Duppy Talk Reader

A Reader’s and Teacher’s Guide to Duppy Talk I wrote Duppy Talk in 1993 while my wife and I ran a school for creative writing on the island of Jamaica. The school continued for a number of years and I continued to polish the stories in Duppy Talk. Storytelling is something that everyone enjoys in Jamaica. That is because practically everyone in Jamaica is a storyteller. However, Jamaicans are also great listeners. We seem to have forgotten how to listen in America. Here, it’s necessary to talk, and do better than just talk – to hold forth. That means to hold others at bay while you cover the territory with your point of view. Television has a lot to do with this. It’s inactive listening. Active listening, on the other hand, is a kind of hearing involvement. The Jamaicans who told the stories that I have retold in Duppy Talk were actors, not the professional kind, but the type that flourishes on the island. There are great street poets and tale tellers in every part of the island, and they really use their bodies as well as their voices, to tell stories. Some storytellers make surprising noises that accompany their stories. Others jump about and wave their arms. Some tell stories in a whispery voice, and these are often the tellers of ghost stories. Most of the tales in Duppy Talk are in this category. We were blessed by having the producers of the History Channel film several of the stories in Duppy Talk, and allow me to narrate them. Some of the original storytellers from whom I gathered the tales acted in the film. This program, Haunted Caribbean is shown every year around Halloween. In addition Duppy Talk was well reviewed and received an Aesop Accolade Award from the Children’s Section of the American Folklore Society. I’m glad the book has been in print since the 1990’s and is still a favorite of grades 3-8. I am also pleased to find unique reviews of this book that, all by themselves, give many ideas to teachers for application in the classroom. Hre is one of my favorites written by John Sigwald, librarian of the Unger Memorial Library in Plainview, Texas. The first time I heard of Gerald Hausman was through his newest book, Doctor Moledinky’s Castle, a loose collection of fictional vignettes revolving around a small- town summer of 1957, told through the eyes of a 12-year-old. Each chapter is a wondrous story of the weird folks in Hometown, USA, and Hausman’s ear for storytelling — sometimes with a macabre edge — was apparent. Before venturing down this semi- autobiographical path, however, Hausman had established himself as a teller of Native American tales with collections such as Meditations with Animals: A Native American Bestiary and Turtle Island Alphabet. A couple of years ago Hausman published a collection of stories he had heard over the course of nine years as a teacher in a creative writing summer school program at Blue Harbor in Port Maria, a city on the northeast coast of Jamaica. Duppy Talk: West Indian Tales of Mystery and Magic is a collection of a half dozen island stories of obeah men, duppies, and myalists (bush doctors, i.e., pharmacists). The stories are written for a juvenile audience, which particularly suited my bedtime reading to my son. Hausman is almost always impish and sometimes scary, but the legends he retells are new to an American audience and quite fascinating. Each story takes place in the village of Castle Gordon, near Port Maria. The opening story, “Angels of Darkness,” is a gentle ghost story of two duppies (remember, duppies aren’t necessarily bad, just sort of disenfranchised), two little girls who died in a fire many years ago but find a way to reward the bus driver who gave them a ride home. Other stories relate how Lucky Duke, whose time had run out, was able to pass his luck on to a friend; a woman’s battle with a bufo, a highly poisonous toad, mirrors her confrontation with the local obeah man; thieves who shoot public protector Uncle Time, who always seems to have ways to scare criminals into honesty, get caught, literally, in his “web of fate.” Hausman employs a simple but effective format, beginning each story with one of Cheryl Taylor’s haunting cut paper illustrations (one of her woodcut-like pictures is also on the cover) followed by a Jamaican proverb. In fact, Hausman devotes the last chapter to reviewing these borrowed maxims that have migrated to this small island just south of Cuba from Africa. My favorite proverb is this one preceding the last story, “Duppy Talk”: “Only when you have crossed the river can you say whether it was a crocodile or a floating stick that you saw there.” What a curious way to pay your dues! After the picture/proverb collage comes the story itself, footnoted by a section entitled “The Storyteller Speaks” in which Hausman relates how the story came to be part of his repertoire. Usually there’s a delightful, autobiographical anecdote or two where Hausman shares with his readers his own naïveté and impatience in assimilating Jamaican culture. Another proverb — “the mind doesn’t see what the heart can’t leap” ─ reminds me of Saint-Exupéry's cloying The Little Prince (“It is only with the heart that one can see rightly . .”), although Hausman’s story, “Laughter of Mermaids,” is much better done. This little mermaid — with a “saturnine ring [of babies] around her head” and gray, sharp teeth — ain’t Ariel, though, and she casts a near-fatal spell, more like the ones in Eliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.” Magical with a hint of malice, that’s what makes these stories unique and their proscriptions, such as never again eating fresh-water fish, unforgettable. My visual image of Jamaica was pretty much limited to the movie The Harder They Come (starring Jimmy Cliff, who sings the title song) and to the popular dreadlocks of Rastafarians (especially George, one of the characters in Harry Crews’s Scar Lover) and my aural image wanders to Cliff, Bob Marley, and a handful of other reggae singers. After I read Hausman’s retellings of Jamaican folktales, this Caribbean island came alive for me and was more real, oddly enough, because of the legends. More than just a caricature of cannabis-smoking, funny talking “mon” guys, Jamaica now seems like a vivid extension of the village of Castle Gordon, full of life, tales, laughter, fears, and superstitions, which foster the best stories. .

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