Stories of Our Lives

Memory, History, Narrative

Frank de Caro

• Publisher: Utah State University Press
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN:
  9780874218930
• eBook ISBN:
  9780874218947
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Folklore & Mythology
• Index: Social Sciences

In Stories of Our Lives Frank de Caro demonstrates the value of personal narratives in enlightening our lives and our world. We all live with legends, family sagas, and anecdotes that shape our selves and give meaning to our recollections. Featuring an array of colorful stories from de Caro's personal life and years of field research as a folklorist, the book is part memoir and part exploration of how the stories we tell, listen to, and learn play an integral role in shaping our sense of self. 

 

De Caro's narrative includes stories within the story: among them a near-mythic capture of his golden-haired grandmother by Plains Indians, a quintessential Italian rags-to-riches grandfather, and his own experiences growing up in culturally rich 1950s New York City, living in India amid the fading glories of a former princely state, conducting field research on Day of the Dead altars in Mexico, and coming home to a battered New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina.

 

Stories of Our Lives shows that our lives are interesting, and that the stories we tell—however particular to our own circumstances or trivial they may seem to others—reveal something about ourselves, our societies, our cultures, and our larger human existence.

One

The Golden-Haired Maiden

IT IS 1979 AND I AM SITTING IN a pub in Youghal, County Cork, Ireland, with six other people, five of whom have personal connections to an imperial past. Our informal conversation quickly turns to the subject about which I have come to interview one of them, though I will wind up taping four out of the five later and will hear their stories.¹

At the bus station in Waterford yesterday evening the stage was set for oral performance. We tell the station agent where we’re going, and he looks completely puzzled, as though we have asked for a bus that goes to Moscow or San Francisco. Then he realizes that we have merely been mispronouncing the name of our destination. We are not going to U-gall, as we have been saying, but rather to someplace more like Yawl. This linguistic confusion and its resolution sets him off on a lengthy paean to the joys of being a bus conductor, of announcing destinations, of pointing out to his riders—especially any tourists aboard—the sights being passed. “Oh, ’tis grand,” he says repeatedly, “’tis grand.” His lilting tones stoke our stereotypes of the Irish love of elaborate, musical speech and remind us of the Irish fame for verbal art, though the conductor on our journey the next day turns out to be more taciturn.

The stage should be set, too, for the post-colonial. Ireland has, after all, been called Britain’s original colony. And it gained independence early—in 1921, well before the spate of post–World War II British colonial departures that began with the independence of India and Pakistan in 1947.

But we have not come to Ireland to encounter grand oral performances, but rather the prosaic, everyday speech of interviews. And though we are very much interested in the colonial, there is nothing “post” about the colonial we seek. Nor, for that matter, is the Irish context directly involved. We stopped in Ireland on the route of a larger project that will also take us through England and Scotland that requires talking to British men and women who lived and worked in imperial India before independence—as colonial administrators, soldiers, businesspeople, and in other capacities. My interest is in part personal and comes out of my Fulbright grant in India in the 1960s, an experience that made me curious about earlier generations of Western sojourners on the subcontinent, who certainly left their mark upon the cultural landscape in various ways.

But my fellow interviewer and I are both folklorists, and our current project is also part of an interest in the expanding conception of the parameters of folklore, of seeing folklore as something possessed and communicated by virtually all human groups—not just “peasants” or “the common people” or “country folk,” not just wizened mountaineers and star-crossed Delta bluesmen. Although our purpose here has a connection to oral history, we see our endeavor as folkloristic and ethnographic, as an exercise in what Margaret Mead and Rhoda Métraux once called “the study of culture at a distance.”² The distance is temporal as well as spatial, for the subculture of our focus no longer exists either in situ or the present time because the colonialists of India mostly came “Home” to the British Isles when their world in Asia ceased to exist.³ We want to know what sort of folklore existed in that world and, in passing, see something about the lore of a politically and socially elite group. To mention the various purposes of this project, however, merely provides a sort of prologue and—though the stories of the sahibs will play an important role here—this project on Anglo-India is but one focus of this book. Rather, the book is intended as a meditation on the importance and value of narratives, oral narratives especially and personal narratives in particular—by which I mean the structured and repeated stories that virtually all of us tell about our lives and the events and forces (personal, historical, and cultural) that have shaped our lives. In doing so, I mean to draw upon both research and stories of significance to me personally or other people I’ve known. Such stories form us and communicate who we are and constitute parts of larger narratives such as life histories and social epics. In the past I think folklorists have performed a singular service to the study of history and culture by repeatedly calling attention to such “humbler” narratives, though I also hope to suggest more about the meanings these stories possess in our repertoires of narratives while placing some into contexts as part of my personal and family repertoire, necessarily against the backdrop of memory and memoir.

We sit in the pub—a rather upscale one—and eat tasty fish sandwiches made on excellent rolls with Ian, the informant we have come to see; his wife, Davida; her brother-in-law, Howard; and Howard’s brother, Arthur; as well as Davida’s sister (and Howard’s wife), Marian (Arthur has never married).⁴ All three men belonged to the small, elite Indian Civil Service, or ICS, the corps which provided imperial India with its key administrators. I am particularly struck by a story Arthur tells, about what happened to him after he left India following Partition (we have learned that our informants seldom speak of the independence of India and Pakistan, but rather reference the partition of one entity into two nations as the culminating event of the British Raj). Arthur’s story went something like this (we had no tape recorder at our pub lunch, so I am re-creating it here⁵):

“Well, I had gone on to Egypt when I left India [Arthur said]. I was making my way south. I thought that perhaps I would reach Kenya, you see, and might try coffee farming there. But when I reached the cataracts of the Nile, I ran into an English chap and he said to me, ‘I say, aren’t you wearing a Marlborough tie?’ And I said I was. Marlborough was my old public school.

“And he asked, ‘Were you at Marlborough?’

“‘Yes, of course,’ I said, or something of the sort.

“‘Why, so was I,’ he said, and we chatted a bit about Marlborough and the people we might have known in common, though we had been there at rather different times.

“‘Well, what are you doing now?’ he finally asked.

“I told him I had left India and was heading for Kenya and might try coffee farming, but he had another idea, you see.

“‘I’m in the Uganda Judicial Service,’ he said. ‘Why don’t you come to Uganda and join the Judicial Service?’

“And so that’s just what I did.”

It is the quintessential old school tie story. In the middle of Africa—still very much a colonial place, though India has become something else—he is literally wearing a tie. This itself is a rather extraordinary fact, and by it his identity is recognized as an alumnus of an elite “public school,” and hence, not only as someone with an important link to the man he has run into but as someone suitably qualified—even without further inquiry—to assume an important position as a judge in African colonial courts.

It is a story about an encounter full of assumptions about the character and abilities of someone who attended a certain kind of school and who thus is a member of a certain class, and about the rightness of his taking a position in which he will judge the affairs of inferior, colonized people. It is also a story that reveals what a small world we deal with in our interviews—this world of the British upper classes whose members assumed a certain right to govern others. Its inhabitants have all gone to the same schools, wear the same ties, encounter each other in far-flung if unlikely places, trust each other, make assumptions about each other, and take care of each other’s interests.

In reality, Arthur’s significant ICS experience might also have entered into any consideration of him as a suitable candidate for this new career.⁶ But the story does not take that into account, but rather focuses on the smallness of the (imperial) world, class solidarity, and the one-of-us-ness that unified certain phases of the British colonial endeavor. Arthur seldom expressed these ideas directly in the course of our interviews, yet they were certainly revealed in his story of the beginnings of his second colonial career. Indeed, the narratives embedded in our larger interviews often revealed much, and much that was never stated directly, suggesting the revelatory power of oral narratives as people encode into their stories, even the most “simple” ones, what they might not otherwise say.⁷

The great importance of stories in human communication has been recognized increasingly by contemporary scholarship. Those who engage in narratology—from whatever academic disciplines they may come—have written repeatedly of the great significance of story in human cultures. Cognitive scientist Mark Turner, for example, goes so far as to say that “story … is the fundamental instrument of thought,” while linguist Charlotte Linde calls narrative “perhaps the most basic of all discourse units.”⁸ Turner and Linde are referring, of course, to stories of all sorts, and narratology has given particular attention to the grand narratives of literature, film, and historical writing. Yet folklorists deserve special credit for having looked at the most humble stories, at the folktales and legends of people often socially marginalized. But in recent years they have also given close attention to the most everyday stories, the personal narratives that people tell about themselves in and sometimes about ordinary situations. Folklorists are not the only ones to study such narratives (one thinks, for example, of the pioneering work of William Labov), but they have taken to these stories with a particular appreciation for them and a particular intensity of interest. Certainly in the larger scheme of things such narratives are easily ignored. Yet frequently they provide telling insights into worldview and cultural attitudes and assumptions so that our attention to them can be very rewarding from the standpoint of cultural understanding. As I have said, my Anglo-Indian informants’ personal narratives often pointed to underlying ideas that they seldom—if ever—addressed directly.⁹ They did provide what Clifford Geertz calls “hindsight accounts of the connectedness of things”—accounts that were often less self-conscious and less deliberately constructed than other, direct statements, but which made important connections as the narrators looked at their colonial lives in retrospect, telling stories that obviously had personal meanings for them that also seemed to comment on larger themes and issues.¹⁰

For example, during our interview with Howard and his wife, Marian, she recounted the following story (which was recorded and is quoted here as a precise transcription), which centers on her father, also an ICS man; the setting is a family holiday in Kashmir:

We just spent our time on the water. Beautiful lakes. We learned how to swim there …

But there was, curiously enough, over there a myth [that] there … was something that dwelt in the lake, a female who used to attract people, and, you know, Daddy was practically drowned under our very eyes … He was turning most peculiar, and it was this thing, this goddess if you like … was asking for him. And it was only that we were out in the boat and the mangi—that’s the head sort of boatman over there—he threw out his … paddle, and Daddy was able to grasp, get hold of it, and we rescued him. And, you know, he’d never go out again like that because he said he used to feel drawn towards the water, and it was quite the usual thing, apparently, that this … It had to claim a victim or two. And you’d never think on these beautiful, calm lakes surrounded by hills and mountains that anything like that could happen.

Although our informants discussed quite openly some of the dangers of life in India—sometimes making light of them—this story suggests hidden dangers and fears they did not discuss. The danger here is not something specific and concrete, like disease or a marauding tiger, but rather something virtually unrecognized by the educated Western belief system, and which suggests a dread of unknown forces that might suddenly destroy the European. The setting is a hill station, one supposedly among the safest for Europeans because it was away from the heat and dust and teeming Indian masses on the plains at lower altitudes and because the cool climate during the hot-weather season would seem more familiar and congenial to natives of England and Scotland. Yet the protagonist is practically sucked to his death nonetheless. The “goddess” perpetrator may be “demon” India herself, which both attracts and frightens the British, and the story can certainly be seen as reflecting a generalized fear of the consequences of the British presence here—a fear that logically would have been quite real, if perhaps suppressed, and indeed one that was never brought up to us in the responses to our many questions.¹¹ The story also suggests a certain assimilation of Indian folk beliefs, something virtually never touched on in other aspects of the interviews, though our questions tried to probe the connections between British and Indian on the cultural level.

I have included these two sahib stories here partly because I just like them. I grew up, an American in New York City, with the idea of the British Empire as not only unimaginably vast and sprawling—such that an Englishman might shift from one part to another with seemingly little effort—but also as being run by an elite; and Arthur’s shift to Africa and his encounter there reinforced my conceptions. Like many of us, I admit to a certain fondness for the macabre and the supposed nearness of supernatural forces, and the story of the Kashmir lake appeals to just that. But I also recognize thematic concerns in both stories that demonstrate how stories can communicate. That possibility for communication is not only found in stories from the other side of the world but from far more homey ones, such as those that many families maintain to pass on the familial past and familial values. Rather, as my retired Anglo-Indian sahibs partly spoke of their past experience through stories, so did the members of my family partly remember the collective familial past through passed-down oral narratives; and certainly those stories I heard for much of my life had a far more pronounced effect upon me than did stories I recorded years later, even if both kinds could be understood as conveying meaning. Unlike the generically personal narratives just given, my family’s stories are more communal—like the traditional tales folklorists have historically most comfortably studied, a similitude that Mody Boatright recognized as “family saga.”¹² Nonetheless, I see a relationship between them and personal narratives in that both kinds of stories sort of fly under the radar in that they are transmitted so informally and are ubiquitous but seldom collected or published as such. Because they are common within particular personal and familial contexts, non-folklorists tend to pay them little attention, though in fact they can tell us a great deal.

My family (I will discuss only stories of my mother’s “side” in this chapter) has a number of stories, but a particular group of them—all involving my great-grandparents Charley and Annie Brown “out West”—have enjoyed particular popularity among my relatives who, I think, see them as particularly significant.

Charley’s father, William C., was a Brooklyn police captain who later engaged in land investments, mostly on Long Island, and who at one point, acquired from the Kansas Pacific Railway a parcel of land in Kansas; in the late 1870s, Charley and Annie went west to work it, and two of their children, including my grandmother, Myrtle Belle Brown, later Mulvehill, were born there. We assumed they had gone west in a covered wagon, pulled like iron filings by the great westward magnet. Stories of their time in the West (they stayed only a few years before going back to New York) had become central family legends by the time of my childhood in the 1940s. They were the stories we all knew and that held us spellbound—though there may have been a few dissenter in-laws who discounted their truth and refused to feel their potency—and they form a sort of fragmented, sketchy saga. Their telling had no particular order, nor were they necessarily told as a group, though I think of them now as a continuous narrative. My grandmother herself almost always told these stories, and after she passed away in the 1960s, they were well fixed in our minds. The stories went like this (and they have become so much a part of me that I do not even remember particular retellings, so I am not so much trying to re-create them as to limn their essential “facts”):

One night my great-grandparents went to bed. The mattress—really the focus of the story—was simple, a sort of sack filled with corn shucks to provide what must have been a crinkly, rustling comfort. Charles Brown, no doubt tired out from a hard day in the West, fell asleep, but his wife kept feeling something—not Charley—moving around in the bed. In fact, the movement seemed to be coming from inside the mattress itself, like little, spasmy earthquakes rumbling up from this soft substance beneath her. She awakened her husband, complained. He, however, dismissed her complaint and rolled over into sleep once more. But she continued to feel these motions and woke him again and finally got him up and looking. They poured the shucks out of the mattress and investigated. There must have been a light—a candle? a kerosene lamp?—and in the pile of limp shucks, a great black snake could be seen wriggling, an uninvited guest at the slumber party, probably swept up with the shucks when the mattress was stuffed into being.¹³

In another story, Charley told Annie about people living in the area who dwelt sort of underground in a house partly dug out of the earth, partly with aboveground walls made of earthen blocks fashioned from the excavated dirt. She disbelieved him, arguin...

Table of contents

• Front Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Be Sure to Read This First: A Preface
• 1 The Golden-Haired Maiden
• 2 7002 Ridge
• 3 Foreigners Arrive
• 4 The Lake
• 5 Beyond 7002
• 6 Becoming the East Village
• 7 Tinkly Temple Bells
• 8 Life in a Cornfield
• 9 Mexico
• 10 Long Ago and Far Away: Another Passage to India
• 11 Katrina: We Leave, We Return, Stories Abound
• Contexts and Meanings: A Brief Afterword
• About the Author