Storytellers' Cairn

Monday, July 18, 2011

Storytellers' Cairn, Child's Park, Northampton, Massachusetts

Ray Hicks

Ray in Flurries

Ray in a Snowstorm

Ray with Fouchena and Her Mother (Cairn Detail)

Ray Hicks after 3 weeks in winter elements

Ray Playing a Mouth Harp

Kwame Dawes in a Snowstorm

Kwame Dawes after the cairn had been dismantled

Cornelia Bailey

Another petrograph of Cornelia in heavy snow

Karen Vuranch, badly weathered after 3 weeks in elements

Orville Hicks

Oyo

Fouchena and Her Mother

The Hickeys

Vickie Vedder (Same below; detail)

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Storytellers’ Cairn, Child’s Park, Northampton, Massachusetts

February - March 2007

“There are many kinds of bilingualism, and maybe the most basic one of all is silence and speech. It’s not a stretch to see art, or invention, as the attempted translation between them. Two languages: the noise of the present, the hush of the past. The silence of eternity, the roar of passing time.”

The Slow Breath of Stone: A Romanesque Love Story, Pamela Petro

The cairn was small—two and a half feet high—about two feet in circumference and composed of 64 pieces of mica-schist, locally called Goshen Stone. I printed each piece of stone with the image of an oral storyteller from the American South. I’d taken the portraits in 1999 for my travel narrative, Sitting up with the Dead: A Storied Journey through the American South. The goal of the book was to ask each storyteller to tell me a tale drawn from his or her home, creating a patchwork of oral portraits of the South.

I built the cairn on a warm day. After that the temperature dropped and over three weeks the cairn saw rain, bitter cold, and two snowstorms. Its outer, exposed rocks cracked, peeled, and oxidized, staining the black and white images orange. The inner ones, like older memories, remained vivid.

Geologist Anita Harris said, “Rocks remember. Rocks are the record of events that took place at the time they formed.”

Rocks are the planet’s storytellers.

I never encountered visitors to the cairn but each day I’d find stacked offerings beside it—acorns, twigs, pebbles, pieces of bark—to attest that it had been seen.

About Ray:

Ray Hicks (1922-2003) was from Banner Elk, North Carolina. Ray’s daughter said, “Daddy has the dialogue that come over with the ships from Shakespeare’s country.” Ray called a rock a rhaw-wuck.

He told medieval Jack Tales. His favorite was Jack and Ray’s Hunting Trip. Ray begins this way. “Now it’s so, what I tell you. Now believe it.” He begins by saying that after he finishes his chores “I’m gonna go down and see Jack and see if me and him can get into something together.” When Ray finds Jack’s log cabin he tells him, “I’m kindly here to go a-huntin’ with you Jack. I heard talk about ye. And I wanted to be with you one time in my life.”

And Jack replies, “Bedad! We’ll do her.”