Women storytellers: Mirth and moving tales

Professional storytellers Kim Weitkamp and Sheila Arnold are good friends and big women with big hearts. During their performances at the recent Flatwater Tales Storytelling Festival at the Historic Grove Theater in Oak Ridge, they sang and told stories that made the audience laugh, cry and reminisce as they stimulated us to empathize with the characters they spoke about.

As a nursing home chaplain who has always loved relating to “elders,” Weitkamp told stories about women whose often-witty “nuggets of wisdom” became what she called “golden coins” that she kept in an imaginary memento pocket. For example, she treasured this advice from her Aunt Louise: “Honey, if you are having a bad hair day, just wear a low-cut blouse.”

She took her 87-year-old mother-in-law to get her hair cut. It was way too long because, Weitkamp said, “Our hairdresser Tammy had the gall to go have a baby, which messed up all of our hair.” Her mother-in-law liked her haircut, and Tammy said, “I think you look 10 years younger.” Replied the customer, “I am not paying you to make me look 76!”

Her 99-year-old friend Margaret whom Weitkamp stayed with during several storytelling events in Kansas called her to say that she was dying in the hospital with two strokes and “wanted to tell me how happy she was that I was part of her life. I started sobbing.” Several weeks later, she received a four-page letter from Margaret saying, “I’m not dead yet. I’m up to six strokes and that’s still not enough. I’m turning 100 soon and I’d like you to come roast me.” Weitkamp did so, and one of the jokes told was, “You know you’re getting old when you care more about where your hearing aid is than whether you have sex.”

Weitkamp is a former owner of a yarn shop whose purpose was to bring together women who like to knit, crochet and embroider. She wanted the shop to be a place where women could get to know each other through conversation provided they resist talking about religion or politics. It became a popular place where women could hang out.

“We women have separated ourselves from each other and are not getting together enough,” Weitkamp commented.

One night she hosted a pajama party and invited the women to bring their own alcoholic beverages. One elderly woman complained that she was delayed buying a bottle of wine because she was carded. Because of poor eyesight, she could no longer drive so she no longer carried a driver’s license.

But when the store clerk saw that she had a Blockbuster video store card, he said, “You’re good.”

In one story, she talked about the importance of laps, the first places where babies and children sit and feel loved. She once asked her nine-year-old grandson to sit on her lap (before he grew too big) and he said to her, “Nana, your lap is perfect.” That made her feel successful. She said to her grandson, “That’s the sweetest thing anyone has ever said to me.” Then she said she went to her office to change her will.

She noted that the “first throne of kings was a lap and the first seat of dignitaries was a lap.”

At the end, while strumming her guitar, she sang for us what she sang to her grandson: “You are my sunshine, you make me happy when skies are gray.”

During her last story, she talked about how she met her second husband after divorcing her first (his family sent her a congratulations card, she remarked). He bought three albums from her at a storytelling event in Culpepper, Va. He asked her to dinner. She worried that he was an ax murderer and asked to take a photo of his driver’s license to send to her sister. She also told him, “My undercarriage is locked.”

“Who talks like that?” he asked, laughing, and then later invited her to visit his mountain home in West Virginia. Whenever she visited, he made her work spreading mulch or planting lettuce in what he called the Garden of Weedin’.

Weitkamp praised the Flatwater Tales committee for the excellent treatment the members gave the storytellers. She even mentioned the many free goodies in the swag bag they were given.

“In Alabama we just got a whoopie cushion and wine — not sure what the connection is."

With self-deprecating humor, she said, “We are shown so much love, in what we do. We get applause. When we’ve had a good set, it can lead to a sense of false reality. You start to get high on yourself, which is legal in every state. It makes you think you can do things you shouldn’t do.”

For example, after a great storytelling experience, she went to the magical world of an amusement park and bought a tall Dr. Seuss hat and a tall drink she didn’t need. She tried rides despite such warnings as, “If you have a bad back, your neck may snap.”

“We sit in teacups spinning at a high speed, thinking we can defy centrifugal force until the teacups bring up meals from three weeks ago,” she joked.

Stating that she loves applause (“which makes my cells vibrate like a bell”) and acknowledging that she doesn’t applaud the garbage truck driver or the burger flipper, she concluded, “We should applaud each other — give each other praise, approval, respect. It costs nothing to ring that bell.”

Sheila Arnold

In her tales about African-American experiences, Sheila Arnold made it clear that Blacks have shown inspiring courage in desegregating schools and freeing themselves from slavery at great risk to their own lives. Yet Blacks’ Cinderella story of overcoming barriers erected by white Americans has received limited to no applause from many whites.

For example, in her story about the "Scarboro 85" Black youths who bravely desegregated Oak Ridge High School in 1955, she noted that the school year was relatively peaceful, thanks to the steady leadership of Principal Tom Dunigan (whose daughter Pat Postma has played a strong role in starting and ensuring support for the five-year Storytelling Festival). But, Arnold added, at the prom, the white students tended not to socialize with the Blacks.

“We were tolerated, not welcomed,” she said.

The next day she delivered a dramatic rendition of two stories about the Underground Railroad written by William Still. This network of people offered shelters, aid and, in these stories, dangerous ship rides from Norfolk, Va., to Philadelphia for escaping enslaved Black people in the South. The ship trips were dangerous because the Black escapees had to be hidden in confined spaces below the ship’s deck so they wouldn’t be discovered by soldiers looking to capture and return escaped slaves during stops at locks.

In one story, one of the 15 escapees was Miss Walker, a huge woman who told the captain she was too big to fit through the small hatch opening to the secret cabin below. The captain gave her a choice: get yourself through the hole or you will be thrown overboard to protect the others. So, she took off all her clothes except for the shift (underwear) and scraped off some of her skin as she arrived bleeding in the secret cabin. Climbing out through the hatch was equally painful for the humiliated woman. She paid a price for her freedom.

In another story Arnold told, a large Black escaped slave named Charles, who was found hiding in a chicken coop, was offered an opportunity to take a ship to freedom in Philadelphia if he was willing to cram himself above the ship’s boiler in its boiler room. The voyage lasted three days instead of half a day because of a storm. But Charles survived despite the burns he sustained.

He whispered, “Thank you!” as he got off the ship.

“What we would go through for a chance for freedom,” Arnold said, concluding by singing the gospel verse, “Before I will be a slave, I’ll be buried in a grave. I’ll be home with My Lord, and I’ll be free.”

Her storytelling and singing received lots of warm applause from a largely white audience.

Carolyn Krause is a longtime Oak Ridger and freelance writer for The Oak Ridger.

This article originally appeared on Oakridger: Women storytellers: Mirth and moving tales