The Storyteller: How I Learned Of My African Ancestry
My maternal grandfather is the original storyteller in my family. He loved to tell stories about Pepito, Memin, and Jaimito. These characters would run into ghosts, get buried in graves, lose their meals. At seven years old, they must have been the funniest things I’d ever heard. Later on I learned that they were part of the Dominican diaspora of folktales.
One of my favorite stories is about why frogs have flat butts. According to my grandfather, a mischievous, drunkard of a frog convinces a bird to fly him to the party all the other birds are having in the sky. The frog drinks too much and upsets everyone. It falls asleep and loses its ride back down to the jungle, so it decides to jump down. As it nears the ground the frog sees a giant rock, and here my grandfather would extend his arms and legs as if falling from the sky. The story ends with the frog yelling to the rock, “Move rock or I’ll break you!”
The punchline of the story is that the frog lands on its butt.
That story stayed with me long after I immigrated to New York City at the age of nine. It was a memory I often went back to when reminiscing about my birthplace.
I’m certain I’m a storyteller because of my grandfather. One of the first short stories I remember writing was about a Godzilla-type monster suddenly appearing in New York City. As he hung from The Statue Of Liberty, he was confused as to why nobody liked him. It wasn’t until years later that I realized I’d written myself into the character of the monster. That first school year in The United States was tough, to say the least. I toppled buildings made of strange cultural and social norms with every step I took.
Matters of identity, understanding, and healing have been at the core of many of my short stories. How I became black once I immigrated to the United States became in my twenties something I could not stop writing about. I searched for other writers that explored similar subjects, all the while believing that stories could heal, could entertain, could teach me how to forgive someone for calling me a “Sand Nigger” or a “Spic” or any of the negative words racists in the past have used to define and harm me.
One day I came upon Chinua Achebe’s “Things Fall Apart”, and there it was — my grandfather’s folktale. One of the mothers tells her daughter the story of why tortoises’ shells aren’t smooth. It’s a different animal, but all the other story points are there. A cunning tortoise finds out about a feast the birds are having in the sky. It upsets the guests and drinks “Two pots of palm-wine” (page 98), eventually plummeting down to Earth.
No one in the Dominican Republic truly knows where all of their ancestors came from. Our family lines were lost in the slave trade. “Things Fall Apart” made me feel more human, more whole and connected to all of shared history than I’d ever felt before. Did this story survive the slave trade? Was it passed down from generation to generation? I wanted to believe it was.
I called my grandfather and asked him about the frog and tortoise correlation. He didn’t remember who first told him the folktale. He said he probably heard it from one of his friends in school when he was a boy.
He’d never heard of “Things Fall Apart”.
