Читать книгу Sitting Up With the Dead: A Storied Journey Through the American South - Pamela Petro - Страница 14
ОглавлениеTHERE ARE ALL KINDS OF ORAL STORYTELLERS, who tell stories for all kinds of reasons. Pre-literate cultures told stories not only for entertainment, but, like Vickie’s family, as a way of codifying the communal past and passing it from generation to generation. The Druids – the priest class of the early European Celts – instructed initiates by requiring them to memorize Druidic lore in the form of linked three-part narratives, called triads. Anglesey, a large flat island off the coast of North Wales, functioned as a kind of university for would-be priests, where students spent eighteen years committing the mythos of an entire culture to heart. Even when Celtic tribes picked up writing from the Romans, still the Druids clung to mouth-to-ear learning, not trusting knowledge not internalized in the human memory.
(While memory is tenacious, what the Druids didn’t count on were the Roman legions that stormed Anglesey in AD61. The legionnaires lined up with their swords and shields on the mainland side of the Menai Straits, a narrow inlet that separates Anglesey, or Ynys Môn in Welsh, from the rest of Wales. When the tide was high, the Druids and their followers – faces painted blue, hair streaked with lime, waving torches and hurling curses – struck such fear into the troops that they almost ran from their posts; but then the tide turned and the Romans got hold of themselves, waded across and slaughtered everyone on the island, effectively wiping out a civilization in an afternoon. When the stories a culture tells about itself disappear, when there is no one left to listen and no one to tell, then not even ghost stories are left. There is, simply, no more culture.)
I learned the story about the Romans and Druids from Tacitus, who helpfully wrote it down. Many people who practice storytelling today get their information the same way – from books or recordings – which may actually broaden their art rather than diminish it, untying the parochial knots of family and geography and bringing new experiences to bear on old situations. These people value the spoken word, whatever its source. They enjoy performance and the verbal acrobatics it entails, and are seduced by the intimate bond between listener and teller. A few years ago I went to a Ghost Story Concert in Tennessee, and sat in a park with hundreds of other people, listening to storytellers populate the darkness with haints and blood-sucking ghosts and dancing corpses that wouldn’t die. Their words came over an invention of this century – a microphone – but I’ve never before felt such kinship with the tens of thousands of generations that preceded mine on earth. We were obeying a human impulse as old as fear, just as they had done: make the dark hours better by filling them with voices.
These ‘book-learned’ tellers often perform in untraditional venues, such as schools, museums or organized festivals. But what interests me about the South, more than any other region of the country, is that it provided ‘natural’ contexts for tale-telling long before the modern storytelling revival ever got underway. In Storytellers: Folktales and Legends from the South, John Burrison identified three traits that have historically made the South a hotbed of the storyteller’s art: a socially-instilled reverence for the spoken word; a population base with roots in West Africa, Ulster (the wellspring of the Southern Scotch-Irish), and Southern England, all of which are rich in storytelling traditions; and finally, physical isolation in a rural landscape. To these I would add the lingering poverty of the Great Depression, which ensured that much of the Southern population remained rural and remote throughout most of the technologically plugged-in twentieth century.
These are the very conditions that create the parochial knots of family and geography that – for good or ill – are the wells from which traditional tellers haul up their tales, still dripping with the rich, distinctive murk of the Southern soul. Shucking corn, keeping the kids quiet, entertaining neighbors: whatever the incentives that brought stories to their lives, these Southern Druids – minus the face paint, though not beyond the occasional hurled curses – learned their art the old way, mouth-to-ear. They first heard most of the tales they now tell themselves, or like Vickie, learned telling techniques and then applied them to stories of their own. Some tell family tales, or personal anecdotes. Others tell legends, or trickster tales, like Akbar’s story of Brer Rabbit, or even ‘jokelore’, which is Colonel Rod’s stock-in-trade. Many tell folktales; a few, the most isolated tellers, furthest from outside influences, tell very old folktales. And then there is Ray Hicks. Ray tells Jack Tales.
When I woke up in Asheville, I knew I was within an hour or two of Ray Hicks’ home. This was so exciting that I splurged on biscuits and sausage gravy for breakfast (one of the perks of lodging well), nodding between bites as an old man told me how he’d worked in the dairy up at the Vanderbilt Estate when he was a boy. His job was to jump off the milk wagon and run bottles to customers’ houses, racing to catch up with the horse if he’d had a big delivery. Now the dairy is a winery: most people prefer Chardonnay to milkshakes these days, though I doubt Ray Hicks would endorse the change.
In 1983 the National Endowment for the Arts made Ray a National Heritage Fellow – a very grandiose title for a man who probably couldn’t care less. I had book-learned a few things about ol’ Ray, as people called him, although I had never met him: he is nearly eighty; he stands seven feet tall; he rarely leaves his Appalachian home on Beech Mountain, in a remote corner of the Blue Ridge; he speaks with a vestigial accent that, according to a New Yorker profile ‘preserves Chaucerian and Elizabethan locutions’; and that these stories are his birthright, the current expression of an oral, family tradition that in this country, at least, goes back to around 1760, when a certain David Hicks, Sr. arrived in America from an unknown village in Somerset, England.
I had read that Ray is ‘the patriarch, the classic American storyteller’. I’d read, too, that once when his truck broke down and he’d been unable to pay for repairs, he’d prayed to Jesus for help, and that night an illuminated map of an internal combustion engine had appeared on his bedroom wall. He fixed the truck easily the next day. Isolated up on his four-thousand-foot high mountain, Ray was to Anglo-American storytelling what Picasso was to visual art: a master, a genius to whom narrative digression came as naturally as shopping lists do to people with empty cupboards. I’d further read that Ray was on record as claiming that he learned everything he knew from his alter ego, Jack.
You know Jack too, and so do I: Jack and the Beanstalk and Jack the Giant-Killer are two of his better-known exploits. Jack is the hero of a cycle of English wondertales so ancient that they were already part of the folk-culture when first set into rhyme in the 1400s. Several centuries later, Jack emigrated to the New World with David Hicks, Sr., and became a Southern mountain lad. Meanwhile, back in Britain, even though the giant never got the best of him, nineteenth-century editors did, and trapped Jack in bowdlerized children’s stories, which is how most Americans now know him as well. Most, that is, but for the descendants of David Hicks, Sr., of Beech Mountain, North Carolina. On their summer porches and beside their winter fires, they kept alive a Jack meant for the adult world; a young man who through cleverness, a little magic, and sheer good luck outwits throughout all eternity his dastardly brothers Will and Tom, various supernatural adversaries, and most of the hurdles life throws in his way.
The partnership of an elderly American mountain man and a figment of the imagination of medieval English peasants (‘my best friend,’ as Ray calls Jack), is based on a good-hearted nose-thumbing at five centuries and the Atlantic Ocean. I can open a book and read the words of Jack’s contemporary, Geoffrey Chaucer, but we are not intimates; Chaucer is dead, so he can’t be my friend. Jack, on the other hand, has been an immortal lodger with the Hicks clan, living alongside each generation. Ray has said, ‘I’m Jack. Everybody can be Jack. Jack ain’t dead. He’s a-livin’ … Like I tell ’em sometimes … I ain’t everything Jack has done in the tales, but still I’ve been Jack in a lot of ways. It takes Jack to live. Now I wouldn’t have been livin’, probably, if I’d not been Jack’s friend.’
My compatriots may enjoy freefalling into an unseen future, but the invisible world I perversely cherish is the one that has passed. I want to fall backward, not forward. That vanished world – still invisible to the eyes, but accessible to the ears – lives on in Ray’s stories, by grace of a marriage of New World and Old that is far more genuine than the uneasy union of European plunder and American folly at the Biltmore Estate.
I wanted very badly to find Ray Hicks.
In the words of someone else who must also have been searching for ol’ Ray, ‘Easier said than done.’ I looked up ‘Hicks’ in the phonebook and found two listings under ‘Hicks, Orville’ in the Banner Elk area, which is the town closest to Beech Mountain. I had heard Ray had a younger cousin named Orville, who was also a storyteller, so that was promising. I rang both numbers: no answer. There was nothing else to do but try my luck in the Blue Ridge Mountains.
I followed the highway as far as I could, then started side-winding up into the foot hills. The temperature dropped twenty-five degrees in half an hour. Sham ‘Trading Posts’ by the roadside sold souvenirs and apple butter for cash; the only trading they were doing these days was on a two hundred year-old memory of the area – a stone’s throw from the Tennessee line – as the Wild Frontier. However hokey, their presence conjured vague thoughts of Daniel Boone, the eighteenth-century pioneer, woodsman, sometime Indian captive, and habitual poor speller (carving on a tree in these parts ‘D. Boone cilled a bar’), for whom a nearby town was named. Boone’s homespun swashbuckling – the story of his rescuing his young daughter from the Shawnee Indians made its way into James Fenimore Cooper’s The Last of the Mohicans–coupled with Ray’s legendary inaccessibility (folklorist Joseph Daniel Sobol described fans ‘making the pilgrimage up the rocky road to Ray’s house, their ears popping and their cars’ suspensions rattling’), kindled a belief that I really was entering something very like wilderness.
Thick fog settled as I drove higher, and when it lifted I found myself in Blowing Rock, North Carolina. Volvos and BMWs jockeyed for position on streets lined in cafes and galleries. I saw a restaurant called ‘Cheeseburgers in Paradise’. There were antiques and estate jewelry and potters’ studios, and the mild smiles of well-dressed tourists resigned to ‘having a nice time’. This wasn’t Ray’s world, it was a twee tourist town. Winter population: 1200. Summer population: 6000. I felt like a cartoon character whose thought balloon had just been exploded. Matters didn’t improve in Boone, but merely slipped down the commercial scale from The Wine and Cheese Shop to the Hillbilly Trading Post. The mountains weren’t distant, now, as they had been yesterday; I was among them, like an insect buried in thick carpet, knobby green mounds on all sides. Whenever there was a straightaway, it was cluttered either with kitsch – old motels, miniature golf courses, and places where families with children young enough to be stupendously gullible could ‘pan for mountain gemstones’ – or slick purveyors of outdoor recreation.
Banner Elk was given over to the latter. In fact it looked like an Olympic village set on a small plateau, ringed by mountains and scattered with hiking shops, ski shops, fishing gear stores, and white water rafting centers. On top of Beech Mountain, Ray’s fabled Olympian home – reached only by turning my car wheels inside out on a road so steeply interlaced that its design would have made an Irish monk proud – I did not find Ray whittling on his porch, but a resort village of prefab condominium units.
This was heartbreaking. Maybe Ray had moved into a condo. I berated myself for turning him into a kind of holy hick; he was as entitled to wall-to-wall carpeting and air-conditioned clubhouses as the rest of us. Still, it was with no mean measure of desperation that I corralled a cop in the parking lot of a trendy toy store and asked about Ray.
‘Oh, you’re looking for Ray-the-Storyteller.’ I was as relieved as I have ever been: at least she’d heard of him. ‘He gives out Beech Mountain as his address, but that’s really not it.’ She then gave me excruciating directions to the Mast General Store in Valle Crucis, about twenty minutes away. ‘They’ll know how to find Ray there.’
‘Ray who?’
My heart sank. Pretty college students on summer holiday were weighing bags of day-glo penny candy – sassafras drops, gummi strawberries, candy buttons, clove puffs, and Charleston chews – for tourists’ children. No one knew Ray.
‘You might want to try up at the Mast Store,’ one finally suggested.
‘I thought this was the Mast Store.’
‘No, this is the Mast Annex. Store’s half a mile up the road.’
I sighed loudly enough for people to stare. My guidebook called Valle Crucis, (which means Vale of the Cross and is pronounced Valley Cruise by the locals) ‘an offbeat settlement’ on a ‘pretty back road’. This was true enough. Despite the penny candy, the detritus of tourism had remained on the highway, leaving handkerchief-size fields and pastures nestled between the switchbacks. One, indeed, cupped the Mast Store, a rambling, sagging thing of many rooflines, that looked like a brontosaurus constructed out of white clapboard. An ancient Esso gasoline sign hung out front, and an American flag flew from the roof. The Mast family had been selling everything from bowler hats to chicken feed and live chickens there since 1883.
Now it was stocked with useful stuff for modern life, though ancient advertising posters still hawked turn-of-the-last-century goods. There was a hardy smell of dust, canvas, fertilizer, and coffee. In the center of the main room sat a wood-burning stove surrounded by rockers: a central focus even in the middle of summer. An old man with a gourd-shaped head, huge eyes and no teeth rocked by himself next to a checkerboard; the red squares were set with Coca-Cola caps, the black ones with silver-and-black, twist-off beer tops. I took the facing chair and asked if he knew Ray Hicks.
‘Yeah, I know ol’ Ray. He been down here a timer two. Sittin jus’ whar ye are now. Wha ye lookin’ fer ‘im? Ye kin t’ol Ray?’
I explained that I was an admirer, and he gave me a loose collection of directions to Ray’s house. At first I was relieved to hear that Ray did indeed live ‘way back deep in th’mount’n’ – so no condo for the Hicks clan, I thought triumphantly – then, an instant later, decided that this was more bad news than good. I would never find him now. I was silently weighing my chances when the old man said, ‘Ole Ray’s as tall’s that big ole stove.’
‘No.’
‘Yes, ma’am, he is.’ He added that he’d personally been coming to the Mast Store since he was six years old, and it hadn’t changed at all but for the stock. The Masts used to sell pig feed and grain, but now the farmers were all gone. Then he leaned over and whispered conspiratorially, ‘Upstars wus the funeral parlor. That’s a-whar they kept th’caskets, up thar. They feed ye all ye’r life, then they dress ye up and pack ye off.’ After that he stretched himself and got up to take his leave, bowing and saying his mother was waiting for him at home. I must have looked incredulous, because he added, ‘She’s eighty-four, but I look older. Ye’r not too big, but she’s half ye’r size, and still a whip’snapper. She makes th’ony canned green beans I kin eat.’
Another two hours of searching turned up wave after green wave of mountain ridges, each skirted by precipitous valleys fast now falling into shadow, but no Ray Hicks. Another young cop told me, ‘Yeah, I seen him on TV tellin’ his old-timey mountain stories, but I don’t know where he lives.’ I finally gave up, returned to Boone and checked into the Franklin Court Motel. One whole side of my room was covered in a wallpaper mural of birch trees in autumn, which struggled to a bitter draw with the floral-print bedspreads and knotty pine paneling. When I went out to dinner I discovered that members of a beefy motorcycle gang had occupied the rooms on either side of mine. I would have despaired then, except that my final, half-hearted effort to reach Orville was successful: he would be happy to meet me the next day at the Blowing Rock Recycling Plant, where he works. I could barely understand his accent, but I thought we had made a date to meet at noon.
It was ten past twelve: twenty minutes at the recycling plant, and no sign of Orville. That morning someone had told me he plays Santa Claus in the Blowing Rock schools each Christmas, and that I couldn’t miss him. But I was; each minute that passed I was missing Orville. Just as I’d christened the phrase ‘The Hicks Hex’ in my notebook, a truck pulled up. The driver worked at the plant, but had never heard of Orville Hicks. ‘Why don’t you try the dumpsters just up the road,’ he suggested kindly. ‘Maybe that’s where he’s at.’
I sped up the highway then literally ran, rucksack filled with tape recorder, notebooks, pens, and corn muffins bouncing wildly on my back, into a bivouac of big metal dumpsters. I kept on running until the sight of Orville stopped me cold. From pictures I knew Ray was tall, gaunt and clean-shaven; Orville wasn’t exactly short, but he was bearded and stout. I thought he looked like a great, ambling composite of all the earth’s creatures, plants and animals alike. The bib of his denim overalls, incongruously graced by a gold watch chain, bulged with a belly big and round enough to take on a life of its own, like he had a young piglet hidden in there. His head supported two landmarks: a Carolina Tractor baseball cap and a curly, graying shrub of a full beard grown right up to his laugh lines. Between the beard and cap smiled the face of a brawny elf, nostrils arched with mischief, very blue eyes glimmering beneath bushy brows. The easy good humor that spilled from this man salved my immediate fear that he was consciously parodying himself.
‘I reckon you want t’hear a sto-ry,’ he said cheerfully. I assured him I did.
‘Well come round here to ma lyin’ bench.’ Gesturing with the antenna of his mobile phone, Orville indicated a salvaged plank pushed up against a chain link fence, next to one of the dumpsters. Peeling paint and decomposing plastic littered the ground like eternal snowflakes. Maybe because it was a recycling dump, there was no smell. We settled in and Orville said, ‘Oright, I’m a-gonna tell you ’bout this boy named Jack, okay?’
The good luck of this made my palms ache with pleasure. ‘Did you learn this one from your cousin Ray?’ I asked.
‘No ma’am, from ma’ mama. I had six brothers and four sisters. I’m th’ youngest. See, in th’ evenin’-time, sto-rytellin’ was part of our growin’ up. Mama, she would holler at us, “You young ’uns wanta hear a tale? Then come on in th’ house,” and we’d go in th’ house and sit down thar and do chores while mama’d tell the tales.’ Orville stopped and expertly spat tobacco juice at the dumpster. ‘We’d break beans, er shell peas, er bunch galax. And we’d set thar and do th’ work, and mama’d tell us these Jack tales. And that’s how I learned ’em, by listenin’ to mama up thar on Beech Mountain. This here one’s called Jack and the Varmints.’
Orville made a noise in his throat like children do when they’re imitating a machine gun, except that he was smiling. It was an extraordinary chuckle, half pure joy, half rhythmic device.
Now Jack, he lived waaaay back up in th’ mountains thar with his mama, and they got up one morning, and went to get something to eat, and looked, but didn’t have a bite to eat in the house. Didn’t have nuthin’. And Jack’s mama said, ‘Son, you gonna have to go out and find some work. If’n you don’t, we gonna starve to death.’
Well, Jack, he didn’t like to work too good, if he could get by with it. But he finally headed down th’ road lookin’ for work. Well, Jack got down th’ road a little piece, and found an old board layin’ beside th’ road that come off an old wagon. Well Jack got his old pocketknife out of his pocket, and got to whittlin’ on that board. Walking down th’ road, he wasn’t carin’ where he’s going, er if he found work er not. Got down th’ road a little piece and Jack looked and he’d chewed down a big old round paddle outta that board. Well, Jack put his knife in his pocket and got that old paddle, walking down th’ road with it, swinging it this way and that way. Wasn’t long before he come by a mud hole [pronounced hough]. Jack got to lookin’, and there was a big bunch a flies flyin’ around that mud hough. After a while the flies lit on th’ mud hough, and Jack snuck up on th’ mud hough with that paddle, and he come down in that mud hough, ka-wham! Right in th’ mud hough with th’ paddle he went. And he picked up th’ paddle and looked under it, and he’d killed seven flies! [Orville chuckled]
Well, Jack thought he’d done something big.
‘Excuse me, can I put this in here?’ A man held pieces of an old kitchen chair for Orville to inspect before he tossed them in the dumpster. Orville looked them over and thought he could do something with them, and stockpiled them at our feet.
‘I’m a salvager,’ he said, a little sheepishly.
So Jack went on down the road and he come to the blacksmith shop. He went in ‘ar and he got that blacksmith to make him a belt [pronounced bey-alt]. And Jack put that belt on, and that belt, it read, ‘Big Man Jack Killed Seven at a Whack.’ Gosh, Jack went down the road with that belt on feelin’ big [pronounced be’eg].
Well, it wasn’t long before Jack come by the king’s house. The old king was settin’ on the porch thar smokin’ his old corncob pipe, leanin’ back in a rockin’ chair, and he seen Jack a-comin’, and he said, ‘Howdy son.’
Jack looked up thar on the porch and seen the king, and said, ‘Howdy-do, daddy.’
The old king said, ‘Can I hep you?’
Jack said, ‘Yeah, I’m a-lookin’ fer work.’
‘Well, Jack,’ he said, ‘I need a man. But you ain’t bigger enough fer what I need you for. But come on up here and set down and talk to me awhile anyway.’
Well Jack went up on the porch, set down in the old chair, and him and the king got to talkin’. D’rectly the king looked over and he seen Jack’s belt. And he read it and said, ‘Big Man Jack Killed Seven at a Whack.’ He said, ‘Gosh, Jack, that belt mean what it says it does?’ [Orville chuckled]
Jack said, ‘It sure does.’ The king thought he killed seven men at a whack, din’t know he was talkin’ about flies. He said, ‘Gosh, you just the man I’m a-lookin’ for.’
Jack said, ‘Whaddaya mean?’
He said, ‘‘Cross the mountain here, there’s a big old wild boar on the loose. That thing’ll weigh ya up to two thousand pounds, it got tusks stickin’ waaaay up outta its mouth, and that thang’s knockin’ down fences and killin’ horses and sheep. Nah I need to get that thang killed. If you can kill that thang and bring it back ta me, I’ll give you a thousand dollars.’
Jack said, ‘Gawsh, a thousand dollars. Well, king, I’ll see if I can go back thar and kill it fer you.’
Well, the king went out and got his horse, and put the saddle on it, and put Jack up behind him, and rode ‘cross the mountain to where he last seen that wild boar at. And the king was sa scared of it, he knocked Jack off the horse and he beat that horse to death gettin’ outta thar, very nearly. Jack got up, dusted hisself off, and said, ‘If that king’s that scared o’ that wild boar,’ he said, ‘I’d better not mess with it. I believe I’ll just go on home [pronounced haum] and forget about it.’
Well Jack started ’cross the mountain haum. He got ’cross the mountain, got down in the holler and got lost [pronounced lawes-t]. He got to beatin’, thrashin’ around in the laurel bushes, tryin’ to find his way out [pronounced a-yout]. The wild boar’s on the other side of the mountain, and it hear Jack down in them bushes, boy here it come. Whipty-cut, whipty-cut, here come that wild boar ‘cross that mountain. And Jack seen that thang comin’ down the mountain, them big tusks is hangin’ out, knockin’ rocks down this way, knockin’ trees down that way, gosh it scared Jack ta death.
Jack took off a-runnin’ as hard as he could run. Wild boar right behind him, whipty-cut, whipty-cut, whipty-cut, hear it come [chuckles]. Well Jack tucked through the bushes, dodgin’ this way and that way a-runnin’, and Jack run and run ‘till he’s just about gived out. And the wild boar’s about to ketch ‘im. Jack said, ‘I gotta do somethin’ quick. That thang’s gonna ketch me and kill me.’ Well Jack looked, and he seen a little old log cabin up thar in the woods. The top of the cabin had fell in, but the rest of it was still standing. Jack went ta that log cabin as hard as he could run, that wild boar right behind him, whipty-cut, whipty-cut. And Jack got to the door of that log cabin, the wild boar grabbed him by the coat-tail and ripped a big chunk outta it.
‘I’ll just pull up this old chair, will that be alright?’ An elderly man had been circling our lying bench for the past five minutes, dispersing his glass and plastics with enormous deliberation, the better to keep listening to Orville. He had his hands hopefully on the back of a folding beach chair that had seen better days.
‘That’s what it’s a-thar fer,’ said Orville, and sent a missile of tobacco spit back at the dumpster.
I gave the newcomer a firm smile that said, Fine, but sit down and be quiet.
Gosh it scared Jack, and Jack run inta that log cabin, and the wild boar come in behind ’im. Well Jack clumb up the log cabin and jumped outta the top of it, and run around thar, and pushed the door shut, and put a big rock up against it. The wild boar couldn’t get outta the log cabin.
Well old Jack went on back down to the king’s house. The king was settin’ on the porch, he seen Jack, ‘Hey, Jack, ya kill that wild boar?’
‘Well no, king, I didn’t see no wild boar.’
‘The king said, ‘That’s funny. Last ten men I sent up’ar, that boar’s tried to kill ’em and scared ’em to death. And you didn’t see no wild boar?’
Jack said, ‘No, only thang I seen was a little old pig up on the side a the mountain. That thang got ta followin’ me around, I made a pet outta it. I was gonna bring it back here and give it to you, but that thang bit me on my coat-tail and jerked a chunk outta it and made me mad, so I picked it up by the tail and the ear and throwed it in a log cabin up thar. You can go up thar and see if that’s what you want.’
Well, the king jumped up on his horse, rode up on the mountain, looked down in that log cabin, seen that wild boar, and gosh it like to scared him to death [pronounced day-yuth; chuckles]. He went back to town [pronounced ta-youn], and got sixty of his men’n Winchester rifles. They all went back up thar. That wild boar’s sa big, a-rootin’ down thar in that log cabin, and beatin’ around with them long tusks, it scared the king’s men – they wouldn’t get close enough to shoot it. Jack said, ‘Give me the gun, I’ll shoot it. And Jack went around the old log cabin, and finally found a crack. He stuck the gun in thar, and bang! Shot it between the eyes and killed it deader’n a hammer [Orville chuckled]. That wild boar fell over. It’us so big, that when they skinned it out, it took twenty-four wagonloads of meat to haul it back to the king’s house.
Two other men joined us, acknowledged by a nod of Orville’s Carolina Tractor cap.
‘You Ray Hicks?’ asked one.
Orville explained that he was Ray’s younger cousin, and related to Ray’s wife, Rosie (Ray and Rosa Hicks are also distant cousins). ‘It was Ray that got me a-tellin’, though,’ said Orville, spitting again. ‘I was a-shy, but Ray wouldn’t have it. He made me go up on stage once’t, and I told a story, and I haven’t stopped since. Sometimes I do twenty-two shows a month. And people bring thar children and grandchildren out here to th’ dump.’
‘Does anyone mind?’ I asked.
‘Th’ county hasn’t complained yet,’ said Orville, chuckling mightily. ‘Now ma own daddy, he was a Missionary Baptist preacher, and he didn’t care too much about th’ sto-rytellin’. “When mama told us tales, she’d have ta look out th’ do-or to see if daddy was a-comin’ home; if she seen him comin’, she’d quit tellin’.
Ma daddy didn’t have no car or driver’s license, so we just stayed up on th’ mountain. We didn’t have no ’lectric’ty ’till 1964, and then we didn’t have no TV. Daddy thought that was a sin. I’ll tell you about the hardest whippin’ I ever got. We’d worked all day in th’ fields, worked real hard. My brother come up to th’ house – he had an old ‘42 Chev-e-rolet, I think this happened about 1959 – and he took us young ’uns up to th’store to buy us a sody pop. Well, we got in th’ car and got up to th’ store there, about three miles, and I looked at th’ store and saw a sign. And th’ sign said, ‘Drink good ole’ Mountain Dew.’ Well, daddy started in th’ store and he said, ‘What kinda drink do you want, Orville?’ and I said, “Daddy, get me one o’ them good ole’ Mountain Dews.” Well, daddy turned right around and broke a switch off a tree, and he gave me th’hardest whippin’ I ever got. Daddy thought it was-a moonshine I was askin’ fer. But it was just sody pop. He didn’t find out ’til years later.’
Orville chuckled his rapid-fire chuckle again, as if he’d been recalling pain inflicted on someone else’s backside.
‘Ma daddy was real strict,’ he continued. ‘Fer him Christmas was just ’nother day. Mama’d get ta feelin’ sorry fer us kids, though, and fill a white rag with sugar and dip it in water er milk and tie it off, give it t’us ta suck on. She called it a sugar tit. Now ev’ry night come 7:30 we had to go to bed, even if we weren’t a-tired. Daddy’d blow th’ lights out, and if we talked we’d get a whippin’. But now, fellers, I was a-tellin’ a story to this lady, and I’ll go back to it, if that’s OK.’
Everyone shook his head very earnestly, and Orville picked up the flow as easily as if he’d been holding it in his hand all along.
Well, tha’ll went back and Jack got his thousand dollars. He put it down in his pocket. Boy, Jack was tickled t’death. A thousand dollars! He said, ‘I’ll go home, won’t have to work.’ Well Jack started down the road. He hadn’t even gotten outta the king’s sight, and the king hollered and said, ‘Heeey, Jack, hold up a minute.’ Jack looked back and said, ‘What it is, king?’
He said, ‘Jack, I just got word in that a big old lion’s got loose. It’s done eat one little boy, and girl, and Jack, me being the king, I gotta have that thang killed. People’s scared of it. If you kin kill it, I’ll give you another thousand dollars.’
Jack said, ‘Get somebody else to do it, king, I’m a-goin’ home.’
The king said, ‘Aw, c’on Jack, you killed seven at a whack. You killed a big old wild boar fer me. You ain’t scared of an old lion, are you?’
Jack said, ‘Well, I reckon I can see if I can kill it for you, king.’
The king went on out and got his horse, put his saddle on it, and him and Jack got on his horse and they rode across the mountain. Well, they see that big old lion thar. The king was s’scared of it he knocked Jack off that horse, boy he took off, whippin’ that horse, gettin’ outta thar.
Jack got off and dusted hisself off, and said, ‘I’m a-goin’ haum. I’m not gettin’ messed up with no lion, and I’m stayin’ on this little bitty road here’ll take me haum, and I’m not gettin’ lost [pronounced law-ust].
Well Jack started on that little old road towards haum. He got down the road a little piece and he come around a bend in the road, and right smack dab in the middle of the road set that big old lion all rared up. It seen Jack. It lioned, ‘Rarrrrrrrr.’ It roared s’loud, the king heard it from in town. He said, ‘Oh no, Jack’s a goner this time.’
And it scared Jack s’bad, that instead of runnin,’ Jack clumb up a big old tree. Clean to the top of it. But that old lion came and got under that tree, and looked up and seen Jack up that tree, and got its big old teeth and got to gnawin’ on that tree. Had the tree nearly cut in two. Jack was up thar scared t’death. But d’rectly the old lion dropped off [pronounced ough] to sleep. And Jack said, ‘While that lion’s asleep I’m a-gettin’ outta here.’
Jack put his foot down, put it on an old brickly limb and it broke, and Jack fell outta the top of that tree smack dab on the lion’s back. The lion jumped up and felt Jack on its back. It tried to bite him and tried t’claw him. And tried to run through the bushes ta knock him out. But Jack was scared t’death. He was hangin’ on that lion’s back fer dear life.
The lion took ough a-runnin’. Right into town that lion went. And the king was settin’ on the porch. He looked, and seen that lion a-comin’ with Jack on its back, and he run in the house and grabbed his rifle. They come round the king’s house, the king shot and missed and shot Jack’s hat ough. Boy, Jack was getting scared on that lion’s back, and the king shootin’ his hat ough.
The lion come around the king’s house again, the king took better aim, and Bang! Shot the lion right between the eyes and killed it. The lion fell over in the street and Jack did too. Well, the king walked over thar where Jack was gettin’ up, dusting hisself off, and the king got up to Jack, and Jack said, ‘Looky here, king, I’m mad, I’m good and mad.’
The king said, ‘What you mad about? I shot that lion.’
Jack said, ‘That’s what I’m mad about.’ Said, ‘I caught that lion up on the mountain, and I was trainin’ it for your ridy horse. I’ve been a-trainin’ that thang for nearly two hours, and you up and shoot it like that. King, that makes me mad.’
The king felt sorry for Jack, give him an extra thousand dollars, and old Jack went on haum with three thousand dollars in his pocket. The last time I’s down by thar to see Jack, that lazy rascal still ain’t done n’work.
Orville chuckled so hard he almost drowned out the clapping. I was freezing – fog had settled again, bringing with it a chill better suited to a November afternoon – but I was too absorbed to care. Orville’s voice fascinated me. Akbar, Colonel Rod and Vickie all had Southern accents, but when they began their stories they slipped out of standard grammar into dialect, as well as thicker, curlier versions of their own voices, which they either borrowed from their own past selves – as, I think, was the case with Colonel Rod – or from friends or relatives. The change was a marker that conversation had stopped and storytelling had begun. But with Orville it was different. His voice never altered. As an educated, African-American professional, Akbar would never say, ‘Ah hears what you’re saying,’ the way Brer Bear does. But to Orville sody pop was always sody pop.
‘I like to tell ma kids now, ’cause they live like lit’le rich kids, with a TV set’n all, what it was like when I growed up,’ continued Orville, after he spat some more jet streams of tobacco juice. ‘I didn’t like school much. I was always a-lookin’ out the winder, day-dreamin’ and such. So I used ta hide in th’ woods and not go ta school. I’d swing on grapevines and set rabbit traps. Maybe I’d go two, three times a munth. My parents never found out ‘till we got the ’lectric’ty, ’cause then a phone come in, around 1965. Th’ princ’pal called and said I hadn’t been in school. You know I got a whippin’.
Before I went ta school, if I went’ – Orville chuckled and his beard shook up and down –’ I had to get up at five in the mornin’ and run th’ milk cow down from the mount’n, cause whar we lived at was in th’ holler. That’us just one a ma chores. Another was raisin’ pumpkins. In the fall o’th’ year, people would drive up thar t’get these pumpkins, specially round Hal-oween time er Thanks-givin’. We raised some great big pumpkins. One Saturd’y, daddy left me down at the barn sellin’ them pumpkins. It was long ’bout one or two o’clock, I hear’d a car come up, a great big old Cadillac. A feller got out with a big old coat on and a necktie. And he looked like a rich city feller.’
The déjà vu switch tripped in my brain. I waited expectantly, then sure enough, Orville sold the rich city feller a mule egg. My mind raced: if I’d had trouble disentangling the undergrowth of Colonel Rod’s conversation from his tales, it was impossible to tramp through the audible kudzu thicket of Orville’s monologues and separate memories from performance. And perhaps that was the point: his memories were his performance. The storyteller was the story. In real life Colonel Rod is a composite figure, half mule-egg seller, half city slicker; perhaps because of this dichotomy he’s more comfortable presenting the tale in the third person. He doesn’t quite have the credentials to sell mule eggs himself. But Orville does. If I hadn’t heard the story previously, I might have believed him. The parts about the sugar tit, the whippings, and playing hooky were all true, so why not passing off pumpkins as mule eggs?
Despite his isolated upbringing, Orville’s storytelling betrays a very modern self-awareness. He is conscious of his own exoticism, of how the ‘mountain man’ image is perceived and valued – and ridiculed – in the world at large, just as Vickie is conscious of Granny’s uniqueness. Because it is presented in the first person, however, Orville’s double-vision is even more unsettling. As I discovered later, listening to his storytelling tape and thumbing through a written profile of him (when the group broke up, Orville offered to sell me his latest tape and CD, which he kept in the passenger seat of his truck), Orville codifies his childhood experiences, remembering them as stories – almost as if they had happened to Jack, and not to him personally. His telling of the Mountain Dew incident on tape, and in print, was word-for-word the way he’d told it to me.
It is clear that Orville is on the cusp, one foot in the contemporary world, one foot in the otherworld of his parents, Gold and Sarah Hicks. But what made my drive to David Holt’s house, outside of Asheville, shot through with twined veins of relief and regret, was that the old world of his daddy’s day is past. If it weren’t, Orville’s stories would not have petrified into legend in his middle age (he’s forty-eight); the flotsam of daily life would polish their edges, as silt burnishes gemstones in a tumbler machine, and his tales would change shape and luster day by day. But daily experience is so different now in these Southern mountains, with the arrival of condos and tourists and wider roads and better jobs and cheeseburgers from paradise, that it doesn’t bear any more on Orville’s childhood memories than it does on Jack’s fifteenth-century escapades. And in some private place beneath his chuckles, that makes Orville sad. In the book he sold me, he is quoted as saying:
‘With my children and the new generation coming along, I can’t live the old ways. Can’t even buy a wash pot. We’ve got a car and a VCR and television, and our children are growing up fine. But if it was up to me I’d take all the electricity out of the house and have oil lamps. Live the old way.’
Before I left the Blowing Rock Recycling Center I asked Orville two crucial questions. One was how to get to his cousin Ray’s house, to which he replied with a tangled web of directions. I’d have liked nothing better than to turn around and march back up into the mountains, but I was due back at the Atlanta airport the following day, and so set them aside for a future trip. The other was what on earth I had been perching my feet on as he had talked.
Orville laughed, chest heaving, spat hard and said, ‘That thar’s a gut bucket. It’s a subst’ute fer a bass. See.’ And Orville began strumming a cat-gut string that was threaded through a tiny hole in the bottom of an overturned metal washtub, attached at the other end to a makeshift handle held aloft by a four-foot stick. Dum dum dum it went, recycling the sound of Orville’s childhood from the percussive thrum of his memory, up through his fingers, and out into the chill mountain air.
