By Jimmie Covington
Commercial Appeal
February 3, 2006
Greg Brownderville is a young man who knows a lot of tales.
He can tell you about a black cat bone, a dancing pool table, a woman who kept pictures of dead people in an album at her home, the devil in the blues and lots of other things.
Over a three-year period, he carried a tape recorder with him on travels to small towns and communities of Delta counties in Arkansas, where he sought out folk tales that people tell in the area. He also obtained some tales from Mississippi.
Brownderville, 29, who hails from Pumpkin Bend, Ark., in Woodruff County, brought some of the folk tales and some of his poetry to a brown bag lunch program Thursday at the University of Mississippi and Northwest Mississippi Community College at DeSoto Center in Southaven.
Brownderville, a graduate student in English at Ole Miss in Oxford, said he was studying literature in England several years ago when he realized he and other people were taking a lot of things for granted in his home area in the Delta.
"Somebody has got to record it (folklore) and write it, or it is going to be lost," he said. "Folklore is always regenerating itself but at the same time, it is a different kind of folklore. The stories I will tell when I am 80 years old will not be the same stories that one of my grandparents tells.
"I just started in my spare time," Brownderville said. "I just approached folks and started talking to them."
He has gathered some of the tales and some of his poetry into a book, "Deep Down in the Delta: folktales and poems."
Brownderville, who is also teaching a junior-level Shakespeare course at Ole Miss, said a lot of his poems are about "down home kind of things."
He chose folk tales for the book that fit thematically and has many others that are not in the book, including some that may be better than those in the book, he said. "I have probably about 400 pages of the stuff," he said.
One of the stories in the book is "The Dancing Pool Table."
It tells of a "mojo man" who can make a pool table rise off the floor and dance. The man is the possessor of a black cat bone.
Brownderville said a black cat bone, which is also referred to in blues songs, is a magic bone taken from a black cat that has been boiled in a black washpot. He said the devil has the soul of a person with a black cat bone but the person has magical powers for the rest of his life.
Then there is the story of the woman who went to funerals, took pictures of dead people in their coffins and placed the pictures in her picture album at home. The inside of the house started remaining dark all of the time despite sunny days and open windows.
The woman was told she needed to take the pictures of the dead people, seal them in a garbage bag and get them out of the house. When she went to the album, the pictures of three of the people showed their corpses had decayed.
"So she took the pictures out, put them in a bag and sealed it up," Brownderville said. "When she walked out (with the pictures), the house lit up like a Christmas tree. Everything was fine after that."
More information about Brownderville can be found at his Web site, gregbrownderville.com.
