The power of the storyteller

March 19, 2013

The opening plenary of the Funders’ Network 2013 Annual Conference in Memphis was a stirring testament to the power of story and a reminder of how much of that power resides in the storyteller.

Stories, after all, are a primal form of human communications. Brain studies have documented the empathy that arises between the teller and the listener. When the teller feels anger, or joy, or sadness so does the listener. Stories carry emotions between individuals in a package that strikes home.

Stories are rooted in an oral tradition. Nothing can supplant the impact of a first person account, even if it relates an event that is burned in the national conscience.

Reverend Samuel “Billy” Kyles had quite a story to tell. He was standing next to Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., when Dr. King was murdered on a Memphis motel balcony. He was one of those caught in famous photos pointing at where the shot came from. He called the police. Yelled for an ambulance. Took a half-smoked cigarette out of Dr. King’s hand.  Billy Kyles was a witness to a national nightmare.

But it wasn’t a nightmare that Reverend Kyles was here to relate; it was a dream.

“Hold fast to dreams
For if dreams die
Life is a broken-winged bird
That cannot fly.”

These are the words of poet Langston Hughes that Reverend Kyles used as a chorus, a repeating reference point in his story. Through each chapter of King’s last two days: his now famous final speech at a Memphis church, the camaraderie of preachers still thinking they were headed for an uneventful dinner, the gunshot and the chaos.

“Why was I there?” Reverend Kyles asked rhetorically, the pain still etched in his voice, there for us to feel through the miracle of story.

“Because a crucifixion needs a witness.”

Forty-five years later, Reverend Billy Kyles is still that witness, the only living man who can tell the story he tells with the depth of personal experience. For the listener, it is a gift, this link to history through an oral tradition that we are hardwired to receive.

“You can kill the dreamer. You cannot kill the dream.”

I plan to tell my son about the story I heard from Reverend Kyles. Repetition is also part of the oral tradition. But since stories deliver the emotions of the teller directly to the listener, there’s no way to recreate what held us in rapt and spine-tingling silence today.

Scott Miller

Photo from the National Civil Rights Museum.