One of my favorite memories from childhood is sitting on the floor in front of my Grandpa’s
chair while he told me Brer Rabbit stories.
Films and the written word are wonderful mediums for telling tales, but I don’t believe that
either will ever replace or replicate the experience of oral storytelling.
Author Lars Mytting has a wonderful comparison of a wood-burning fire to the modern ways
of heating homes that applies here.
“Scientifically speaking,” he writes, “there is no measurable difference between
the heat generated by electricity and that produced by combustion, but the body reacts
in a different way to the more intense heat from the [wood burning] stove . . . An ordinary
electric radiator or heat pump warms only the air in the room, but flames and glowing
embers release electromagnetic, infrared radiation that has much the same characteristics as
sunlight.
Warming occurs in the skin and the body as the radiation arrives, with an immediacy and
an intensity that bring a feeling of well-being and security . . . These factors, combined
with the smell of wood and a little woodsmoke, and the sight of the ever-changing play of
flames, connect us with the primordial magic of the fireplace.”
Oral storytelling is as old as mankind and like a wood-burning fire it brings with it
a sense of immediacy found in no other medium.
Much in the same way that radiation from a fire causes warming to occur in the skins
and body, oral storytelling causes a story to unfold in the mind of the listener, no
screen or page is necessary.
The ultimate result is the same as a fire, we are connected to a primordial magic.
A lot of American folklore was collected as part of the WPA’s Federal Writers’ Project
during the New Deal.
There have been numerous anthologies of these folktales published over the years and having
read quite a few of them, I’ve come to realize that not all folktales are created equal,
the same principle applies to folklore collectors.
After reading one collection of Appalachian folklore that had stories ranging from spectacular
to yawn-inducing, I went through the table of contents and highlighted the best stories
for future reference.
It was then that I realized that the majority of these high-quality tales had been collected
by one man: Raymond Sloan.
Sloan was a folklore collector for the WPA Writer’s Project in Franklin County, Virginia
in the late 1930’s.
I did some digging and discovered that he had been interviewed in 1976 and recordings
of those interviews still exist.
Imagine my excitement when I heard the voice of one of my favorite storytellers relating
tales from his native hills and hollers.
So, even though Mr. Sloan is no longer with us, I’m happy to welcome him as a guest
on The Weekly Holler this week.
I usually add music and video into these stories, but I’m not going to for this episode.
Sit back, close your eyes, imagine you’re sitting at the feet of your grandfather, and
get ready to enjoy the tale of Nat Nichols from an authentic Appalachian storyteller:
Well the old house had stayed abandoned for a number of years.
And people shied away from it, wouldn’t go by it because Nat Nichols had deserted
from the Confederate army, and had returned to the house, his old homeplace, cabin, and
details had been sent out by the Confederacy to bring him back.
So one or two men went to the back of the house and some went to the front.
And being a little bit trigger happy, because he ran out the front door (he heard them trying
to break into the back of the cabin to capture him, he ran out the front door) and one of
the details shot him immediately, see, and he fell right in the front yard.
They shot him dead without giving him a chance to surrender.
So it was quite a tragedy because they could’ve captured him without all that.
And years later, relatives of old Nat, I think his grandson probably, had the land, and there’s
the cabin.
So his grandson gets married, and with his new wife decides to move into the old Nat
Nichols house, rather than try to build one for himself.
But all of them heard stories of old Nat’s ghost showing up every once in awhile out
in the front yard where he’d been shot dead by the Confederate details.
So, my father was telling me that as an old lady, young Nat’s… the grandson’s wife,
was telling the story.
He remembered her telling it just as it had happened to her.
They were sitting on the front porch of the old cabin, and she was an old lady when she
was telling this story, said “We were sitting out there and it was dark, awful dark; no
moon, no stars, quite a few clouds, pitch black.”
And so young Nat, the grandson, said “It’s a good night to drive black sheep.”
And the woman telling the story said “Yeah, I think I see a white’un now.”
And said “Out in the front yard, there had rize up this white thing, just where old Nat
had been shot.”
And she immediately fainted, dead away.
She said that when she came to, her husband was rubbing her with camphor, trying to reassure
her that everything was all right.
But now, whether she saw something, or her imagination ran away with her, at least here’s
a ghost story where she was convinced to the extent that she fainted, dead away.
So that was old Nat’s ghost out near the stump in the center of
the yard.