles. Along the way it has picked up new ornaments: New Orleans carnival beads, a medallion of the Deer Clan (which includes poets and storytellers), a twist of hide, a bear’s tooth, an image of Ganesh. Wherever I tell stories I like to offer it to anybody who will exchange stories with me. In every class there are those who like to talk and those who would rather swallow fire than open their mouths in public. I was one of the shy ones myself, and I understand how paralyzing this can be. Instead of asking who would like to tell stories (thus terrifying the quiet kids), I can ask, “Who would like to hold the talking stick?” Invariably, even the shyest children are eager and willing to hold it and proud to tell their stories.

  Some groups get very creative and make something that includes artifacts and images from all of the students’ stories. I’ve even seen a talking hockey stick. The object itself doesn’t matter, but the values it represents are the essence of the Telling Bee project: listening with respect, passing on family heritage, honouring the community through your storytelling, being open to all the stories in the class. Talking sticks are a lot less expensive than computers, and I think they add quite a bit more to the children’s lives.

  The motto for the Telling Bee comes from a Portuguese proverb: First you listen, then you talk. Everybody in the school—children, teachers, caretakers, principals—collects a story that they’ve heard by word of mouth. The children ask their parents and grandparents questions like

  Have you ever known a true-life hero?

  Did you ever get in trouble as a kid?

  Did you ever move to a new home? What surprised you there? What did you miss from your old home?

  Did you ever know an unusual animal?

  Did our family survive war or other disasters? How?

  Have you ever had a supernatural experience?

  What was I famous for as a baby?

  Were you (or I) ever lost? How were you found?

  Which of our ancestors do you think of the most?

  Is there a story behind the names in our family?

  They bring the stories to class and retell them, with the permission of the person who gave them the story.

  After the storytelling, the stories are written and published. One of the marvels of desktop publishing is that any school-size community can produce a wonderfully designed book of stories. Often, when the book is published, schools will have a celebration and book launch. I’ll never forget a Greek grandmother coming up to me at the McMurrich Public School book launch and saying, with great pride, “Did you read the story about the Greek girl in the civil war who rode the truck with the soldiers? That was me!” She was very moved that her granddaughter had listened, remembered and retold her own memory of war.

  Sometimes within a classroom, one story will spark another. Edward Bavington, a grade-six teacher at McMurrich, heard one of his students tell a story about surviving the Gulf War. He in turn contributed a story about a landlord he’d had who had lost his entire family in Auschwitz. He ended his story by writing, “If I appear hard when I hear a degrading remark, it is with the memory that slurs, unchecked, rise to mountains of dead.”

  Often the stories people bring in for the Telling Bee have traditional motifs. The principal at McMurrich, Mel Beyea, told “The Blanket,” which you may recognize as a fable:

  The house was very crowded. Grandpa was getting on his son’s nerves. Grandpa did nothing but eat, sleep and complain. To his son he was a nuisance. The son decided that his father must move away and live somewhere else. Soon the day came. The son decided to give his father half a blanket. The son’s wife pleaded that grandpa should be given a whole blanket. The son insisted that it be half a blanket. They quarrelled. Finally, the son agreed to give his father a whole blanket. “No,” said the grandson. “Give grandpa half a blanket. I will need the other half, father, to give you on the day that I decide that you must move away and live somewhere else.” Grandpa stayed.

  Beyea heard this story, appropriately enough, from his own grandmother.

  In another Telling Bee, this one in Gogama, Ontario, a young Ojibway boy took the talking stick and told another story about grandparents and grandchildren. “I know how my
town got its name,” he said shyly. “I heard it from my grandma.”

  A long time ago the people who lived here wanted to do something really special. They decided to have a race. But instead of having the strong young warriors race, they wanted to do something unusual. So they had a race of old women. All the old women got ready for the race. They practised and practised by running up and down the main street. There was one old woman who had a grandson. He was very little. He used to call her his “Gama.” He was very excited about the race. “Gama going to win?” he asked her.

  “I hope so, grandson,” she said. “But I don’t know. I’m eighty-two years old, and there are some racers who are a lot younger than me. There are seventy-year-olds, and even a sixty-year-old. But I’ll do the best I can.”

  The day of the race came. All of the old women tied on their racing moccasins and lined up at the starting line. The signal went and they started running.

  The little boy was sitting on his dad’s shoulders so he could watch the race. He looked for his Gama at the front of the runners, but she wasn’t there. Then he looked at the back. She was running as fast as she could, but she was way behind everyone else. The boy started bouncing up and down shouting, “Go, Gama! Go, Gama!” She looked up and saw him, and it made her run faster. She really took off! In fact, she won the race. And everyone was so proud of that little boy who helped his “gama” that they named my town “Gogama, Ontario.”

  After telling his story, he said, “I live with my grandmother. She’s raising me.”

  As the Telling Bee goes on, the schoolyard begins to fill up with stories. At one school, the gym teacher told a remarkable story about a wartime romance. Children talked about it during recess. At another school, the caretaker turned out to have been a classically trained actor in the Philippines. After people heard his story, he was no longer just the guy with the mop cleaning the floor. One boy told the story about how his face had been burned, and from then on nobody stared at him. Among the parents, too, there’s a buzz as they compare notes, and talk about their family stories. Soon not only the school, but the whole neighbourhood is filled with the sound of storytelling.

  Whenever I animate a Telling Bee, I also tell a number of traditional folk and fairy tales. I want them to hear the connections between their family stories and the great themes of oral literature: heroism, tragedy, hilarious comedy, romance, triumph over catastrophe—all of which can be found in the stories every family keeps alive. I was on the Web the other day and noticed a site devoted to something called (and trademarked!) the “Digital Storytelling Bee.” It struck me as a dreary and disheartening occupation, trading stories through screens and keyboards. Stories, from folk tales to family lore, are meant to be told live and direct. The Romany people have a saying: A millionaire is someone who has spent a million dollars. So it should be in the world of stories and Telling Bees. If you’d like to run your own Telling Bee, you’re welcome to visit (yes, digitally!) www.tellery.com. The guidelines are free for the borrowing.

  In the summer of 1999, I had the chance to take my talking stick around Canada. I co-created (with David Carroll, the producer) a national radio show called, appropriately enough, Talking Stick. (Our motto was Have Talking Stick, Will Travel.) We taped storytellers at kitchen tables, downtown cafés, festivals, concert halls, and all the other natural habitats of the oral tradition in today’s society.

  One afternoon we dropped in to visit Louise Bennet-Coverley, known to West Indians everywhere as “Miss Lou,” one of Jamaica’s national treasures, who is now living in Canada. She told story after story about the great trickster Anansi, who is sometimes a man and sometimes a spider. She told us about the Jamaican ghosts known as duppies, which are dangerous if you show them disrespect, but kindly if you honour them. Throughout her stories, marvelling at Anansi’s hilarious misadventures, she would burst out with the wildest, most infectious laugh, as if she knew Anansi personally and had witnessed his tricks herself. I’ve often found with traditional storytellers that they seem to inhabit the same world as the people in their stories. In my book Tales for an Unknown City I included this recollection from Jim Strickland, a Canadian who had heard a great traditional Scottish storyteller named Jeanie Robertson: “I had never heard a traditional storyteller. I was absolutely and totally spellbound…. I can’t say that I heard her story. I saw the story. That’s the extent of her power as a storyteller. You saw it all happening. I wasn’t aware that I had listened to her language.” When we finished taping Miss Lou, I felt that Anansi had moved with her from Kingston, Jamaica, to Canada. He was no doubt riding the subways, selling fruit in Kensington Market, playing his shape-shifting tricks as much in Toronto as he did back home. When we left Miss Lou’s apartment she called out her jubilant blessing: “Walk good, and good duppy walk wit’ you!” Three weeks later, a hundred thousand radio listeners heard the irresistible cadence of Miss Lou’s voice as we broadcast her Anansi stories across the country.

  On our travels we caught up to Charly Chiarelli and over a glass or two of grappa we heard about how he grew up in Hamilton, Ontario, in a neighbourhood that had more people from Racalmuto, Sicily, than still lived in Racalmuto. He told us about the time the welfare officer came and he was pulled from his grade-five class so he could translate for his mother. The welfare lady asked questions his Sicilian mother found humiliating: “Do you own other property? Do you own precious works of art?” Finally, Chiarelli’s mother exploded with injured pride and operatic anger. “Tell her we own many villas in Milan, Florida and Paris! We only live here because we love cockroaches! And she can find the Mona Lisa in the closet, behind those rags we call clothes!” The little boy, caught between his mother and English-Canadian bureaucracy, turned to the welfare officer after this threeminute outburst and said, simply, “My mother said no. We need a lot of words to say no in Sicilian.”

  We met Itah Sadu in her bookstore and heard her recount the story of how Thornton and Lucille Blackburn escaped slavery via the Underground Railroad. They wound up prosperous citizens in early Toronto, and created the city’s first horse-drawn cab service. One long afternoon, we listened to Dennis Mann in his kitchen north of the suburb of Pickering. This is probably the last rural area left within thirty kilometres of Toronto. As he told story after story of the local characters and history, we could hear the sound of the heavy machinery clearing a path for highway 407. Soon, all of that prime farmland would be yet another featureless subdivision, and all of Mann’s wonderful yarns would be the only trace of his deeply rooted community. The people driving in on their hour-long commute will never pull off the highway long enough to hear, as we did that day over endless cups of coffee, a thousand and one Pickering stories.

  The radio show helped launch its own mini-oral tradition. Marc Kuly, a young man working as a blacksmith at a national historic site wrote in to describe how his friends listened to the show: “It all started with one of my co-workers hearing the first episode of the program. Before long his report led to a few of us listening and swapping tales… Slowly but surely we began to adapt the stories for telling to tourists visiting the workplace. By the end of the summer a library of borrowed books of folk tales and legends… had accumulated in our lunchroom. From the original three or four of us who listened to the early episodes, a group of nearly fifteen staff members were avidly listening to the show.”

  Throughout our quest, I kept thinking of one of the first tellers we taped, a remarkable raconteur named James Zavitz. He told us about an experiment his grandfather, an agricultural scientist called Charles Zavitz, had run on a field of barley. After a vicious hailstorm devasted the plot, wiping out years of careful work, he went out and examined every plant. He found one still standing, and from that stiff-stalked specimen he cultivated the hardy Ontario Agricultural College Number 21 Barley, a grain that helped Canada survive the Great Depression. This piece of Canadian and family history (Jim is my father-in-law, and of course when he told me that story it was the one time
the tape recorder didn’t work) is an apt image for what storytellers do. Every family, neighbourhood and community has someone who distills our experiences, histories and dreams into stories. They teach us to value the things that are most likely to withstand the hailstorms of time and forgetfulness. Like the special barley, these durable, storm-resistant narratives can nourish the imaginations of a whole country.

  That summer we discovered that radio is a great medium for the art of storytelling. In a much-divided country like Canada, with its many regions, two languages, three founding peoples (English, French, aboriginal) and numerous immigrant groups, the storytelling voices that were broadcast every Friday night carried an extra message. Our listeners heard the beginning of a new story, a rich and polyphonic epic of national identity, expressed not through one official story but through many individual voices. Taken all together, they made a Canadian story far greater than the sum of its parts.

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  One of the greatest joys of a storm fool is to visit distant lands and make storytelling connections with new listeners. I’ve had the opportunity to travel to Israel, Ireland, Germany, France, the U.S., Singapore, and throughout Canada as a storyteller. One of the most challenging and exhilarating storytelling celebrations I’ve performed at is the Graz Tells International Storytelling Festival in Austria. One afternoon near the end of the festival, I went wandering through the streets of the city; I was saturated with stories and needed a break. Graz is a beautiful European city, full of cafés and galleries and nice cars and well-dressed people. The Graz audiences are warm and knowledgeable. They laugh at all the right places, even if a story is told in English, not German. I love the place—and at the same time (like some of its native sons and daughters), I am haunted by it. As a Jew who performs in Austria and Germany, I can’t help feeling like an ambassador from a shared and tragic past. On an earlier trip I had visited the Jewish cemetery at the edge of town; the gravestones told a chilling story. Most of the Jewish community of this charming town was transported to the camps during the war. Few returned. Their neighbours watched them go. A German friend once explained that post-war culture practised a kind of willful forgetfulness, a deliberate silencing of painful truths.