Suddenly They Heard Footsteps

by Dan Yashinsky

  That man, Kaax’achgook, he always goes to northwind side every day.

  He goes out on the point—never tells anyone.

  He marks when the sun comes out in the morning.

  Marks it with a stick.

  In the evening, he goes out again.

  Marks a stick where the sun goes down.

  He never tells anyone why he does this.

  He just does it all the time.

  Finally, that stick is in the same place for two days.

  He knows this marks the return of spring.

  Then the sun starts to come back in June, the longest day.

  Using the sun as his navigational aid, he is able to paddle home with his eight nephews. He had been gone for a year, and long since given up for dead. As he nears his home shore he begins to sing three songs:

  I gave up my life out on the deep for the shark.

  The sun came up and saved people.

  I gave up hope and then I dreamed I was home.

  The story and the three songs were the present the joyful mother gave her soldier son at the potlatch where she welcomed him home. The story and the song of Kaax’achgook brought the young man’s own perilous journey full circle—life and story completing each other in her extraordinary gift. Odysseus-like, the young soldier hears his life framed by a myth.

  Ruth Sawyer said storytellers should make “a determined effort to write at least one original story every year, using some folk-source.” I’d like to describe the process of rewondering traditional tales, using my own stories and Kay Stone’s “The Curious Girl” as examples.

  For many years, I happily told the “The Devil with the Three Golden Hairs,” from the brothers Grimm. It features an absurdly greedy king who, when he hears a prophecy that his daughter will marry a poor child born with a lucky caul, sets out to destroy the young man. It occurred to me, after many hundreds of tellings, that I knew this king very well. Just as the king’s mad and unrelenting greed for control cannot let his daughter find her own future, so I live in a world where individual creativity is squelched, where an insidious force insists on making everything the same, on standardizing hamburgers and funeral homes, on microsoftening our very capacity to share data. This new take on the story launched a retelling set in modern times (“Mr. Globus and Laughing Boy” is included on page 230). The king transformed into Mr. Globus, the CEO of a multi-trans-international corporation that makes, not only handheld remote-control electronic channel changers, but also the televisions that have the channels you can try to change. Same greed, different villain.

  I was telling “The White Snake,” also from Grimm, when a group of listeners opened a new window into the story. It is a story featuring a young man who learns the language of the animals. He steals this knowledge by tasting of the King’s secret and forbidden dish: a white snake. On the journey he undertakes after leaving the King’s service, he meets fish, ants and ravens, all of whom he helps after understanding their language. He is riding a horse that, in the Grimms’ version, is the only animal in the story that doesn’t speak. When the baby ravens ask for meat, this is what happens: “So the good young fellow alighted and killed his horse with his sword, and gave it to them for food.”

  I always found this scene hard to tell, not because it was violent but because it broke a thread of suspense in the story. It never made sense to me that a man who could speak the languages of all the animals had no connection to his own horse. Because in the traditional version there is no intimate relationship to the horse, his sacrifice of it seems superficial. As I was strolling up and down the hills of Cape Clear, Ireland, with a group of storytellers, I asked them what they thought about the story. They found this scene as jarring as I did. It was as if the story turned its back on its own magic. I admitted that I had always been bothered by the relationship, or lack of it.

  The story began to evolve in a new direction. In the version I’ve included in the Story section of this book, “Strange Voices,” (p. 201) when the young man goes to choose his horse, it is the horse that claims him. When the time comes to make the sacrifice for the baby ravens, it is the horse that offers itself. The man resists, but the horse’s wisdom prevails. Upon her death, his sacrifice is losing his magical power to understand the language of the animals. Later, he receives a reward for his acquiescence to the greater wisdom

  Kay Stone, in her book Burning Brightly: New Light on Old Tales Told Today, studies a number of storytellers who work with traditional material in inventive ways. Drawing on her own experience as a teller, she reports on how she recast the Grimms’ story “Mistress Trudy” into a story she calls “The Curious Girl.” “Mistress Trudy” ends when the disobedient heroine winds up turned into a log and tossed on the fire after she has beheld the “witch in her true form.” The burning girl makes “a bright light.” Stone’s first encounter with the Grimms’ version was upsetting:

  When I first met Mistress Trudy in my own copy of the complete Grimm tales she did not offer pleasant company. I was enraged. So much so that I threw my book across the room—something I have not done since I was a child. It split neatly in half. The story inflamed me. I was too sympathetic with that overly curious and disobedient girl who set out so boldly on her path into the woods, and who was eventually overwhelmed and destroyed by the witch she sought out. It was an ugly story…

  After this unpromising beginning, the story somehow set deep roots in Stone’s imagination. Over a period of many years, she kept revisiting its themes, images and characters.

  What continued to push the story into new growth was my own stubborn curiosity. I wanted to know what happened to the girl after she was thrown into the fire. How did she survive, and why? I knew there was something about to happen next but I did not know what it would be. Every time I told “The Curious Girl” I trusted that I would discover at least one thing that I had not noticed before, and each discovery gave its energy to the next telling. In this way the story grew on its own and it became easier and easier to tell as I became more willing to enter Mistress Trudy’s door.

  Stone developed a new story from the bones of the traditional version. As she tells it, the Curious Girl is transformed into a bird by the witch’s fire, and is promised a restoration to human form when she brings back a story the witch has never heard before. She travels the world, gathering stories from all creation. Even so, when she returns to tell them, Mistress Trudy says, “Excellent, excellent! But I heard every one of those stories before you were even born. I hope you have another.” The bird/girl isn’t sure what to do. She has, like Odysseus in Phaiakia, truly landed on the shore of her own destiny. “She opened her mouth to say ‘No!’ But a story began to come out on its own. It sounded familiar: ‘Once there was a girl who was curious, and stubborn, and always disobedient to her parents…’ Indeed that was the story that had never been heard, and as far as I know, it is still the story with no end.”

  Sometimes I tell stories in the “first person fabulous.” This is a narrative voice that lets “me” wander through fantastic realms, encounter mythic beings, and slip through the frontier between real life and magic. In other words, it lets me tell lies. Alice Kane used to recite this poem by Ida Zeitlin by way of reminding her listeners that storywisdom comes via unpredictable routes:

  The Dreamer awakes,

  The shadow goes by,

  The cock never crew,

  The tale is a lie;

  But ponder it well,

  Fair maiden, good youth,

  The tale is a lie,

  But the teaching is truth.

  Story lies are, of course, different than pernicious everyday lies. Call them “fiction” and they become art; call them narrative inventions, and they sound noble, even wise. The first person fabulous is the voice of tall-tale tellers, but also of philosophers and purveyors of parable. It works as a passport for travelling quickly between everyday life and the dimension of legend, letting the storyteller use the energy and intimacy of a real-soundi
ng account to create an utterly fictional world. I like it because, although I’m reluctant to use my personal life as material for stage performances, when I tell stories in the first person fabulous, I can have my privacy and perform it too.

  In “The Devil’s Noodles” (p. 209), I use the first person fabulous voice to set the scene in Toronto’s Little Italy, my old neighbourhood. The story-pattern comes from a traditional tale often titled “The Blacksmith and the Devil.” I used to tell Richard Chase’s wonderful version “Wicked John and the Devil” from Grandfather Tales, his classic collection of Appalachian oral tradition. My friend Renato, who ran a café around the corner from my house, always struck me as larger than life. He was generous, funny, brusque, irreverent. He never paid his taxes and he sold wine illegally to customers he knew well. And he was the most tender and kindhearted man in the whole quartier. I didn’t set out to modernize Wicked John, but meeting Renato let me imagine how the story could evolve.

  Another example of my use of the first person fabulous comes in “The Devil in Don Mills” (p. 220). The inspiration for this contemporary Faust tale came from two sources. One is a novel by the Russian writer Mikhail Bulgakov titled The Master and Margarita, in which the devil is a paradoxical power: he reveals truth by fabricating deceptions. The other source is a poem by Charles Baudelaire that depicts a Parisian roué meeting Satan in a café. The promise of modern technology—for example, to give us speed and ease in finding data—has proven to be a deal with the devil; as our data-hoards grow, our storymemories weaken. Instead of Stalinist Moscow or 1890s Paris, my natural setting for a Faustian encounter turned out to be a suburban shopping mall, full of standardized doughnut shops, hamburger joints, clothing stores and computer outlets. But the story-pattern hasn’t changed, and neither the moral dilemma it poses; only the scenery and the characters look a little different.

  It is no accident that the first person voice has become part of contemporary literature, both written and oral (and televised, if you watch Oprah). Walter Benjamin, in his essay “The Storyteller,” written after the First World War, observed that soldiers back from the battlefield were shockingly silent, unable to find words to describe the horror and absurdity of the mechanized slaughter they had witnessed. They were “not richer, but poorer in communicable experience.” The war’s insane violence undermined the very value of experience itself—moral, emotional, physical, communal. Benjamin believed this loss, this growing silence, threatened the very possibility of storytelling as a human activity because “experience which is passed on from mouth to mouth is the source from which all storytellers have drawn,” and he went on to say, “It is as if something that seemed inalienable to us, the securest among our possessions, were taken from us: the ability to exchange experiences.”

  Benjamin wrote his elegy in 1936, three years before the world entered a period of unimaginable atrocities, and four years before he himself, pursued by Nazis, entered the silence of suicide. He chose to give up his own ability to exchange experiences, and so entered the very history he had so eloquently chronicled: the twentieth century silencing of the storyteller’s voice.

  In the storytelling renaissance, the first person, the witness, the real-life hero telling the chronicle of his/her own adventure has an urgent appeal for those hungry for an unmediated contact with life, starved of direct experiences. Storytelling has become one way to reclaim the ground of human experience as a source of understanding and communication. The first person voice, fabulous or real, is a route back to a world where our personal experience is primary. Benjamin would be surprised and probably pleased to know that storytelling has returned after what he thought was its final exile.

  There are certain protocols involved in working with traditional stories, particularly if you find them in published sources. When I was working on “The Storyteller At Fault,” I wanted to include my adaptation of Harold Courlander’s famous story, “The Cow-tail Switch.” I wrote to Courlander asking for permission.

  The great folklorist and writer felt that my reworking had lost too much of his story and reminded me in no uncertain terms that it is essential to respect the traditional pattern that once anchored the oral multiforms of traditional tales. In the end my story evolved in a completely different direction.

  This kind of experimentation, whether it meets with success or failure, is part of the contemporary storytelling renaissance. It springs from the borderland between literate culture and the emerging arts of orality (storytelling, spoken word, rap). For as long as humankind has been literate, there have always been raids back and forth across this frontier. Authored stories and poems often turn into folklore, and oral sources inspire written versions. Most Canadian schoolyards resound with children chanting “Alligator pie, alligator pie, if I don’t get some I think I’m going to die…” They may or may not know that the Canadian poet Dennis Lee wrote this poem; it has already become part of their oral lore.

  The distance between the two worlds of oral and written tales changes from one epoch to another. In the fourteenth century, for example, a rich oral tradition prevailed. The streets of Oxford, London, Florence, Baghdad and Cairo were filled with countless gestes of saints, knights, amorous clergy, lusty maidens, ridiculous bureaucrats, craftsmen, kings and peasants. Chaucer, Boccaccio and the editors of the Thousand and One Nights must have absorbed these legends, wonder tales, religious fables, tall tales, all the “urban myths” of the day. From this speakable feast, they fashioned some of the worlds greatest narrative literature. The historian Barbara Tuchman calls this period a “distant mirror” of our own time. As a storyteller, I look back and see a curiously inverted image. If Chaucer wrought The Canterbury Tales in the midst of a living oral tradition, six hundred years later contemporary storytellers are trying to create a new spoken literature drawn largely from the shelves of our local libraries.

  What makes this inventiveness possible is the fact that stories have an inner life that allows them to sustain their meaning through myriad expressive forms. Robert Bringhurst, in his introduction to Alice Kane’s Dreamer Awakes, writes, “[I] am amazed by the way stories and songs, and the words of which they are made, preserve their forms over hundreds of years and thousands of miles, just as animals and plants do over many generations. Stories are not copied; they are reborn, and each succeeding individual is different, yet the species, for long stretches, is substantively the same.” The landscape of “The Devil’s Three Golden Hairs” transforms, in my telling, into a world where the poor live so far away that they only get one channel, and the hero gets pulled from Wild River by a lesbian couple; still, if I’ve done any justice to the story’s underlying pattern, it is essentially the same tale the brothers Grimm collected and wrote. Munsch changes his mudpuddle into a snowdrift but the story, that is, the part that makes it worth remembering, is unchanged. Stories are not museum artifacts.

  Bringhurst describes this process as an organic one: “Stories find the tellers they need. They nest in us like saw-whet owls and wood ducks nest in trees…. [T]hey use us to reproduce themselves.” As they are re-created in each generation, the details may change but the story can, with the Muse’s and teller’s help, continue to speak with undiminished force.

  LETTING THE STORY THROUGH

  But you know, what amazed me was that the good hakawatis didn’t have flying carpets constantly whizzing around, or dragons spitting fire, or witches concocting crazy potions. They kept their listeners just as spellbound with the simplest things…

  RAFIK SCHAMI, Damascus Nights

  THE AUSTRIAN STORYTELLER Karin Tscholl describes storytelling as the art of “juggling with a knife and a balloon.” The balloon part is the gentleness needed to create a shared reverie with the audience; the knife is the edge of suspense as the story unfolds, the irresistible energy that makes you want to hear what happens next. Both forces must be balanced to make a story memorable from the first word to the last. So a story must be as light as a balloon and as sharp as a knife.
This is helpful, but a beginning storyteller may wish for some more specific, hard-and-fast rules—the Top Ten Tips of Unforgettable Storytelling. Unfortunately, they don’t exist! There is no one right way to tell stories. I have, however, worked out some useful principles, which I keep in mind whenever I tell stories. These aren’t tips or methods or systematic ways to improve your storytelling technique, but simply four important ideas that have guided me in my own explorations.

  Anne Pellowski, in her splendid study of international storytelling, reports a telling by Sabadu, an African storyteller: “To the rabbit, of course, he gave a wee voice, to the Elephant he gave a deep bass, to the Buffalo a hollow mooing… when he mimicked the dog, one almost expected a little terrier-like dog to trot up to the fire, so perfect was his yaup-yaup.” At the other end of the performing spectrum is someone like Alice Kane, who with her quiet voice and her stillness can hold five hundred people spellbound. I saw her do so in a tent at the big storytelling festival in Jonesborough, Tennessee.

  The only style worth pursuing is your own, however long it takes you to discover it. As you search for your own voice and storytelling way, as you experiment, copy, turn back, and sometimes make triumphant and original breakthroughs, it’s worth remembering the story about Reb Zusya, one of the great Hasidic teachers. I once heard the late Reuven Gold tell of the time Zusya said to his students, “When I die, I’m not afraid of the angels asking me if I was as wise and virtuous as Abraham, or Isaac, or King David, or Solomon. I know that I could not be like them. I’m much more afraid that they will ask me if I had been as good as Zusya could have been.”