Historical Fiction Based on the Life of Dred Scott

A Novel by Mary E. Neighbour

I love a good story, always did, but I don't care so much about books. That's a difference you find with black folk. White children, see, grow up hearing the same story told over and over again the same way. Whether it be a fairytale or a history lesson, each time the book be opened, it be the same old story. Whilst black children grow hearing the story told different all the time. My kin never trucked in no books. Tales was all told out loud, the African way. All the village folk'd gather round the great fire whilst somebody would stand—couldn't tell a story proper without moving to it. A story's got to sway and mark time. Later another somebody'd get up and tell, perform, the same story, yet tell it different, in a contest to see who could give it over best.

My Gran used to tell a story each and every night but she never told one the same way twice, and she'd all the time have that knack for knowing the right time to tell which one. That's the knowing of the griot. You'll never get that from no book. Gran's story ability come from her papa, a trader up and down a big old river in Africa. He done learned the different tongues of the people along the way, and he picked up stories from this village and that. He used to say a story's got two sides to it: a upriver side and a downriver side. Upriver he heared the stories, and as he traveled and thought through them, the meaning took hold. Downriver he told them, quilted-like with things he hisself knowed.

This here's my downriver story. I don't expect there's many more upriver ones left for me. But that's how it should be. This here will be a upriver story for my two gals, till they start telling they own downriver tales. Sure 'nough, the griot blood runs in they veins, too.

Very respected folk, them griots, 'cause they told the tales and kept the history, both. The stories are the history. Like the satchels tale—puts me in mind of the dream my Gran used to tell, a dream what come to her the day 'fore I got born. She dreamed of Nana-Buluku, the one god, setting down two satchels. Gran, 'course, knowed this part of her dream to be the old folktale. But her dream moved on beyond that. She next seed a small child, what she understood to be her as yet unborn grandchild—me. I go to one satchel and pull out the hoe and the reed flute. I begin to play that flute so beautiful it conjures the great serpent Da, what done helped Nana-Buluku to create all the world and everything in it. That's why rivers and mountains go all twisty, 'cause of the way Da slithered along. Then, once the world got filled with trees and rivers and mountains and critters and people, it become so heavy that Nana-Buluku told Da to coil up beneath the world, so as to keep it from toppling over.

But in Gran's dream, there's Da, come forth to the sound of my flute—and sure 'nough, don't the earth begin to jiggle and shake? Even I's scared. I stop my flute playing and call, "Go back, Da, go back." But Da does not go back.

"It is the wish of Nana-Buluku that you play your flute for all the world to hear," he says, "and if the world trembles and rolls, that too is the wish of Nana-Buluku."

Then Da put me on his back and carried me away.