and how people talk about the past

In my two years with the U.S. Army I found they were very focused on narrative and messaging, and largely understood narrative as messaging. That is, they did not think about narrative so much as a way to shape or structure information but simply as the content. What they needed to learn were two things: genre and people.

Genre because stories come in different packaging that affects how we receive those stories: indeed, if we mark them as “stories” or as “news.” E.g., jokes vs anecdotes.

People because stories only get around because people tell them, as they themselves are getting around, and they only tell stories that are useful, that help them get around.

What the team assigned the task of developing a framework for the Army eventually arrived at was the concept of social information systems. (That is, folklore with network theory built in.)

Back from the Army I continued to work on materials, and I began to wonder about how often the humanities and the human sciences—the entities that comprise CoLA—use narrative. In particular, how often we assume something is narrative.

Having spent three decades doing field research, and having recorded hundreds of hours of interviews, I was fairly well equipped to assess how much, or how little, ordinary people “out there” tell stories, and, when they do, what kinds of stories they tell. (And how frustrating it can be when you have set out to “collect stories”—which is a weird concept, but that’s for another time.)

What I discovered “out there” is that, even when you set out to collect history, few to no people tell the kind of large set pieces that have been romanticized by scholars and are now embedded in our larger imaginary. What people have, what they tell, are collections of small stories that circle around, are connected to, certain moments in time or topics of interest. 

And by small stories, I mean small stories. Stories of a half dozen to maybe a dozen clauses. Small.

And those stories intermingled with, or perhaps were embedded in, a lot of other discourse: arguments and speculations, information and reports, and descriptions of all kinds. E.g., “there used to be a cinema there on that corner, and if you walked around there, then Ms. So-and-so’s shop was right there and she’d give any kid who was nice a piece of candy.” 

People talk about all kinds of things and in all kinds of ways and only sometimes is the way they talk in the form of a narrative, of this-then-that.

When I reported these findings in my dissertation, my director—who had literally written the signature work on folk history and local legends in Northern Ireland—responded simply: I had talked to the wrong people.

Now consider this response for the blindness it manifests. Here was one of the finest scholars I have met but he could not see that ordinary people told history, and they told it in their own way. His assumption was, guided by that collector impulse, that the folklorist’s task was to identify the extra-ordinary tellers, the people who told history the way it should be told, the true keepers of collective memory. This ignores the collectivein collective memory. Rather, it prefers the individual memory that claims to know all. If you are thinking this is not only a projection of scholarly expertise but also a remarkable convenience—in that interviewing one or two people is always easier than interviewing a dozen or more—then you would be right.

The text that set me on my journey was one I in fact collected from a woman who was known in her own community as their historian. If you asked about historical matters, at some point the person with whom you were talking would turn to you and say, “But you better go ask Ms. Bridgwaters. She’ll know better.”

Elizabeth Bridgwaters was the scion of her community. She had paid her dues as dietician in the public schools, had run for city council, and had been a preacher in the AME church. In her late eighties when I encountered her, Ms. Bridgwaters enjoyed taking her time in telling a story, but intermingled with all the other things she told me across 15 hours of recordings and many other hours unrecorded, she told me the following in the moment that a community center, which had once been a school, was in danger of being transformed into something the community itself did not want.

It’s interesting you know. 

When I was a little girl, 

most black people lived on the east side of town. 

But some black people lived over here. 

But they didn’t want us over there. 

So they built a school over here.

It’s a text that fascinates precisely because it is so poetic, using paired deictic instances, there and here, as a way to transform the pronomial reference scheme, turning them from black people to the powers that be and reinforcing it with a building.

In the 15 years that followed that research, my first fifteen years here—against, I started at age 5, I spent a lot of time focused mostly on material folk culture and folklore theory, but this moment, this bit of discourse weighed on my mind, called on me to find it a better place, a place within the larger home of folklore studies. 

Ten years ago, with the book on the crawfish boat revolution done, I decided to return to the study of vernacular discourse and to the puzzle of how people talk, when people tell stories, and what those stories look like both as stories and as pieces of a larger discursive repertoire available to individuals to make use of.