The squash dies but the story lives

My grandmother Gilberta Williams told stories. Quite often, there was no particular narrative, no structure threading the things together, other a haiku-like zen-ness. Like, every time we were in the car together, riding down Government Boulevard in Mobile, Alabama, she’d look at some fancy big-ass mansion or other and say, “Oh, that’s where Dr. So-and-so committed suicide. 1972, I think.” The end. What? Neither of us were driving this narrative. Granddaddy was driving, because I was, like 10. And Grandmother never drove. Why? What was her story? I didn’t ask because I was wondering, What is “suicide?” Anyway, I just looked at the live oak trees, whose giant limbs draped over Government Boulevard and made a dark green tunnel accented by Spanish moss. After the trees and the Admiral Semmes Hotel came a real tunnel, the Bankhead, which went under the Mobile River, and I always looked at the gleaming white tiles and wondered what would happen if the river ever bust through the walls.

Mobile's 21-foot-wide Bankhead Tunnel, opened in 1941 (there's a newer, bigger tunnel but this one is still open)

That reminds me about when I was riding in a passenger van with my math-nerd sister and her two daughters, because her soon-to-be-ex-husband never came on such trips. We were riding toward Gulf Shores, Alabama, for a Real Vacation. My niece Virginia, who was about 10, had a big book in her hand. She wouldn’t put it down, reading and reading while she went into the Rest Area bathroom, the way people today never stop looking at their cell phones while they cross the street. After one stop, my sister and I were talking about I don’t know what, and the niece, who hadn’t said a word for 100 miles, asks, “What’s ‘shrapnel’?” 

My sister laughed because she didn’t know how to explain it, and her face said, “Kids!” Which is an idea I’m not acquainted with. My sister looked at me, because I’m supposed to be the word-nerd. “When things explode and itty-bitty parts of all kind of shit get shot into you,” I said. I was proud of the shit-shot alliteration, but my sister wasn’t sure that was age-appropriate. That’s what you get when your niece is reading Harry Potter and you realize adults everywhere, you included, will be reading it soon, too, just to find out why "shrapnel" is in a kid's book.

Anyway, this isn’t really a narrative, either, but it’s sort of a story, paradigmatic or not. I’m in it, and people around me are in it, but it only has a modicum of structure if I give it some. Maybe I should start again. OK, so. It’s the beginning of the semester. In the beginning, there was the word. Now, of course, that’s the Bible, which I really don’t read, but the Words are a lot like “Once upon a time,” from my point of view, which is first-person-skeptical. The Bible contains a narrative, because different people at different times and in different cultures and countries tried to give it one.

About now, I’m wondering, how did I get to the Bible? I’m going to lose some of my audience. There are older stories. The oldest recorded (i.e., written down, and on stone, no less) “story” was told by the priestess Enheduanna, daughter of Sargon of Akkad. Quite likely, you can’t place her. When I talk about “Mobile” and “Alabama” and “Gulf Shores,” maybe you know I’m talking about the Gulf Coast of the Southern United States. White sands. Deep Horizon oil spill. Hurricane Katrina. Mardi Gras (Mobile had it before New Orleans, y’all). But Akkad? Well, this was back in 2300 BC, more or less, and Akkad was somewhere in Sumeria — most of which we know today as Iraq or might call old Mesopotamia if we’re feeling classical.

Anyway, Enheduanna wrote songs and someone inscribed them in stone, sans music of course. She was a king’s daughter, and people wrote down things that she said and did. Enheduanna sang to the goddess Innana, but what makes her songs more than religious texts, more than lost rituals to a forgotten god, is that Enheduanna sang about herself. She put herself in the story-song. She sings of being cast into the desert by her father’s enemies, of praying for their destruction, of almost dying, of asking her all-powerful goddess, who can both destroy and build, who contains both “male guardian spirits” and “female guardian spirits,” “Who am I”?

Enheduanna’s songs are, we think, the oldest known writings “in which the author identifies herself and speaks in the first person” (classicist James D. Williams, no relation, in An Introduction to Classical Rhetoric).

For me, not rich, not writing in stone, stories heard but often not heard, a narrative of my life unfolding within a living breathing, vast ecology of interlocking, interdynamic systems of narrative(s), like a multiverse Venn diagram, it’s important that Enheduanna spoke, was heard, was recorded as best they could back then. Being significantly older than 10 now, I’m glad there are more stories in which women speak for themselves, because in the telling, from a little girl in a car with her grandparents to a long-ago priestess singing, singing, singing, to women in a virtual room talking about stories, the narrative lives, even if I insert this random Venn about "squash" and "death."