About five years into my decade-long weekly storytelling routine at Myrtle Creek Elementary, I was in Donna Hunter’s second-grade classroom and had just finished performing a long and complicated Russian folk tale called The Firebird, the Talking Horse and the Princess Vasilissa, when the kids asked for another story.
“What am I, a second-story man?” I asked in mock outrage.
At that point, I already had a repertoire of forty stories amounting to fourteen hours of performance material stored in my head, but I decided to try one from my childhood, an old one I’d never tried to tell before, the story of Androcles and the Lion. Unlike the Russian story it is simple, easily remembered and doesn’t take up much time.
I told of the hero’s kindness in pulling a thorn from a lion’s paw and was telling about the Roman emperor sending Christians to be eaten by lions when Sarah had a happy thought. “I would be safe,” she chirped brightly.
Of course, that was true for her as a Muslim and the rest of the children seemed to accept it easily, so I agreed with her briefly, “That’s right,” and went on with the story.
Later, I began to question the wisdom of telling a story that I had heard from one of the nuns who, decades before, taught my siblings and me at St. Dominic’s Elementary School. Those nuns were full of stories, many of which I learned later were apocryphal ones about the childhood of Jesus. Should I be telling stories with a religious aspect in a public school where children with a variety of backgrounds sit at their desks?
And, what about seven-year-old Sarah, the daughter of a Pakistani doctor and part of the only Muslim family in a small Southern Oregon town where Evangelical Protestants make up the bulk of the population? Her innocent outburst had luckily passed swiftly without bringing trouble with her schoolmates. Still, it troubled me that my story telling had the potential of exposing her to scorn.
Christmas came and went later that school year, and within a month, local people were calling Arabs “sand-niggers” and one of my neighbors wanted “to see their heathen bodies stacked up like cordwood.” The bombs were falling in Bagdad when Sarah’s teacher told me that the girl’s older brother, Hussein, had been getting harassed by some of the kids in the school. Mrs. Hunter asked me to come up with a story for Sara and the kids and that day, when I finished the performance that I’d prepared for that week, I asked the kids if they knew who the most famous storyteller in history was.
“It’s you, Bob,” one boy said.
“No, not me. She was woman and her name was Sheherazade,” I told them.
Sara’s yes lit up at that. “My aunt’s name is Sheherazade!”
“Yes, many women have that name. She knew a thousand stories, and next week I’ll tell you one of them.”
I picked up a used copy of Andrew Lang’s Arabian Nights for $2.50 at a bookstore and began my prep routine, reviewing the stories, selecting one and going over it repeatedly until I knew the details and plot line well enough to remember them during the performance. (The rest, like always, was improvisation.) Like many of the tales contained in the Alf Layla Wa Layla, or Sea of Stories, it contained a longer story within a bracketing shorter story. And like so many very old folk tales, this one had deeper layers of meaning.
One day, the Caliph of Bagdad goes out from the palace to walk the streets incognito where he meets a blind beggar named Baba Abdallah who won’t accept a handout unless the giver strikes him first. When the Caliph forces the blind man to tell him the reason for his sinful-seeming demand to be struck, he learns about how the beggar, formerly a wealthy merchant, had lost his eyesight through his greed when lusting for hidden treasures. His sin, Abdallah feels, was so grievous that only by first receiving punishment can he be worthy of compassion. The Caliph then tells him that he has suffered enough already when fate punished him with blindness and provides him with a sort of pension, enough to meet his basic needs without begging.
A week later I walked into Donna’s classroom and saw Sarah sitting at her desk. She was wearing a brightly colored hijab, something she’d never worn to school before.
I sat down and began my story.
“A thousand years ago Bagdad was the most important city on earth, much greater than London or Paris or Rome. It was the capital of an empire that stretched from India to Spain and it was ruled by a wise and powerful man named Harun al-Rashid…”
I continued telling folk tales at the school for another four school years, performing every Thursday until 1995 when my first book came out and my writing career took me away from the kids. During those final years I sought only stories from countries and cultures that our nation had attacked. Sadly, there are a great many of those cultures to choose from. The list spans the globe with bombings in Central and South America, the Caribbean, Africa, Asia, the Middle East and Europe. Just recently our bombs and missiles have fallen in Iran, Niger, Syria, Somalia and, today as I am writing this, in Venezuela.
My hope back then was that the kids might remember a little something about those places and those people later in life, that maybe they would think of Baba Yaga, Datu Omar, Little Two Eyes, Coyote or Anansi the Spider whenever the war drums started rolling; that perhaps, through those stories, they might see those enemies as people not much different from themselves.
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