It all comes down to story telling. That’s what got them all going from Homer to Shakespeare to Dickens to Eudora Welty—to all the many dozens of great ones, far too many for me to cope with. It’s the love of any good story, in and of itself, its hold on listeners and readers, its power in the way of the telling.
A hem of this wondrous human garment, one size has fitted all through the ages, came in my direction both from my Bell family—my father’s people—and from the Little family, my mother’s clan. The Bells from the deep American South too long dwelling there to know anything otherwise, illiterate too. And opposite, the Littles, middle class forever, teachers and preosperous weavers back through time, gentle and subdued, stoic and strong.
It is interesting that the Littles who are in my blood line are dying out, the name is at least. They didn’t make boys. This while the Bells have rarely made a girl. Bookish Littles. Warrior Bells.
What united them was the love of their stories. Passed down word of mouth by the Bells; by written document in the case of the Littles. Also, they were all Scots, if that matters.
My dad had many stories to tell us. Which he unashamedly elaborated. Telling with a natural sense of how to do it. About growing up destitute a few miles from the Gulf of Mexico; about being stalked by a wild cat down a late night Alabama highway; of being caught naked by his church elders in a tub in the kitchen of his first New Hampshire manse (Susannah and the elders in reverse); about the farming family that brought him the grandfather who they’d caught molesting the 9 year old in the barn; about being coaxed as a little boy by his oldest brother, the bedridden Buddy, to go get him a ‘cut’ of sugar cane, which he did even though he had been strictly forbidden to do so (Buddy came back from WWI an invalid of some sort who did indeed die soon thereafter probably loading my father with guilt from that ‘cut’ of cane).
So many anecdotes, I heard told by my aunt and uncles at family reunions. Just now in writing I recall one I’d not thought of in years, my father’s story about trying to work his way through college as a waiter during the worst of the depression in Tonkawa, Oklahoma. And how the then governor of Oklahoma left him a miserly nickel tip for a large table of dignitaries, so little he told us, we who listened in awe, that afterwards he wept. This I had trouble believing as I couldn’t invision my father who was always on the verge of anger ever weeping.
My novel Small Games of Chance contains several of these Bell family tales.
The stories seemingly had one rule. It seemed that at all cost they must avoid mention of my Grandfather Green Berry and my Grandmother May Skinner Bell. May had a high school degree, rare enough then, from the time she lived with nuns in Oklahoma. She was said to read voraciously from the local library. It was she who taught my grandfather GB to read and write heads together in their shanty.
My Mother, Frances Eleanor Little, a pastor’s daughter, never in my memory told a story herself. But she did read them aloud, daily, until we were stupid enough to reject that. She read us books of many ilk. She was a good reader, as children we listened rapt. To Les Miserable, The Bishop of Barchester, Vanity Fair, such and so on, to include all the novels of Dickens. Her favorite writer, and then mine.
Strangely, morning devotions aside, one book that was not discussed at home, recounted, read aloud, quoted, recited from memory was of all books the Bible. This remains a mystery to me. Early on I became embittered against organized Christian churches. Then later an agnostic and by the time I entered university an atheist. As a result I only read, or head read, the Bible in its best parts, short bits and pieces and even that over a period of many years.
For a clergyman’s home this was truly odd. I feel a bit cheated in this because like sagas of any old time peoples, the Bible is such a fantastic collection of Jewish folk tales, dubious histories, delightful myths. What book has more loonies and bad guys?
When the stories came to be translated for King James in the early 17th century from the Latin, Greek and Hebrew, as they had come down in dribs and drabs, miraculously The very gifted team of translators (sometimes swelling overly euphoric over the source material) they had made up the Bible. They had written an eternal masterpiece of the English language.
My great grandfather Little was born in Ulster, County Fermanagh, Northern Ireland. He ended up as a Kansas wheat farmer, successful, rock jawed. To me in photos he bore a disquieting resemblance to George Bernard Shaw and near the end of his almost 100 years wrote his own memoir, a copy of which I have. It is not Shaw for sure, although he and Shaw bear a striking resemblance in their photographs, but it does have the gift for well told lyrical stories that the Irish share, Protestants and Catholics alike.
He wrote of the time he and his wife pioneered in Kansas in the 1870s. They lived in a soddy. He writes of how he would come upon my great grandmother, who had also been born in Ulster, And find her “daydreaming of beautiful Ireland even though the nearest tree was more than 10 miles away on the Chikaskia River.”