ORAL STORYTELLING CULTURE: A TREASURE TROVE OF STORY MATERIAL

​Dad storytelling at the table, 2004

I come by storytelling honestly; I was raised in a working-class storytelling culture.

Both my mother and my father were storytellers in their own right. My father was the teller of manly stories. Tales about men and work and fighting, animal attacks, tragic accidents and gruesome death. Split-second decisions with powerful consequences. Heroism and success, or strife and payback, or tragedy unending. 

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My mother’s stories were more the private sort that women tell out of earshot of men. Stories often focused on what she called the double standard--sexism. True stories of the dark sides of certain men; assaults, unwanted pregnancy, ruined reputations. And then women’s resistance, through speaking up, telling off, fighting back, banding together. Or, in the absence of power, sometimes a more womanly sort of come-uppance, through secret channels and covert allies.

When all else failed, she chose a sort of serenity, leaving with God, or Fate, the final justice. “He’ll get his. Don’t worry,” she would say. “He’ll get his in the end.”

Do not imagine us sitting cross-legged at the hearth, nodding thoughtfully, while the wise elder holds forth. An oral storytelling culture doesn’t relegate stories to performance alone; rather, storying is a way of thinking and communicating. In the working-class, rural culture where I grew up, stories were ingrained in our thought, they were part of how we talked. Rather than conversing in a linear way, polite and formulaic or with logical arguments unfolding, our conversations would naturally just veer off into stories.

People might be talking together on any topic at all and then, when a point was to be introduced or illustrated or deepened, the speaker would simply tell a story. This was often followed by a story on the part of the other speaker, and that story might echo the first speaker’s point, or it might detract from it, or it might introduce another factor or perspective, and the conversation would proceed from there.

An illustration. In 1995, I was away at university taking coursework in Education and Gender Studies. Home for a summer visit, I was sitting with my dad in the yard on old banged-up kitchen chairs, watching my children run and play in the big field. I was telling him about some of the things I was learning; women’s 20th Century history, the suffrage movement, sexism in the professions, women disallowed in faculties of law and medicine. “This was when your mother, my grandma, was a young woman,” I observed.
 
Then I shared an anecdote about a professor who I felt had it in for me because I had missed an assignment deadline when my children had been sick with Chicken Pox. I said I thought the sexism towards women was still real, it had just gone underground. “But,” I told him with a chuckle, “they ain’t gonna stop me now.”

There was an amicable silence, followed by my dad’s quiet chortle. “Jesus!” he said, grinning. “Sometimes, I wonder what kind of woman my mother even was.”

Then he told the story about my grandmother in 1905, fighting a bull who was goring her first husband. Literally, she took the bull by the horns and wrestled him off that man. 

Grandma Josephine Lavell, 1960

This is the story of Josephine that leads off the first chapter of my novel, A Seven Year Ache. I have ten-year old Rosie conveying the story as told by her big brother, Kenny. But it’s my dad’s story, and told in his voice.

Oral stories can be a treasure trove of material for the writer.

And stories can be ambiguous in a way that linear argument cannot. There are often multiple possible interpretations of meaning and intent. That’s as it should be.

I am not saying, by the way, that every story is wide open to interpretation and can mean whatever the listener wants. No, oral stories have a limited number of possible interpretations, especially since the listener knows the speaker and so this, rightly, informs the most likely meanings and intentions of the story.

When you grow up in a working-class, storytelling culture, not only do you develop your own repertoire of stories, but you also can keep a hope chest of the stories of others. I cannot express how powerful it is for me that, with my parents, grandparents, and all my aunts and uncles having left this earth, I still have their stories. At times, I feel that, having their stories, in some small way, I still have them here with me.

And those stories, in actual fact, sustain me in my darkest hours.

“Buck up,” I tell myself. “You are the granddaughter of Josephine Lavell, for God sake.”

They are not beautiful stories in the conventional sense; in fact, they are almost always hard stories, complex and unsettling and difficult to hear. Yet in this, they guide and warn and give depth and inspiration to my life here and now.

When my father was a little boy in 1937, his big sister, Eileen, then seventeen years old, was impregnated by her married employer and died under questionable circumstances. The fact my aunt Eileen had died at age seventeen was general knowledge. It was only in the 1990s, during a visit with another elderly aunt, that the whole truth came out. The truth that the women knew and quietly carried over the years.

The story of Eileen became the flesh and the bone for my novel’s third chapter, Mother’s Constitutional.

My father had seven sisters, my errant Lavell aunties. Their worlds abounded with every kind of abuse imaginable. They lived troubled and difficult lives, often dying young. Today, in my mid-60s, I have already out-lived six of the seven.

True Story, Eileen Lavell d. 1937 “Ever remembered, ever loved”

I never met my auntie Eileen, she died so long ago. But because I know her story, she is both real and important to me. And a couple of times a year, I still go and visit her grave. I place a single flower there, my black Shepherd dog lolling in the grass, and I tell my auntie that she is not forgotten.

Oral stories, handed down, illuminate the lives of people long ago, but they also illustrate themes of social class and gender, showing how, on personal and systemic levels, people’s money, prestige, and power, or the lack of these, could enhance and privilege their lives, or bend them, sully them, and pervert them utterly.