Told by Mary Hamilton
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About the Story
Many years ago, while sitting at the kitchen table of my storytelling friend and colleague Cynthia Changaris, I told her I felt it was way too easy for me to remember times when I had felt wronged, and I wondered what I would tell if I wanted to capture a time when I had been treated with great kindness. Immediately the memory, “When I was in first grade, an older girl, Anna Jo Hinton, taught me how to run into the jump rope” sprang to mind. Of course such a brief memory does not a told story make, so I had work to do. Why questions — Why do you remember this? Why did it matter then? Why does it matter now? – were followed by the challenge of finding words to show what happened and why it mattered, instead of directly saying to the audience “I want to tell you about an act of kindness I have never forgotten.”
About Mary:
You can read more about Mary’s development of “Jump Rope Kingdom” from the briefest of memories into a tellable tale in the family folklore section of her book, Kentucky Folktales: Revealing Stories, Truths, and Outright Lies published in 2012 by University Press of Kentucky, available both from the publisher and on Mary’s website www.maryhamilton.info. Mary’s book is unusual because it not only contains stories retold and tells where they come from, but each tale is followed by an essay that provides additional information about the story while also commenting on some aspect of the art of storytelling.
The recent resurgence in fairy-tale based media, such as movies (
Family was a blue envelope crinkly thin as onion skin. My mother sliced it with a butter knife careful to preserve the criss-crossed messages of love held inside. My uncle was the sweet, rank aroma of a brown box stuffed with shamrock plants grown moldy on the transatlantic mail voyage. Granny was an Irish Sweepstakes lottery ticket, race run and prize lost before my birthday gift arrived. Photographs were too costly for Irish incomes. Instead we exchanged “holy cards,” pictures of saints, to mark weddings, funerals and births. My friends dined on grandmother’s roast chicken each Sunday and holiday. Summertime was when Granny fed me boiled sweets with cuddles. (To my knowledge, she never cooked. Cuddling was more important.) Sprouting like weeds, cousins changed enough that each visit we circled like dogs meeting for the first time.
In the New Voices column in Storytelling Magazine, I have been focusing on making connections between the storytellers we often see at NSN events and the younger adult tellers out there, who do not find their way to our festivals and conferences. On November 11, 2012, adults of all ages packed a sold-out room in Minneapolis to hear stories. These were not the edgy, Moth-style, personal stories many think of when they imagine young listeners. Nor were these the family-friendly tales that fill many storytelling festivals. These were four tales from the Brothers Grimm – two that many had heard, and two tales that Jack Zipes had recently translated into English for the first time.
