written by Luray Gross
I Tell an Old, Old
Story
I cannot say, I cannot say that anything
I tell you will be true, but
I
cannot say, I cannot say that anything I tell you will be false.
Once a woman scoured and scrubbed her two cooking pots and
carried them along the stream until she found a sycamore tree in fruit. The fruits, the wise man had told her, she
must carry home. She had asked for
children over a husband. Old as she was,
and bitter, what good would a husband be?
She did as the healer said.
And the medicine worked.
Children's laughter filled her yard.
Small heads lay in her lap while she sang a crazy lazy tune. Their hands swept the dirt yard and made
shadow animals on the walls.
Why discount joy at any age?
The inmates
in their matching t-shirts and pocketless pants listen. The guard in his navy uniform appears to fall
asleep. I tell the story to soothe and
to provoke. Jonathan calms. William fidgets. Jameer returns my gaze. Jose misses
the story entirely. He's off to
court. That's all I know of his story.
But the old story does not end with happiness.
Perhaps the woman woke with a bad dream; perhaps she felt
its tiny knives at the base of her skull.
Why is not remembered. Only this:
when the child knocked the pitcher onto the floor, when the milk spilled, when
the blue clay shattered, the woman turned on the child, and the child silenced,
but his eyes spoke, and the old woman could not bear his tears.
"I am sorry," did not cross her lips. The children returned to the trees.
Kevin sits
at his desk, head in his arms. When he
lifts his face and looks at me, I covet
his thoughts. What does it mean to him
that the old woman does not get a
second chance?
"She
should have known," he says.
"Known
what?"
"Known
she wouldn't be able to take having children, all their running around.
All that trouble. She should have
asked for a husband.
Yes, and
would he have beat her? Would he have
raved? Would he have insisted she be the strong one, the one with
the even temper, the kindly tone? Would he have listened to her stories,
been soothed by her songs?
What good
would a husband be, I wonder, but do not ask Kevin to speculate. Kevin, whom I
don't yet know. About whom I know more
than I should. Seventeen and three murders to his name.
The old woman tries again, scrubbing the pots until they
shine like the sun, carrying them back to the place where the sycamore rises,
still abundant with fruit. Although she
is old, although she has felt the press of shame, she pulls herself up into the
branches. But each fruit bears eyes that
convict, the eyes of a staring child, eyes that do not hide their pain.
For her, there will be no repair. No happily ever after.
For Kevin
the story is not yet fully made, or for Dani, already a father, or Joel, who is spurned for his African
mother, or for freckled surly Callie, this
week the only girl in the class.
The pitcher lies in pieces on the stone-hard dirt. The kraal is silent, and so it will remain.
****
Every storyteller I know tells certain stories as much for
themselves as for those who listen.
These are the stories that have taken up residence in our hearts and
minds and refuse to leave. Some raise questions we have never been able to
answer; some mirror a journey we have taken or know we must someday take. Each, I suspect, still has much to teach the
storyteller herself.
We tell others of course, some learned for a particular
occasion or audience, perhaps learned only knee-deep, some just for fun. They are useful stories. But the stories I’ve speaking of are ones
we’ve entered as one might enter a cavern, once with a candle, another time
with a wide beam mag light. Each time we
tell the story, we are listening, alert to something more the story might teach
us, alert to the body language of the listeners and open to their thoughts and
questions, even it the interrupt the telling itself.
For me, one such story is “The Children of the Sycamore,”
the Maasai tale I reference in the above poem. I first encountered it in Julius
Lester’s delightful anthology of African and Jewish stories, How Many Spots Does a Leopard Have? Lester stays quite close to his own
source, African Folktales, edited by
Paul Radin. It is a story that does not
end happily. Perhaps this is one of the
reasons I found myself going back to it again and again. It is a story about making a seemingly small
mistake that cannot be undone. A story,
among other things, of the consequences of careless speech. (Oh, how many times I have spoken too soon,
too harshly, too broadly. At other times
my silence has wounded.)
Though once another storyteller told me she hoped I would
not tell it because it was too sad, I’ve not heeded her advice. It is a story
I’ve told to grown-ups and youth, but also to children as young as ten whom
I’ve gotten to know at least a bit and at a time when we can process the story
together. We may write poems. We may simply share our reactions and pose
questions. Like Kevin at the detention
center, our thoughts about the story may give us or those with us some insight
into our own lives, our own predicaments and victories.
