Sitting Up With the Dead: A Storied Journey Through the American South. Pamela Petro
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as if she were kneading her words the way bakers knead dough. ‘They also believe that stories have medicine. That stories find you when you need them. And if you become a storyteller, it’s a sacred responsibility. You have to give your audience the medicine you think they need.’
I wondered what medicine I would get, as I sipped a Diet Dr Pepper. Now, she continued, she worked as an artist-in-residence in the South Carolina school system, travelling and teaching Native American culture, basketry and paper-making, and telling stories. ‘I tell the children about the drowning of Cherokee towns for reservoirs. There are some of us,’ she was almost whispering now, ‘who can still hear the drums sounding underwater.’
Half-hypnotized by her delivery, this last bit of information jerked me wide awake. In Wales, my touchstone for oppressed nations, Welsh-speaking villages had also been submerged – recently, in the 1960s – by reservoirs dredged so that towns in England could access water more cheaply. Instead of drums, Welsh nationalists claimed to hear chapel bells tolling underwater. I told Nancy this and she nodded solemnly. ‘Yes,’ she said, ‘I see you understand.’ Then she excused herself and ran out to drive her reluctant teenage daughter to work at McDonald’s.
These missing places, drowned, or decimated like Rosewell, take revenge in ghost stories of phantom drums, and long-dead children crying in the bottoms of wells. Landscapes do hold stories, only sometimes they are so old, or the victims of violence were so powerless, that the tales become dislodged, and the ‘hauntings’ that began as collective conscience, a community remembering, get swept up into the dominant, collective conscious as folktales of ghosts. I heard eerie stories, usually in pubs in North Wales, about church bells ringing under the sea long before I ever learned about the Tryweryn Reservoir. I wondered how many spooky tales contained an ember of subversion at their core – a protest of the vanished, pushed from the margins all the way off the page – that smolders there either to be ignored or bellowed into flames according to the teller. Everything depends not so much on the tale, but on who tells it.
One of the original feminist manifestos, aptly tided Diving Deep and Surfacing, by Carol P. Christ, makes the succinct point that those who tell the stories wield the power. ‘Women,’ she wrote, ‘live in a world where women’s stories rarely have been told from their own perspectives.’ Carol Christ wasn’t the first, of course, to point out the power of storytelling in shaping knowledge, especially in relation to women trapped in men’s narratives:
‘On women … the clergy will not paint,
Except when writing of a woman-saint,
But never good of other women, though.
Who called the lion savage? Do you know?
By God, if women had but written stories
Like those the clergy keep in oratories,
More had been written of man’s wickedness
Than all the sons of Adam could redress.’
This wonderful diatribe was delivered by the Wife of Bath in Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales. Her admonition, and Christ’s – for the characters to seize control of the narrative – applies to all marginal-dominant relationships, as Nancy well understood. It was her particular goal to wrest control of the storyscape from the settlers, so to speak, and return it to the Cherokee. Audiences hear different drums, no matter how deep the water, depending on who is speaking them to life.
She pursues this task with zeal, but with delicacy. ‘Because I work in the school system, I have to be so careful. Remember, this is the South. I can’t say the word “imagination” – I must have looked aghast, because she stopped, nodding her head – ‘really, I’m serious, I can’t say “imagination” to the children because some parents complain it leads to devil worship.’
I was trying not to choke on my Dr Pepper. Nancy raised her eyebrows and rolled in her lips, as if to silently reiterate, It’s true. ‘The South is so controlled. You have to break the rules without making people bleed. Stories do that.’
This was my cue: I asked her if she would tell me a tale that she felt grew out of her environment, her Appalachian corner of South Carolina. Nancy nodded and said that this was her version of a tale she heard years ago from an Abenaki storyteller named Tsnaqua. She cleared her throat, and began.
A long, long time ago, the Creator, the one who made us all, red-yellow-black-white-and-brown, had a huge stone bowl. He reached deep down into it and he picked up the last little bit of clay that he had in there, and he said, ‘There’s not much here, I guess I can throw it away. Hmmmm. But if I do, then the two-leggeds that I made will all know I threw something away. I told them not to do that, and I want them to listen, so I’m going to show them how to take a little bit of something and make it better.’
So the Creator took this little bit of clay and he molded it and he shaped it and he gave the new thin thing eyes and Snake could see. He said, ‘Snake, wait here in the bowl. I need to go down to the river … to get more clay.’
Snake waited and waited. And he waited and waited. And the Creator didn’t come back. So he started looking around, and the Snake looked in the sky and there were stars there, and he was warm, and when he looked down he saw color for the first time. He saw red-yellow-black-white-brown-blue-pink-purple-and-green, and he said, ‘Oooo, what’s this? I want to go into the world and find out about color.’ So he slithered out of the bowl and he went down into the world. When he did that the Creator came back with a big armful of clay, put it in his stone bowl, and said, ‘Snake, where are you? I have enough clay and I can give you arms and legs. Snake! Where are you? I have enough clay and I can make your skin.’
But snake was not to be found. ‘Oh no!,’ cried the Creator. ‘You crawled off into the world and you weren’t ready yet. You’ll never have arms and legs now. You’ll have to slide on your belly forever. How are you going to keep yourself warm? It’s going to be winter and night-time when you get down there and you don’t have any skin! I wish you well, but I wish you would have waited.’ So the Creator just had to wait to see how Snake took care of himself.
Snake crawled off into the world and it was winter and night-time and he had to crawl underneath a rock to keep warm. He was shivering and he was shaking, and he knew he had to get warm or he was going to die. So he looked around and he saw this Cherokee round house, and there was a fire coming up out of the floor, and he said, ‘Maybe the fire is like the stars, and I can crawl over there and get warm.’ So Snake crawled over, got warm, and he was happy and grinning like this [Nancy grins extravagantly]. And there was a girl in this roundhouse, and she took one look at that new and different thing, something she’d never seen before, and she screamed. ‘ACH!’ And it hurt Snake’s ears. Then, in Cherokee, she said, ‘Get out of my house, ugly nasty person!’ And the snake said, ‘Ugly? Nasty? I’m new and different and you’re hurting my ears!’ And the snake crawled out of the roundhouse crying, back underneath the rock.
The snake cried so hard – it was so cold outside – it froze his eyes open, and today snakes cannot close their eyes. It was so cold underneath the rock, all by himself, that the tail of the snake froze and cracked into little pieces, and today rattlesnakes, as you know, have the same kind of tail. And the snake said, ‘I’m cracking up. I’m going to die. And then the Creator will have made me for no reason. I can’t let that happen. I have to take care of myself.’
And so the snake found another roundhouse – because Cherokees never lived in teepees, you know – and he went into that roundhouse, and he was by their fire, and he was getting warm and he was real quiet, but there was a boy in the roundhouse. And the boy took one look at that new and different thing, something he’d never seen before, and he didn’t scream or anything – because guys don’t scream – they just pick up big sticks AND START HITTING. He WHACKED that snake. And then the snake had a horrible limp. Did you ever see a snake limp? It’s real hard to do without legs.
The snake limped on out of the boy’s