It is 1979 and I am sitting in a pub in Youghal, County Cork, Ireland, with six other people, five of whom have personal connections to an imperial past. Our informal conversation quickly turns to the subject about which I have come to interview one of them, though I will wind up taping four out of the five later and will hear their stories.¹

At the bus station in Waterford yesterday evening the stage was set for oral performance. We tell the station agent where we’re going, and he looks completely puzzled, as though we have asked for a bus...

Of course, I was born in a Place and grew up in a place and I have always felt strongly influenced by place. My early place was New York City. Like virtually everyone, I must have started hearing stories while still young, must have awakened to the power of narrative as I learned about how people communicate. Yet when I think of the quintessential New York story—the story that most evokes my early place—I think of one that I heard only many years later, after I had left the city. Stories have this power to reach back and...

Those other stories, which I heard “all my life” at 7002 Ridge, start in the second half of the nineteenth century, on the Kansas frontier—stories already recounted in the previous chapter—and in Battery Park in the City of New York. These seem to be the stories of my personal beginning, linking me and my “people” to the national story, situating me and us in time and the great flow of America, giving me my personal connection to larger forces, extending my own life and identity back beyond the 1943 of my birth. Such stories stretch us into other...

Lake Waramaug became a key focus for family memories.

The lake, my mother or grandmother would say to people who couldn’t place it, is “about twenty-five miles north of Danbury.” People might know Danbury, Connecticut, because of its noted hat factories or its fair, which had begun modestly enough in 1821 and developed into a sort of lavish, intermittent amusement park and racetrack that drew people from miles around. The route north from Danbury went to New Milford, a picture-perfect New England town with a green that once graced a Saturday Evening Post cover, and then on to New Preston,...

Growing up at 7002 Ridge I felt connected by stories and other knowledge, connected to forebears and a past, though I would not know the true story of John Henry for some years. Such a connection is not an inconsiderable thing: the places where you walk take on greater meaning; the people whom you see acquire added dimensions.

Some of the connection was tangible: many of the people from the past still surrounded me, inhabiting space that was also mine. I lived with my mother, Bee, and my grandmother Myrtle Belle; uncles and aunts walked around the neighborhood; Bee’s youngest...

In the phase of my life that transpired from 1963 to 1966, I was most involved in two kinds of stories: the fictional kind that preoccupied many creative writers at Johns Hopkins University and later, when I worked for the New York Welfare Department, the carefully typed kind that made up our case files. While this was a period for written stories, those stories did not impinge upon my larger narrative sense, and I have remembered and told other, oral stories long after I’ve forgotten the fiction and the files.

For example, I still tell about how I first encountered...

Before I even arrived in 1966, India had already entered my consciousness in many ways. Thanks in part to the Beatles and their maharishi, the country was enjoying a resurgence as a place of mysticism and mystery. Sitars and tablas could be heard in Western pop and rock music. In the East Village, Beat poet Allen Ginsberg—both influenced by and a propagator of tropes of the Asian East and its mysticism—was a major presence, writing, chanting, being. And the more mobile hipsters who traveled abroad in increasing numbers often made India their endpoint, where they could trip out...

A couple of years later, in Bloomington, Indiana, I met my future wife, Rosan Augusta Jordan, probably first while she put in a few hours staffing the desk at the Indiana University Folklore Library (the folklore collection was housed separately at that time). She had finished her coursework and doctoral exams, completed her dissertation fieldwork in Texas and Mexico, and came back to work on the diss in Bloomington’s familiar atmosphere. She came into my life with her own set of stories that helped to give her a past and identity to me. I cannot say that stories played a...

When I left Bloomington, I took a job at Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge and settled into academia. Although I do not mean to slight the many years I spent there, I do not intend to drone on about them. LSU and Baton Rouge turned out to be a bit of the Old South where I found the material for stories about white-coated black men who served coffee to university administrators or took your tray to your table at the local cafeteria and of new neighbors who took us to Natchez for the Pilgrimage, which likened the Old South...

A merging of forces in 1979 brought Rosan and me—while we were still very much folklorists teaching at LSU—to the pub in Youghal on the west coast of Ireland and to the stories which a kind reader may remember from chapter 1.

We took on what we called the “sahib project” because we were intrigued theoretically by the sorts of folklore an elite group would have and by the idea of studying a folk group in past time. Rosan, from her interests in ethnicity and group identity, was fascinated by the possibilities of looking at a new sort...

We leave New Orleans, running away from Hurricane Katrina, on Saturday, August 27, 2005, before the big rush of people, well before the deadly rush of water. We are not tied down to jobs, a business, cats, aquaria. The road out is an easy drive, not yet clogged by later refugees; dear friends in Baton Rouge, Margaret and Juan, take us in, even giving us their own grand king-size bed. Although Baton Rouge takes a hit, Juan and Margaret’s street never loses power; we have A/C throughout and some TV, though the cable service has been knocked out. The day...

Writing recently in The New Yorker about business theorist Clayton Christensen, Larissa MacFarquhar notes that her subject’s success lies partly in that he is “a master storyteller.” The CEOs he has influenced “learned through stories, they remembered stories, and they repeated stories to the people who worked for them.”¹ Christensen presented his stories in written form, in his published work; the CEOs presumably picked up the stories from there and carried them into the oral realm. But the point is that stories, which convey understandings, are likely to be remembered and repeated and are particularly effective as a means of...