Works in Progress Volume 18:1 Winter 2005 ISSN 1075-0029
Waking up the people - by Linda Gross

Well, I guess I've always been fascinated with listening to stories. And I used to just listen to my aunts and uncles and you know, my grandfather, and - I have an uncle who is living now, Uncle Buster. And he is such a character. He is funny! And he is always telling stories. And he is really, like an oral historian. And it hasn't been until recently that we even think of him as an historian, but that's what he is. That's what he is. He's in his 80s and people will come to him and they'll just call out a name. They may say, "The Dean family" and he takes you all the way back. Really, like the griots, back in Africa. You know. So whenever he sees me now, he just hugs me and we'll get to talking about different things. And he really kind of inspires me.

When I was younger, I was influenced by my grandfather. You know, by granddaddy Murphy, and my parents. And Uncle Buster, I would hear about him. He was always the one who would call on the phone and he would call collect, you know, to my mom. He would call with a different name. He would say, "It's James calling." And he would trick her. Because if she knew it was Buster, she wouldn't accept the call. So he would say, "It's Tyler on the phone." Or "It's Lyle on the phone." And he has all of these names. His name is James Lyle Tyler Martin. And he's known as Buster. So whenever he would call, it was always a story, just behind him. And at the same time, as funny as he is, there's also a sadness about him. And it wasn't until as I got older that I discovered what that sadness was.

Because, it's almost like people let Uncle Buster be himself. And come to find out, he was in World War Two. I think he was stationed in Alaska or somewhere. And my grandmother passed away. And for some reason, when he got the word about it, by the time he got back to Tennessee, everything was over. Her funeral and everything. And he never - well, to this day, he has never gotten over it. So even when he starts telling stories, he'll start laughing. And he may start out on a very high note. He may end just sobbing and crying, telling you about my grandmother, telling you about some of the sad things that have happened in the town too.

So from him, I guess, I developed just the whole idea of just how powerful a story can be. How it can just lift you up and at the same time, it can kind of purge you. It can kind of heal you. And even to this day, I kind of lean on Uncle Buster when I see him. I kind of lean on him for a little strength to just keep me going, and making me realize that you do have to pull out some of those stories that can kind of heal you, and some of those stories that are painful. But it's important to get them out. It's important to express yourself. And I guess I'm thinking about him even more right now, because we are in a war situation. And that's how my storytelling is. Depending on what's going on in the world, depending on what's going on in my life, what's going on in my family, kind of steers me into a way of how my stories come across.

So the things that I know of my grandmothers are stories that have been passed on to me from my father and my mother. And what I noticed that happens within the black family is that there are stories that we share to the public, there are stories we share with the world, but then there are very personal stories - I think Zora Neale Hurston talked about that - that we just keep inside, that we don't share with anyone, that we don't share even share within our families.

And once I started sharing with people that I was a storyteller, that's when the family members started coming to me, sharing with me some of these stories, some of the stories I had never heard before.

And it could have been because of my age, because I was a child. But I was always listening out. I was one of these kids always eavesdropping, always finding out about stuff. I would pretend like I was on the couch asleep but I'd be really eavesdropping. You know what I'm saying. So that's how I found out about a lot of stuff.

But now, now that I've gotten older and I'm supposedly the so called storyteller, now people come to me with other stories. ...

I was always curious and I could read at a very young age according to my parents. Of course everybody kind of exaggerates. Everybody's a storyteller in my family! They claimed I was reading when I was two or three. But I became very ill. I had pneumonia or chicken pox at the same time and then I forgot everything. I became so sick they thought I was going to die. And that's a story in itself. But when I came out of that my mother started reading to me again and telling me stories. And they tell me how I would carry around a wagon. I would pull it. And inside were all these books, my favorite books. Now I have a vague recollection, but that's because they had told me that, over and over again.

But I just loved stories. I loved listening to stories on the radio, too.

My favorite story at the time, when I was little, was Peter Rabbit. But I didn't realize until as I got older, once my mom got sick, that that was her favorite story. So she would tell me the story of Peter Rabbit all the time. So I just loved hearing about him. My father and my grandfather would tell me stories of Buh Rabbit, and I would kind of mix the two together, you know. My mother, really, was very religious and she would tell me lots of Bible stories. And the way they would tell me these stories - it would just frighten me. It would just scare me, you know.

I didn't start calling myself a storyteller really until 1973. Before that. I was in theater. Before that I was a poet. I was a writer. I always wanted to be writer. I think I announced I was going to be a writer when I was about 8 or 9 years old.

My mother encouraged me no matter what I wanted to do. If I said I was going to be a poet, my mother and father said, "Right on." I remember when I said I was going to be a track runner. "Right on." No matter what I said. I even said, one time, I wanted to be a humanitarian. I didn't even know what that was - they said "Right on." I wanted to be an interpreter. I got hung up with the United Nations... and because I was from a little town, I was influenced by television. I would have all these crazy ideas. Then the people in the town would give you ideas, too. They would say, "Oh, the way you walk, Linda, I think you should be a nurse." Or, the way you talk, you should be a lawyer." Plus I played the piano and I played the flute and even though I was terrible at it, people said I should go into music. So I had all these ideas and somehow this led to theater. If I had to do it all over again, it probably would have led to folklore, but at the time that wasn't mentioned to me.

And the thing was, I knew I wanted to go to Howard University, and going to Howard I came across all kinds of people and movements. I was right there during the Black Arts, Black Power, Black History Movements. And at the time, I started writing my own little things. And my teachers would put on the papers, "This is so unorthodox. But go ahead." I wasn't conforming to what was considered acceptable theater or standardized theater at the time. I guess I was more into an avant-garde thing, or trying to pull out some of my Black roots and things like that.

I was always relating things to back home. At the time, that was considered unorthodox, because I was there to study Shakespeare and Ibsen.

Again, being at Howard - you had all these people coming through. You had LeRoi Jones (who became Amiri Baraka) coming through, and Ossie Davis, as well as Eldridge Cleaver and Muhammed Ali, you know. So this just put a spark in us. So I joined this group called Theater Black. At first it was Theater Noir, then it became Theater Black, and then it became WATTSA, and WATTSA stood for We Ain't Takin' This Shit Anymore! So it got very, very, crazy, you know! So we were doing Malcolm X poems and I wrote this poem called "Black." You know, "You call me black, white man..." Later, Glenda Dickerson put it in one of her productions. I don't even know all the words to it. I just remember that at the time, it became popular. And what I started doing in my presentations, I started taking songs. I remember taking Nina Simone's songs, and Johnny Taylor's songs, and Langston Hughes' poems and I would dramatize them. And I would do them in a way - it was kind of like a storytelling thing, you know, and this would just excite the crowd....

And I was always still thinking about the folktales I had heard as a kid, plus I was reading folktales, and I think the 60s was a time when a lot of collections were published. You know, Harold Courlander and all these things, and Howard had a tremendous library. Plus DC had these tremendous bookstores. So I was reading all these things, plus I was in the [Howard Student Center, called the] Punch Out sharing my tales of home, and I think things kind of came to a head for my senior project. Because as a senior, you had to do a recitation or whatever. And most people would do scenes from plays. And again, me and my avantegarde unorthodox self, I got up there and did a whole thing of storytelling, telling stories, singing.

But that kind of led me more into the storytelling and into the folktales. Because I had been in the Punch Out just sharing stories from home, you know, about 'splo and all that kind of stuff. And I though everybody knew what 'splo was. Because 'splo was like home-brew, home-made liquor, you know. And I think the reason it was called 'splo- because that was like short for explosion. And once you taste it - well, just the smell would knock you. ... So when I would talk about what was going on down in Tennessee at the Punch Out some of the people were shocked. Because some of the people who came to Howard at that time were considered like the light bright. They came from the middle class. Their parents were like judges and lawyers and doctors and all of that. So some of the stuff I was sharing - some of them were embarrassed by it. Some of them had never heard of it.

So a lot of these elements were kind of bursting out of me. And like I said, they kind of reached a head with me at Howard, with me still liking theater but kind of merging them together. And then I remember when my husband, Clay, was a teacher there. And you had black poets, you had black dramatists, you had all this stuff, you know black, black, black, black, black, but there was nothing in terms of black storytelling, in terms of preserving the folktales.

And Stephen Henderson, he had developed something called the Institute for the Arts and Humanities. And he is really the one that started bringing all the different Black Arts together. Because, like I said, the Black Arts Movement really came out of the poetry and the plays. And it was really almost like a Black male movement, too. You had people such as Sonia Sanchez, who is one of the people who emerged, but it was really dominated by the men, you know. And they were going to have this program and they wanted it to reflect all of the black arts. And Stephen Henderson was the one who said, "You know, we need storytelling. We need a storyteller." And that's the first time that that idea clicked in my head. And my husband was teaching in the department at the time, and he thought of me, because I was telling stories, I was telling stories to him, I was telling stories to my kids. So he came home and he said, "Linda," he said, "They're looking for a storyteller." And I said, "Well, here I am." And that's how I started, really.

But that first program that I did. I think I told a story about Buh Rabbit and I think I even did an Aesop fable. I was just doing whatever I had been telling my kids. And I remember I had all these cloths, and after I had done everything, it was like people were just staring at me. It was like they had never seen anything like that before, just staring. I didn't know if they liked it or what they felt. But then they come up to me and they hugged me, and they said, "Wow this is just unbelievable, this is something." So from there, I said, well, this is what I'm going to do now. This is it. I've found my calling. Because that was the thing, trying to find your calling. So this was it.

And being at Howard and being at those times, I thought of storytelling as a political statement. And that's where I come out of it. Like I said, I come out of the Black Arts and Black Power movement, and I wanted to make a political statement. So I would use storytelling. And I would say "ancient tales for new times."

And my audiences at the time were adult. You know, because a story is an animal story, they tend to think it is a story for children, but it is a story for everybody. So I was telling these animal stories, but they were really for the adults. And I would tell a story that almost kind of had a political thing to it. In other words, a person had to figure it out for themselves, but the whole power of a fable, of an animal story is that even though you're talking on an animal, it's taking on human characteristics. Also, you have to remember, this was a time during the Vietnam War. There was all kinds of things going on during that time. So my stories tended to be fables and animal stories but they were stories again to kind of wake up people. To kind of excite the crowd, you know, to get people to react, to express themselves. And during the 60s and 70s, you could say pretty much anything you wanted to say. There was no censorship, like there is now.

And you'd hear all kinds of stuff, and I remember Leroi Jones coming to Howard's campus, on campus. They would do programs on the steps, and he did this fabulous program. Nowadays we would call it spoken arts, poetry, or that type of thing. In those time, it didn't really have a title. But to hear LeRoi Jones do his poem "Up against the wall"...It was like nothing I had ever heard before in my life! And he and his manner, his mannerisms had the elements of what I would call storytelling. Because Leroi Jones would do his poetry to get the word out. In other words, he did whatever he could to get the word out. He might be hollering or screaming or stomping and all that kind of stuff. And that's the kind of stuff I wanted to do. So storytelling kind of gave me that outlet, where I could mimic people. Because I loved the idea of making faces, I loved the idea of mimicking people....

I didn't know that that was considered an African way of telling a story. I was just telling a story the best way I knew how. My influences - I mean coming from my mother, my father, my grandfather, you know, my aunts and uncles, the town itself...and then hearing people like a Amiri Baraka or a Jayne Cortez, a Sonia Sanchez and also seeing and hearing Sun Ra and Ornette Coleman and Pharaoh Saunders and Sonny Rollins - and once you started seeing these people, and hearing these people...and all this just kind of came together for me so that I emerged.

And the whole thing with me with storytelling was to not only to be influenced by my culture but also to develop my own thing. I'm the kind of person that I want to be unique, no matter what I do....

So even with my storytelling, I'm always looking for ways, exploring it, taking it out, take it in different directions, you know, because to me storytelling is so powerful and I think it is so important and so crucial to really get the story out. And I think of storytelling, really, as a force, and I think of it as a survival tool, and I think that's how we as a people survived, and I think that's how people - human beings as a species - will continue to survive - if we get the story out. And I think what's happening now is really a suppression of the story, of the word, getting out.

I was so shocked when I heard there were other storytellers, because I thought I was so unique! I thought. "Oh boy, I'm the only storyteller in the world!" I think the first storyteller I started hearing about was either Brother Blue or Mary Carter Smith. They had a tremendous influence on me, especially Brother Blue, because he was so different, he was so unique and I was influenced by that.

Apparently, talking to Brother Blue and Mother Mary, they kind of started doing their things around '73, too. Something happened, in the 70s, that led to the storytelling movement. Now what or why, I haven't been able to figure out. Why people were driven or drawn to this, you know, because people left their jobs, they started saying "this is what I am going to do," type of thing.

And what was so funny, I was discouraged, too. See, I don't want you to think that everything was all roses, because it wasn't. Sometimes people didn't know what I was talking about, what I was going to do.

And at the time I was very disappointed. I was very, you know, discouraged, and I think that's what kind of reminded me of the story my grandfather used to tell about the frog who wanted to be a singer, how you had to keep going and that was a story I was telling to my kids anyway. And that kind of led me to telling that story in public.

They started the Smithsonian Festival of American Folklife and Bernice Reagon was at Howard and [my husband] Clay and her would talk and she heard about what I was doing and she said, "Well, maybe Linda should be featured." And I remember that I had to kind of like come and audition for her. And I was so afraid, so nervous. I could hardly talk. I was stuttering, because I stutter anyway. I could hardly move. My feet were so wooden. And I really did a horrible job. But it was something in me, something she saw. And she encouraged me, and she said, "Well, you can come and you can tell your stories." And I just remember she said, "I just hope you" - I remember she pointed to my feet - "I just hope you move your feet a little more."

And then in '75 they had me to tell stories. But one year, when I was there, they had me to come out of this shack, which was similar to what was in my home town, and they even had a garden. And I never will forget. And I think Bernice just said this. But they didn't have - they didn't give me a microphone. Either they couldn't find a microphone or they forgot that I would need one. So Bernice said, "Just use your voice. Just use your voice. Use your voice. They'll come. They'll come." So that's when I started doing this cry: "Well, oh well, well!" Before I had never done that, to the public. But I wanted people to come and hear the stories! And I had all this so-called competition because, you know, people from all over the world were there, sharing their art, their folklore. And how was people going to come and look at little old me, you know?! And I just started going "Well, oh well!" "Story! Story-telling time!"

"Well, oh well, well," that came from a little man called Squeal 'em Carr. Now to this day I do not know his real name. Because a lot of people in my town have nicknames. Everybody has a nickname. You know the Negro Leagues, the baseball teams, would come though the town and they would play in this big field that isn't there anymore, you know, and whenever there was a home run, you could hear "Well, oh well, well!" and it just took me out! It was like, "Who is that?! Who is saying that?!" Again, I was curious. I always had the questions. And my mother said, "That's Squeal 'em Carr," you know. And my mother would sing it around the house too. In other words, that became like something people would say around the town, because you think of Squeal 'em Carr and that saying, you know. And one day, I saw Squeal 'em Carr, and he was so tiny. He was a very short man. And the whole idea of something that powerful, that you could hear all over that field, coming out of his voice, you know. So apparently, when Bernice said "You've got to call 'em," that is what came out of me.

And what happened next, I bought some bells. These are bells that I have been using ever since the 70s. I thought that since I am going to be at the Smithsonian, and I'm using my voice - I got to do something else [to attract people] so I started ringing the bells.

And so, once I kind of emerged as a storyteller, and when I told my grandfather what I was doing, that's when he brought this old bugle, this old bugle he had. I'd never seen it before. And he told me that was his job. On the plantation. He had worked in this big plantation in Alabama. Now, you know, my grandfather, he always got to tell a story. And again, you didn't know what was true and what wasn't. But he claimed that the rooster would crow first, early in the morning. The rooster would crow. And when the rooster would crow, this would wake up Shep, the dog. Then the dog - now again, the way he would tell it, it would sound like the truth! - the dog would come and like lick his hand. And that would wake him up, and then he would get the bugle and then he would blow - mmmmm - and that would start waking up everybody. Now I believe it, because that's what he said. And so he says, "I had to wake up the people to get them to start working." He said, "And that's what you're doing. You're waking up the people." So he gave me the bugle. And that was so odd. Because before that I did not know that's what he did.

A lot of the times, you might do something, you don't know why you're doing it, you don't know where it comes from. You don't know if they can trace it back to Africa if you're aware of it. You know, you just start doing it. So that's something I just started doing, you know!

And at DC, at the Smithsonian thing, these crowds just kept going, would gather around. And one of the people who saw me, who heard my stories was Louise Robinson, She was one of the original members of Sweet Honey in the Rock. So a lot of them came, they would see what I was doing. And one of the members [of Sweet Honey] now uses, tells the frog story I tell, and also the Stuart sisters, Ardie Stuart Brown [came], and it kind of inspired her to develop what she developed. And so what I started doing kind of led to a movement.

Linda Goss was born near the Smoky Mountains in an aluminum factory town, Alcoa, Tennessee. She grew up listening to the storytelling of her grandfather Murphy and other family members who shared stories of life under slavery as well as a heritage of folk tales, oral history and legend.

Stories about ethical values, the civil rights struggle in Tennessee, and stories from personal experience are among many hundreds of stories that she has gathered over decades of serious study and performance. She is currently working to document play-party songs, as well. The "Official Storyteller" of Philadelphia, and a pioneer of the contemporary storytelling movement, Ms. Goss was co-founder of "In the tradition..." the National Black Storytelling Festival and Conference and The National Association of Black Storytellers, a founding member of Keepers of the Culture, and of Patchwork: a Storytelling Guild. She is the author of numerous books, and a contributor to many collections on African American storytelling. She will be sharing stories as part of PFP's February 19th program (see calendar to right) and will be leading a 3-part series of storytelling round-tables at our new home. For more information about these events, and about Ms. Goss, visit www.folkloreproject.org.