Category Archives: Legends

Narratives about belief.

WWI Family Survival Story

Nationality: American
Age: 49
Occupation: Consultant
Residence: Carlsbad, California
Performance Date: April 2012
Primary Language: English
Language: None

“In World War I, Italy was overrun by Turks and, in this one area, there were thousands of Italian soldiers that were massacred by the Turks. There were three survivors out of thousands. The Turks piled the bodies in huge piles to burn, because what else were you going to do with the bodies? And my mother’s grandfather, so that’s my grandfather’s father, was one of the three survivors out of thousands. And he survived by hiding in the pile of bodies for a week. Or three days. Three days to a week. And then he got away before they torched the pile of bodies.”

 

The informant was very insistent that this story really happened and proceeded to look it up on the Internet for about fifteen or twenty minutes. However, he was unable to find an article corroborating the story. The informant told me that he heard it from his parents and he told it to his three sons. He also said that his mother’s grandfather received a medal or an honor for his bravery. The story incorporates elements of survival, strength, bravery, and honor. As a result, this family legend is important to the informant’s sense of family identity.

 

Sailor Story

Nationality: American
Age: 21
Occupation: Student
Residence: Los Angeles, California
Performance Date: April 2012
Primary Language: English
Language: None

“My grandpa’s best friend, who is a sailor, always tells this story about a seagull. There’s this couple or this sailor out on the water and it’s a beautiful day and they’re sailing along. And the swell starts to pick up and it’s so rocky that his fake teeth fall into the water. And he can’t get it. And I guess they go back to the harbor, to the bay, and tie off the boat, and a seagull flies back over them and has the biggest smile you’ve ever seen. And it’s the man’s teeth.”

 

The informant told me that her grandpa’s best friend is a sailor with a really corny sense of humor and she said she is pretty sure that he has fake teeth. She said that her grandpa also has fake teeth. Thus, the two of them really like retelling this story because it contains elements that they can relate to and identify with. However, the story seems to have a deeper meaning. Sailors can never be certain of how the sea will treat them and sailors can develop a rocky relationship with the sea. Sometimes it’s smooth sailing and other time’s things don’t go your way. In the story, the day starts out beautiful and the water is smooth, but then something changes and the water is suddenly rocky. The story seems to be saying that regardless of how the waters are, you need to maintain a good sense of humor about it. After all, the sailor is lucky to survive the rough conditions. Sure, he loses his teeth, but he makes it out alive, and despite the unfortunate fact that he is now toothless, he can get a good chuckle from seeing the seagull with his teeth.

Guys falls off motorcycle at red light

Nationality: American
Age: 60
Occupation: Lawyer
Residence: Plano, Texas
Performance Date: April 19
Primary Language: English
Language: French

This a common motorcycle story I’ve heard from several people, especially when I was first learning to ride a motorcycle, and it always happened to someone they knew. Someone was touring on a motorcycle, and when you ride a motorcycle, and you’re on the highway, your feet are on the footrests, because you don’t need your feet to balance when you’re riding fast. This guy was on this long trip, and gets off at the ramp, gets to the bottom of the ramp, puts the brake on, forgets to put his feet down, and the bike falls over to the side. He drove over a hundred miles on the highway to see a Bruce Springsteen concert without a problem. On the way home, he gets all the way back to his hometown, and gets off at the ramp. There’s a red light, so he stops his bike falls and he ends up in the hospital with a broken leg.

 

It’s a warning to not be complacent, ever, no matter how easy it is when you’re driving a motorcycle.

 

Motorcycling is inherently dangerous,a nd so I think that this story is some kind of way to regain control, and more importantly, to imply that tragic things that happen to people on motorcycles happen because of their own stupidity. It is an attempt to take out some of the unknown variables of motorcycling.

Is That My Name?

Nationality: American
Age: 57
Occupation: Corporate Financial Officer
Residence: Friendswood, Texas
Performance Date: April 9, 2012
Primary Language: English
Language: Spanish, very poorly

Greg Williams

Houston, Texas

April 9, 2012

Folklore Type: Legend

Informant Bio: Greg is my father. He is the hardest working man I know. He really values hard work so much so that he named his daughter after the hardest working woman he ever knew, his grandmother Laura. He grew up relatively poorer or lower middle class, and his father grew up dirt poor in very rural Hix, Texas. Both of Greg’s parents worked, and he started working at the age of ten. He has never stopped since as far as I know. Today Greg is a very accomplished and sought after Corporate Financial Officer. He is also very caring like his father.

Context: My Papa, my Father’s father, died. We were going to have the funeral soon. I knew I wanted to ask my Dad about the stories his grandfather told him because he talked in length about talking about them, but never told them himself. The one he came up with although he was a little hesitant to tell it because it is not very pretty is the story of our last name, Williams.

 

Item:

I spent every summer with them [father’s parents] as a youngster until I started playing football and had summer workouts at home. It was like going to camp except with much better food as my grandmother was an amazing cook having raised 8 kids. I did everything with my grandfather during those summers – milked the cow, tended to the acres of garden, mowed the pasture, rode horses, hunted squirrels and listened to him tell stories usually about people I did not know. He was a small man at 5’ 2” tall and my grandmother was 5’11” tall. They made quite a pair. She was fairly quiet but Lee Williams loved to tell stories while we sat outside at night eating watermelon. My grandfather and my father always thought our last name was different. I asked how they could not know. They said it was a different time. My grandfather had several siblings and they all thought this was true.

My grandfathers’ father’s family migrated from Ireland and my great grandfather lived with his family in Baltimore, Maryland during the civil war. My grandfather’s father got into a confrontation with the law. We think either over union confiscation of horses the family owned or somehow taking up for his brother over something or both? My great grandfather fled Baltimore to New Orleans where he traveled back to Ireland for some period of time. He later returned to the United States via Galveston, Texas migrating up from the coast into central Texas settling about 30 miles west of Bryan/College Station, home of Texas A&M. He settled in central Texas and we think my great grandfather changed his name to Williams to easily blend into society.

 

Informant Analysis: We heard the same stories over and over again. No television, (laughing) no radio, it was pretty much the only form of entertainment. At first it bothered me a lot. You know it’s kinda one of those things where as a kid, Tommy was doing the project, and we were going to go to Baltimore to figure out who we were. And at one point the court house burned down and a lot of the documents were gone, but in the end it is what it is and I know I’m Irish and who I am. The other thing it probably did, is it gave me a sense of you know when they were in Baltimore they had horses and a farm and back in those days that was everything, and then it was all gone. You know he went back to central Texas with the shirt on his back and had to start over, and he had a family and started a new life.

Analysis: This legend really is not discussed in my family. I probably bring it up the most out of everyone because I think it is interesting. It tends to make other people in my rather large extended family uncomfortable. What made it stick in my mind is that the last person I talked to about it was my Papa. I identify with it as a part of my identity that is yet to be explored because I really value my origins. This is something I learned from my father. He knows where he has come from because of where he ended up in spite of his origins, as did his father, and as did my Dad’s great-grandfather. Whether or not all of the details in this legend are true is unknown thus far, but it is the closest thing to an ancestry the Williams family has.

Alex Williams

Los Angeles, California

University of Southern California

ANTH 333m   Spring 2012

Capax (Legend)

Nationality: Colombian-American
Age: 29
Occupation: Lawyer
Residence: Philadelphia, PA
Performance Date: 4/13/12
Primary Language: English
Language: Spanish

My informant’s mother is Colombian, and her father taught at an American school in Colombia. They met because her dad was her mom’s English teacher at night school for adults. They took their honeymoon in the Amazon jungle. The villagers in Leticia (the city bordering the jungle) had a story about a man who traipsed through the jungle wearing nothing but a loincloth. He was rumored to live in the jungle by the fruits of his own labor, howled like a dog, and carried a dagger. His name was Capax. My informants father swears that he saw Capax for a short instance back in ’78.