![]() Do with it what you will," the African griot says. No child ever tires of asking: "Where were you when.?" And no adult ever tires of the answer. Children listen to grown-ups hold forth in beauty parlors and barbershops, at barbecues and card parties. How else are they to know which teacher is forgiving or which one holds a grudge? They hear how words are held together with "What happened next?" They know stories work best when the intrigue sucks in listeners until they are one with the teller of the tale. Big kids whisper something the little kids pass along. For them, stories come as easy as double Dutch jump rope or shooting marbles. We boo and hiss and hope to discover some shadow of ourselves. Bandits and bad girls, angels and innocents they all have equal footing. What is a story but a way to help us see, if only for a second, the ways of the world in a new light? There might be many versions of the same tale (how many tales did Scheherazade really spin?) Are they all true? Yes, but only when the telling keeps listeners waiting anxiously to hear how the hero will be rewarded, how a wayward relative fared, how a disguise was broken and last-forever love was found. They did not mince words, but they did drag out the truth in a string of metaphors and parables. The women in my grandmother's house kept up their spirits with stories of love and grief, anger and laughter. There I learned to listen, to know when a story was about to take a turn, when the ending played out slowly, like grosgrain ribbon let loose from a package, or suddenly, like a door slamming in a gust of wind. ![]() There I learned to love the sound of language, how words hold a cadence. If my sense of storytelling began anywhere, it was in my grandmother's dining room. What better way to teach a child that some things are not what they appear and not all history is written? Even then, I believed hiding was a game the women allowed me to play and those stories were meant for me. Street sounds drifted in through the windows, shouts of neighbor boys playing stickball, nagging me to join them. In the distance, a trolley bell ding-dinged across Taylor Avenue. ![]() I'd crouch lower, the mouse in the corner, all ears for the talk that followed. "These walls have ears," Grandma cautioned when she spotted me scooting around the legs of my mother and her sisters to find my perch under the dining room table. They swapped stories that offered comfort in a world that had taken their men into battle and left them to fend for themselves with ration stamps and factory jobs. When I was 5, the women in my family would gather at my grandmother's house to share news of the war in Europe and the Pacific, news they said could not be found in Movietone newsreels or the St.
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