ENG 363
March 5, 2010
Stories Told by Others as Stories of Their Own
When sitting down after a holiday dinner with your extended family and the kids have gone to bed and the dishes are washed and dried and put away and the fire is burning finely in the hearth to keep at bay the cold rain and snow and another drink of whatever it may be your pleasure to have a glass of at such times and one of the elders of your family starts in on another story of the days that used to be there is rarely—if ever—an agent of the court at hand to insist the teller of such tales place their hand on the Good Book and swear before God and man that what they are re-telling in this family context is the Truth, the Whole Truth and nothing but. Family stories are not the sort which are put forth before the bar to be judged for veracity citing witnesses and calling to hear from others who were involved in the plots revealed by the elder of your family when sitting down to share life's tales with their family on holiday evenings with a drink in hand and a fire in hearth. Nor do we, as family members, readers, or other tellers of our own tales, expect such stories to be held up to the same scrutiny as testimony given in a room of polished wooden balusters and attorneys with shiny shoes and tailored suits.
Family stories are given a certain leniency when it comes to the measure of veracity—and many times they are expected to stretch objective truth. Tales grow taller, more dramatic, with age and each successive retelling. Few people are satisfied or even able to tell the story of a family event from some time past without adding a certain spice, a certain dimension, to the narrative. And the stories of family past in the trio of books we have journeyed through show—each with their own unique perspectives—that they are no exception to this expectation.
Rooted Deep in the Pigeon Valley: A Harvest of Western Carolina Memories by Carroll Jones is centered on family stories; they are the focus of the narrative, plot, and theme of the work. He sets out to give readers a comprehensive history of his ancestor. Using them as such, it is understandable that Jones has based those stories he shares upon historical documents and personal diaries. While neither is beyond reproach for pure validity, both are commonly accepted as being valid sources for historical information. Diaries, although prone to the very exaggerations and subjectivity that separate family tales from sworn testimony, capture the voice of the person writing and the time period from whence they come.
Upon introducing his great-grandfather, William Harrison Hargrove, Jones tells us directly, "I knew he was a Civil War veteran, but beyond that the details of his life and history were rather murky" (25), before leading through a whirlwind summary of his life's adventures —"His personal diary provides a record of his odyssey" (33)—leading up to the War Between the States, his time with the 21st Regiment North Carolina Infantry during the War, and his travels following it.
It may come as no surprise that Jones makes Hargrove the hero of these adventures, complete with admirable character traits and few, if any flaws. "It is a testament to William's character that he stopped off in in Petersberg to check on friends recovering from wounds and sickness in the hospital there. He steadfastly remained at the side of the injured Garland Furgeson for almost two weeks waiting to assist his good friend home" (34). Of course, no real, breathing person has a flawless life, but this idealizing is the result of selective telling.
Selective telling can come in different forms. One way is as Jones has done, taking all evidence at hand—historical documents and personal writings—and then picking which parts of the narrative to pass on. Another is through assembled memory and habit of telling the story in a given manner. This latter method is more indicative of Daniel Robb's shared family stories in Sloop.
To his credit, Robb does tell us he fills in blank spots in the tales he passes along to readers, "There is a story my father has told me many times" (216), and starts off with the broad strokes of a story retold by someone who was not a participant in it, but quickly adds details to heighten the tension and dramatic effect of a situation where his father (as a young boy) and a friend take a boat out onto Buzzards Bay and almost sink it. "'Keep bailin', man,' I imagine Jim sayin. 'We gotta keep bailin', or we'll be sailing her across the bottom. And your mother wouldn't like that'" (217). Robb contributes numerous details that he states are only "in his mind" (217) so vivid that they would likely not have been remembered by anyone actually experiencing the event. But he does state that it is only his memory of the way the story was told and not a description of what actually happened. "That's the story as far as I know it," he tells his readers, "It's the story I tell" (219). In fiction terminology, this is the mark of an unreliable narrator. But unreliable narrators are usually withholding a key piece of information from their audience. In a non-fiction memoir, this device can easily raise questions about the veracity of anything the narrator imparts. Complete with an odd comma inserted into his text, Robb does reveal his own unreliability: "I am not sure, that I have these stories exactly right, but that's how I recollected them for a while now. That's how I tell them." His memory, complete with imagined additions, replay the stories with details and information that certainly did not exist when they were originally told by the people they actually happened to.
Perhaps the most authentic re-told family stories come in Half Broke Horses by Jeannette Walls. Although the tales in Half Broke are a few shades more subjective than even Robb's partially made-up retellings, they come off sounding like just the sort one might expect from a family hand-me-down. They adhere to neither historical veracity nor consistency between one another. A story told exactly the same way twice is told, not from memory of the event (or story as it was originally heard) by out of habitual retelling.
Walls narrates this "True-Life Novel" in the persona of her own grandmother. This lends an air of credibility to the stories she relates which would not otherwise be present in the book coming from a more distantly involved narrator. The family stores then seem to come from someone with direct personal interest in the events of these family stories rather than a removed descendent. One example of this would be Walls (as her own grandmother) recounting "Dad's pa" serving under "Colonel Robert E. Lee ... stationed on the Texas frontier, fighting Comanches, Apaches, and Kiowa" (11). Robert E. Lee had one of the most documented lives in human history, and a cursory glance at his military record shows that, while not an impossibility, it would take a most anguished stretch of the the concept of time and of the English language to have Robert Casey "serving" under Lee in that particular time and place. Likewise would be the case of the family story told about Billy the Kid, "who had stopped at the Casey Ranch when Dad was a teenager" (35). Although Walls does not provide the date of the narrative in which these stories were told, it is again factually unlikely that Adam Casey (Dad) was of the age where this was possible. But, again, these are hand-me-down family stories, and they are told in Half Broke Horse under that auspice. They sound as if they were originally told that way, and in an age long before the history of the world was accessible with a few keystrokes and access to the internet; they are re-told with the authenticity of a folk tale. More intriguing then, are the conflicting stories about Adam Casey's temper and accusations he faced concerning a murder.
In what began as an argument over fence lines, Adam Casey was accused of murdering another man. As Walls relates it, Adam "insisted he'd been framed ... and after serving three years in prison, he was set free" (8). There are many reiterations that Adam didn't murder the man and yet successive unrelated stories Walls shares paint a contradicting portrait of the man. One of these conflicting stories holds that "he had a terrible temper" and "impatience with folks who had trouble understanding what he said" (given that he had a limp and a speech impediment due to a horse having kicked him in the head when he was younger). "He'd start sputtering and cursing, and ... pull out his pistol and plug away at things, aiming to miss people—most of the time." One incident in particular Walls cites as having Adam so enraged as to attempt to murder a tinker who Adam thought "overcharged to repair the kettle." Adam went to get his guns, but the Mexican woman who helped around the Casey house hid them. "Dad worked himself into a lather, hollering about his missing guns, but I was convinced Lupe saved that tinker's life" (11-12). This is not the description of a man who could rightfully claim innocence when accused of having carried out violent retribution upon another. But it is evidence that all of the family stories as they came down to Jeannette Walls were ones that had been collected and compressed and retold by family members over the span of several generations.
Just because the tales Jones, Robb, and Walls tell of their families have differing levels of credibility doesn't mean they aren't true. There is a modern proverb from author Neil Gaiman which states, "Things need not have happened to be true. Tales and dreams are the shadow-truths that will endure when mere facts are dust and ashes, and forgot." According to this, stories hold more longevity than factual events do. Solidifying this point from another perspective is a line from a parable by lyrical poet and story-teller Robert Hunter: "Stories are as much a part of a human as their blood, their bones, their children, their lovers and their dreams."
The family stories Jones, Robb, and Walls offer us are, by their very context and own admissions, not meant to be taken as literally and factually true. They are, after all, stories told by others as stories of their own. That makes them folklore of a sort, whether they remain within the bloodline of a family or are shared by someone in that family with an untold number of strangers reading the words on the page of a published book. If fiction can be called a lie that tells the truth, can not the same be considered for the stories we hear on cold nights when we sit near a warm hearth with a preferred drink in hand and ears eager to hear the tales handed down one to another through the years, without holding them to the scrutiny we would wish from someone swearing before their personal Almighty that what they are telling you is as pure a form of truth as Socrates, Avicenna, Kant, or Nietzsche ever dreamt of in their small epistemological philosophies.
Works Cited
Gaiman, Neil. Sandman: Dream Country. New York: Vertigo, 1992. Print.
Hunter, Robert. "The Orfeo Files." Letter to Terence McKenna. May 1996. Online.
Jones, Carroll Clark. Rooted Deep in the Pigeon Valley: A Harvest of Western
Carolina Memories. Wilmington: Winoca, 2009. Print.
Robb, Daniel. Sloop. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2008. Print.
Walls, Jeanette. Half Broke Horses: A True-Life Novel. New York: Scribner, 2009.
Print.
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