After 50 years of teaching, I’ve decided my favorite class was the only one that considered a subject I’d never studied in school — oral tradition. It focused on stories told by African Americans and Native Americans. Students in the class were free to write a research paper about oral traditions they encountered in their own lives. Because partying included oral traditions and was very important to many of them, their independent research sometimes allowed them to teach me enough about their social lives that by 1993 I could publish a marginally scandalous but surprisingly complicated piece in Antioch Review titled Partying and the Mysteries of Student Culture.
My interest in oral tradition was a side effect of discovering, when I began teaching in the 1960s, how very little I knew about Black American culture even though my doctorate focused on 19th-century American literature and history. Students helped me notice what I didn’t know. Then in 1977 I taught for a semester at the Newberry Library in Chicago, where their impressive collections revealed how much I didn’t know about American Indian oral traditions.
Writing about this in 2022, I’m struck by an irony. New Hampshire legislators have been working to get “divisive concepts” out of the public schools because they might make a person like me think he’s a racist. But when I began to recognize my ignorance of much American culture, my embarrassment about what I didn’t know soon gave way to fascinating discoveries that led to some of my best teaching and writing.
The differences between oral cultures and writing cultures are profound. In 1982 Walter J. Ong, S.J., published Orality and Literacy with a subtitle that seems prophetic now, given the enormous influence of social media in our time: The Technologizing of the Word. He began with a warning. It would require “painstaking thought” for those of us raised in writing cultures to understand cultures in which speaking and listening were the major methods of communication.
It’s difficult, for example, to imagine the enormous importance of storytellers on a winter night in a community lacking writing, as well as radio, television, films, computers and smartphones. Those storytellers probably play the roles of stage actors, priests, therapists, teachers, mediators and more. Such storytellers and their stories must have had an importance we literate people can never fully comprehend.
To suggest the potential power of storytellers in our own time, I call upon three wise women: history professor Doris Kearns Goodwin, law professor and journalist Linda Joyce Greenhouse, and Supreme Court justice Sandra Day O’Connor.
On Jan. 6, 2022, Goodwin spoke with members of Congress about the possible impact of the House Select Committee’s investigation of the attack on the Capitol on that day in 2021. She said we’ve learned fact-checking does little to change people’s minds about Jan. 6. The stories people tell about the attack on the Capitol, she said, are likely to shape how citizens come to understand it.
Goodwin appears to believe the committee’s way of telling the Jan. 6 story will be crucial in determining whether people are convinced either that the attack was unimportant, even a “false flag” planned by enemies of President Trump, or that Trump and his allies were seeking to undermine majority rule — the heart of democracy — by overturning the 2020 election.
Linda Greenhouse recently wrote a guest essay in the New York Times about the Black woman President Biden has nominated for the Supreme Court, What Kind of Story will Ketanji Brown Jackson Tell Her Fellow Justices? She points to similarities between Jackson and Justice Stephen Breyer, whom she would replace if her nomination is approved by the Senate. Both Breyer and Jackson attended public schools, went on to graduate from Harvard Law School and gained Supreme Court clerkships. Both, as judges, have revealed impressive mediation skills.
But what seems to interest Greenhouse most of all is a 1992 Stanford Law Review essay by Sandra Day O’Connor: Thurgood Marshall: The Influence of a Raconteur. Greenhouse quotes from O’Connor’s conclusion, in which she tells of missing the stories Marshall told when they served together on the Supreme Court and “hoping to hear, just once more, another story that would, by and by, perhaps change the way I see the world.”
O’Connor, in her tribute to Marshall, tells how when she was just out of law school, she heard him talk about the problems Brown v. Board of Education should address. She says her “awareness of race-based disparities deepened.” After they became colleagues and friends, she says, she was “most personally affected by Justice Marshall as raconteur.”
Greenhouse concludes her essay by saying she doesn’t expect Ketanji Brown Jackson to change the Supreme Court. “But she may well change the conversation,” she adds, “and that’s a start.” It’s possible, Greenhouse seems to believe, Jackson could tell stories that help some of her colleagues change their view of the world.
In this time of a war more dangerous than anything we’ve known in many years, a war that began in lies endangering all of humanity, millions of us may be discovering, or rediscovering, how stories expressing truth and moral courage can give us hope that we can learn to live together.
Bill Nichols lives in West Lebanon. He can be reached at Nichols@Denison.edu.