New Deal New Stories

During the Depression years, the US government set up various work programs to keep unemployment from rising into riotous numbers. Similar things were happening in Canada, but that's for another entry.

Where the US was absolutely brilliant was in how it also funded various arts and historical projects. John Lomax, for example, toured the prison yards and recorded the music that was being sung there. It was he who first found and recorded Huddie Ledbetter, or Leadbelly, at the Louisianna State Pennitentiary.

Another program was the recording of the oral histories of surviving slaves. The US Federal Writers Project put to paper more than 2000 slave narratives now housed in the Library of Congress. When Kid was younger we read My Folks Don't Want Me To Talk About Slavery. A sometimes harrowing, always gripping, remembering of hard times past. There's some humility in getting your head around the legacy of something like this, for example:

"Slavery was a bad thing, and freedom, of the kind we got, with nothing to live on, was bad. Two snakes full of poison. One lying with his head pointing north, the other with his head pointing south. Their names were slavery and freedom... both bit us and both was bad."

I think of all this when I check out this great site, StoryCorps (thanks KK). It's a "national project to instruct and inspire people to record one another's stories in sound." They seem to have quite a bit of private and public funding, and are archiving all material at the American Folklife Centre. As much as I can rag on about the US and froth cynical when I see stuff like this, you got to love a country that takes such care in preserving its own history.

The stories, conversations really between two people who know each other, are touching, simple and candid.

The man who remembers being pulled off a bus as a child for "insulting the white people" and dragged behind a building by an old woman, only to have her break down in tears and tell how proud she was of him. "It opened a window for me," he says.

Or the elderly couple discussing how her Alzheimer's has affected their long and loving relationship. He has to prompt her gently to remember the important milestones of their lives. "I don't want to be an ugly lady that's not in her head," she cries. "You'll never be an ugly lady," he answers.

Or two guy friends discussing how one has donated his kidney to the other. It's lovely how their moment of revelation and closeness takes place at a baseball game.

Or the fifty-something lesbian mother telling her daughter how difficult it had been to come out to her own mother years ago. "I was 19 years old and you know what she said to me? She said, what did we do wrong." The woman chokes up then the daughter, maybe 12 years old says, "I think if she knew you now though she would be really proud."

Or the 15 year old girl with Down Syndrome asking her dad how he felt when she was born. He says, "I told somebody just the other day that I want to be more like my daughter Mary when I grow up."

I could go on and on. Time ravels and unravels, it unreels then it heals. We're only as good as the history we remember and the history we forgive.