A book in my life

Roy Kerridge

Continuing Folklore. our occasional series, Roy Kerridge remembers A Treasury of American Aeight years old, I was scandalised when my younger brother drew a red nose on the picture of Stalin which hung above my bed, the grimly genial dictator suffering a cold sore ever afterwards. Lenin, by his side, seemed to grow more severe than ever. A child of English academic parents, my loyalties would scarcely seem to need ques- tioning. Yet I not only felt I belonged to Russia, but to England, as I was allowed free access to the Children's Encyclopaedia and the manly patriotism of Arthur Mee. A third allegiance, my soul neatly divided, was to the American South. The Brer Rab- bit stories of Uncle Remus fascinated me to such an extent that I tried to walk like a rab- bit, my school fellows finding me rather odd. When I was ten I was given a large book entitled A Treasury of American Folklore edited by B.A. Botkin and published in New York. All the best stories and songs in this volume were from the South and my captivation was complete. England and even Russia seemed to shrink beside the land of John Henry, Ole Miss and Ole Massa and Stackalee. The latter was a negro bad man in league with the devil. He changed himself into a horse when the law caught up with him 'and galloped away with a lot of little baby red devils riding on his back'.

Risking a charge of lunacy, I recited part of the Stackalee ballad to another boy on the way home from school: I'm telling the truth! You think I'm lying? He had to run sideways To keep from flying.

My companion took a step backwards and regarded me very gravely but went on walk- ing home with me, chatting normally, none- theless. This I regarded as a vindication of the book, which I read from cover to cover again and again, different chapters seeming to affect and influence different periods of my life. I have it beside me as I write, though we both are rather dog-eared now.

First published in 1944, The Treasury evokes that heady period of American history when Russia was an ally and Com- munists and New York intellectuals could allow themselves to be patriotic to their own country. All their submerged love for Uncle Sam, now sanctioned by Uncle Joe, bubbled to the surface in an ecstasy of Americana. Among the nonsense and the mischief much good was done, as the Library of Congress financed a nationwide collection of folklore. B.A. Botkin was placed in charge of the archives, and from them he distilled his marvellous book, with many quotes from American classics such as Tom Sawyer and Uncle Remus. It is to his credit that he allowed the quaint tales and legends to speak for themselves, with no intrusive leftwingery or crude propagan- da. A certain worship of the working man that crept into his linking narrative was swiftly debunked in the stories themselves, in which everything, even hard work and heroism, was seen in a comic light.

Extracts from Mules and Men introduced me to Zora Neale Hurston, an outstanding negro writer and story collector, at her best with humorous tales. Unfortunately, she believed that folklore collecting was a science that overrode questions of right and wrong, and apprenticed herself to various New Orleans voodoo men. Soon she was undergoing terrifying initiation rites and helping her masters to cast spells that ap- parently killed people. This was too much for her, and after a breakdown she became a domestic servant. Her best tales, re- counted in the Treasury, have made me a popular visitor around the council estates and wherever children thrive.

When I was 15, the songs in the book received nationwide acclaim as skiffle and rock and roll. Some were good tunes, but

they were bad for people — a strong intoxi- cant. If Elvis Presley had been a little older, his warblings would have been heard in Bri-

tain only by a few earnest folklorists, as part of an obscure collection by Alan Lomax, and social catastrophe would have been averted. By the time I left school and embarked on my wanderings, I saw my sur- roundings as an idealised South full of

ramblers, gamblers and juke joint women. Botkin's Treasury both enriched and Inl;

poverished me, as for many years I believed

that the only art worth considering was folklore, as all the rest, literature included,

was 'middle class'. Thus I have become a

rather complex Philistine, preferring nlY violin solos to be jigs, reels or breakdowns and my novels to have the traditional Pat-

terns of Dickens rather than a Romantic or Gothic structure. My favourite film stars

are cartoon characters, such as Yosemite Sam, a braggardly Western character straight from the pages of Botkin.

My return to reality took place in Don- caster, where I had become a hanger-on of

a bunch of migrant labourers from Glasgow, engaged in scaffolding works at one of the coal mines. In the evenings the

pubs were full of Scotsmen, roaring and

brawling and stamping their feet to raucous accordion music. Traditional ways of life, unsanitised and owing little to the Welfare State, I realised, could exist in England as well as in America. One of my favourite of the Botkin stories 'De Witch-'ooman an' de Spinnin Wheel' I heard told in almost the same words by Mrs Brown, a kindly Jamaican housewife from the Blue Moun- tains, who kept her large family in London

spellbound with tales learned from her grandmother. Sailors' yarns from New England, I discovered, had their counter- parts in Old England, and Irishmen sang

Elizabethan ballads as blithely as any AP'

palachian 'mountaineer'. A Zora Neale Hurston character ended his stories by say-

ing 'I trod on a pin and the pin bent, and that's the way the story went'. In a tower block, I met a former village girl from

Wiltshire who told her children about little men with grey beards who lived between floors and came out at night to look f°,r, food. 'I stepped on a nail, and the nail bended, and that's the way the storY ended', she concluded her saga. Unlike many lovers of traditional songs and stories, my politics have by now match- ed my interest in living vestiges of the past' and so has my taste in friends. I like °I Tories. The strange, picaresque world of Botkin was surpassed by George Borrow' In a very English setting, and now my im- aginary America and Russia have paled by comparison with the land where I was born: But whenever I open Botkin's Treasury I feel the old magic return.