Tag Archives: legend

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.

 

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

Legend of Pele and Kahawali

Nationality: American
Age: 31
Occupation: Park Ranger
Residence: Hawaii
Performance Date: March 2007
Primary Language: English
Language: Hawaiian

“During the rule of Kealiikukii, an ancient king of Hawaii, there was a tribe called the Puna, and its chief was named Kahawali.  For fun, Kahawali used to go sledding down the sloping side of a hill with a friend.  People used to come from all around to watch them sled. One day, the crowds attracted the attention of Pele, the Hawaiian volcano goddess. She assumed the appearance of a woman and challenged Kahawali to a sled race.  Kahawali won the race due to Pele’s inexperience.  The two returned to the top of the hill and Pele asked Kahawali to give her his sled.  Kahawali refused because Pele appeared to be no more than an average native woman.  Kahawali then shot down the hill on the sled.  In response, Pele transformed into her supernatural form and pursued him down the hill.  Upon reaching the bottom of the hill, Kahawali saw Pele chasing him with lightning, earthquakes, and streams of lava.  Then, he found a broad spear and his friend and the two fled together.  As they fled, Kahawali ran past his favorite pig, his mother, his children, his wife, his sister and his brother and grieved for them as he passed.  While his family and pig were consumed by the lava, Kahawali and his friend were able to escape using the broad spear as a bridge to cross a crevice and as a sail for their getaway canoe.  The pair settled on the island of Oahu, and lived there for the rest of their days.”

 

My informant is a park ranger for the Hawaiʻi Volcanoes National Park, and part of his job description is to learn as many legends as possible about Pele, the Hawaiian volcano goddess.  He learned this particular story by reading a book on Hawaiian folklore in the park’s gift store.  The mother’s side of my informant’s family is of native Hawaiian descent, and his relatives have told him several legends, but they had never taught him this particular legend.

This is my informant’s favorite Pele legend, and he tells it to everyone that stops to talk with him at the information desk.  He finds it the most interesting because of the ruthlessness of Pele’s pursuit of Kahawali.  He believes that this legend is still shared in some households of native Hawaiians, just as a way to connect with their ancestry, and that no one really believes Pele is responsible for all volcanic activity.  He also suggested that the legend was originated by the Hawaiians of the past to explain a volcanic eruption that occurred during a thunderstorm.

This story is a legend because it occurs in the real world and invites discussion as to whether or not this event ever happened.  The story gives a time frame, sometime during Kealiikukii’s rule, and occurs in a real place, on the island of Hawaii.  Also, while unlikely, one could argue that Pele exists and is responsible for all volcanic activity and that she chased a Hawaiian chief out to sea.

My personal opinion about this Hawaiian legend is that it is told as a warning to be as prepared as possible for a natural disaster.  No one from Puna survived except for Kahawali and his friend.  If possible, the tribe should have built their houses on hilltops so that a wave of lava wouldn’t consume their homes and families.  Or, if that’s not possible, the tribe could have an evacuation route to the sea planned.  Instead leaving his family behind and grieving for their eminent deaths, Kahawali might have been able to run to the sea with them if an escape route had been made.

The Legend of Xica da Silva

Nationality: Brazilian-American
Performance Date: April 2007

Xica da Silva was an African slave woman in Brazil long before the nation abolished it in 1888.  She was able to gain her freedom through marriage into the Portuguese court.  A particular royal Portuguese official (Tax Collector according to my informant) “fell desperately for her” and she gave him sexual favors, winning her emancipation.  The collector, who was becoming wealthy and powerful due to the success of gold mining in Brazil, had a palace built for his wife.  Even though the colony in which they lived was landlocked, he also built a ship and a lagoon for the ship, just so Xica could feel the sensation of sailing.
My informant says that it was Xica’s rise out of slavery and into wealth and luxury that made her legendary among the slaves.  I asked her if Xica was some kind of hero to the slaves or did anything to benefit them, and my informant said that Xica, through sex, earned only her own freedom and in fact had slaves herself.  This story remained a popular local legend until the emancipation of the slaves in 1888, and has now apparently become a migratory legend.  When the slaves were freed, their labor was replaced by that of immigrants.  My informant’s family, originally of Italian descent (she had one Portuguese grandmother; the rest of the family were Italian), emigrated to Brazil in 1890, where her grandfather grew up on a coffee farm.  He heard this historical legend from the local workers, who were former slaves, and he passed it to my informant, who recalled it as the story “that impressed me the most” of all those she heard from Brazilian lore.  She said that Xica was indeed a historical person, and that the essence of the story is true (how Xica used sex to buy freedom and lived in abundance as the wife of a wealthy nobleman), but that the popular imagination among the slaves may have exaggerated the amount of gold and luxury she enjoyed.

Orphan gets run over by train

Nationality: Chinese
Age: 18
Occupation: Student
Residence: 920 W. 37th Place Suite 3301C
Performance Date: 31 Oct. 11
Primary Language: English
Language: Chinese

Orphan gets run over by a train

In Melbourne, there was this orphanage. I’m not exactly sure how it happened, but the orphanage burned a while back and was finally replaced by a school – like, a boarding school – not too long ago. Apparently, there are these umm…(positions arms perpendicular to each other)… railroad tracks nearby, and an orphan went over to the railroads and was run over by a train. The way the story goes you can see hand prints on the windows when the train passes by on foggy nights. It’s probably the first thing the train…you know…the first point of impact or something like that.

My roommate, E. F.,  heard the story from another friend, who was inspired to share after hearing a similar story on the local news, only a few nights ago. Right away, various elements of this story identify it as a legend. The setting, for one, is the capitol of Australia, a geographically distant but nonetheless real location. The events, for another, comprise the untimely death of an unnamed child and his/her haunting the location, which, although a known motif within ghost stories, present obvious challenges to belief as well as common thought – even for an individual who comes from an East Asian culture in which ghost stories are far more prevalent than here, in the US.

Despite the absence of any discernible proof and his usually pragmatic demeanor, E. F. didn’t altogether reject the possibility of the story’s events. He said he didn’t know any others but later mentioned that “at home [i.e., Hong Kong], parents usually tell their kids stories like this to prevent them from doing anything stupid.” As such, my being elder (even if only by a 3 years) likely removed the value of telling the story which could explain the unimpressed tone and lackadaisical gesture E. F. used.

Unfortunately, I find it difficult to form alternative analytical suppositions without more details. However, lack in this regard also limits potential outcomes. Elders clearly aren’t the only people who tell the story, and children aren’t necessarily the only ones who hear it. Therefore, elements are bound to vary based on circumstances of each telling. Furthermore, the abstract nature of an metaphorical approach to analysis is desirable.