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“If stories come to you, care for them, and learn to give them away where they are needed. Sometimes a person needs a story more than food to stay alive.”
-Barry Lopez, Crow and Weasel

Week 4’s quote comes from Sheila. Another literary quote that I haven’t actually read in context, but that’s ok. I like the sentiment, and hopefully I can answer the challenge with the justice it deserves- by telling a story.

When I was a kid, we moved to Zwolle. I didn’t realize until much later how “behind the times” Zwolle was. Our phone was a party line at first; we did get cable (16 channels), and there was a Wal-Mart 30 minutes away. Many of those luxuries, though, came to the town late. I knew people as a child who still did not have full indoor plumbing; they weren’t underpriveledged, they just hadn’t gotten around to catching up to the technologies of the past few years. Some residences in the area didn’t have full electricity until the 70s, and being kind of out in the middle of nowhere, amusements were somewhat limited. Thus, the oral tradition of telling old local stories stayed much stronger, longer, than I think it really did in other regions. I had a girlfriend next door who lived with her grandmother. Her me-maw had lived in the area all her life, like her parents before her and so on, and didn’t see the point of television. They had one… but it was never on. She preferred telling stories. On nights when we didn’t have school the next day, or when I spent the night with Brandi, she’d tell us the stories. The stories about the Cryin’ Woman who wondered up and down the very road we lived on, 100 some odd years after she hung herself because her daddy wouldn’t let her go to a dance. Stories about the inhabitants of that special graveyard down the road that wasn’t consecrated and was for the ’specially bad people, about the times when neither Texas nor the US owned the area (it being a buffer zone) and all the bad guys came their to hide their stolen treasures. Stories about the Civil War era priest who dumped all the parish’s treasure in the well to keep it safe, only to have it blown up later. Now, I was a ‘transplant’ to this town where everybody was related and had all known one another and their families forever and ever- but hearing the histories they’d all heard all of their lives, well, it helped me to feel more connected to that place I have since come to recognize as my own hometown.

While I was there, that little town grew up. Before I graduated from high school all the party lines were gone. The little building in town where hunters could take their meats to process on their own as long as they cleaned up and used a little bleach after had been taken over by some agency that now processed it for you if you paid them because you couldn’t do it yourself anymore. We had internet (at about 14.4, but still), and if you took the backroads through Belmont to I-49, you could be in Shreveport in an hour and a half. A lot changed in what seems now like a very little time, and it didn’t seem like anyone was telling stories anymore.

Which brings me to the second part of the quote, sharing those stories. That lil’ college I went to required a thesis be written to graduate, and as I was a liberal arts student with a love of history, I decided to get myself a little recorder and go get some of those stories. I tracked down my friend’s me-maw, and some of her friends, and put ads in the papers and met more crazy old folks with crazy old stories to absorb. I learned that the Cryin’ Woman got around- she’s in 4 parishes and on at least 9 roads- and I learned all about John Murrell and his clan of ner’ do wells who terrorized a region and stole all the gold. And at the end of all that? Well, it may not be much, but there’s a copy of that thesis in all the libraries of all the schools of the region, and in the main Parish libraries, and in my own college, so that maybe when somebody else gets curious about the stories they might remember from once upon a time, they’re recorded, and they aren’t completely dead and forgotten. Sure, they’re tangled up with economic and cultural analyses, which was the only way to turn them into a thesis project, but at least they’re written down somewhere.
So, they’re out there.  I’ve given them away, but kept them for myself at the same time.  I can’t say if they’ll ever do anybody any good, but at least they’re there to be had if they’re wanted.

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