In earlier times before the people had a written language, it was the duty of certain elders to be storytellers. Their life’s work would be to tell over and over again in the exact words, stories of the history of the tribe. This was regarded of utmost importance. We saw this surface in Alex Haley’s book, Roots, where he was able to trace his lineage back to Africa and be told, “This is the very place where the young man Kunta Kintay was captured and taken away to slavery in America.” Alex’s grandmother and aunts had told the stories repeatedly all of his days.
Even so, we become the storytellers of our family. At gatherings we “aged” ones bring out the episodes that are etched in our minds, and tell them yet again. As we visited Edward’s dad each Sunday afternoon, he would spiritedly remember the same stories and tell them as if we had never heard them before. I especially recall his words about when “me and Shorty Horton drove the old model T to Colorado in 1919.” They traveled up and down the mountains and through the Big Thompson Canyon, camping out as they went. This experience that they had as teenagers left a special memory that he kept throughout his 90 years. He could tell about it like it happened yesterday. After he died, we found the old pictures taken by “me and Shorty Horton” in Colorado.
We too tell the incidents of our lives at family gatherings and soon the younger generation can tell them also. One neighbor man who was known to be rather “windy” would launch out telling some bragging tale. If he stopped to take a deep breath, his son would take over and finish the story without a hitch. Someone observed, “He has told those lies so many times, he even believes them himself.”
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