Comments on 13006

Their folklore casts them as comrades-in-arms, regardless of ethnicity (the secret stories are told and cherished by white, black, and Latin children), for the homeless youngsters see themselves as allies of the outgunned yet valiant angels in their battle against shared spiritual adversaries. For them the secret stories do more than explain the mystifying universe of the homeless; they impose meaning upon it.

Virginia Hamilton, winner of a National Book Award and three Newberys (the Pulitzer Prize of children's literature), is the only children's author to win a MacArthur Foundation genius grant. Her best-selling books, The People Could Fly and Herstories, trace African-American folklore through the diaspora of slavery. "Folktales are the only work of beauty a displaced people can keep," she explains. "And their power can transcend class and race lines because they address visceral questions: Why side with good when evil is clearly winning? If I am killed, how can I make my life resonate beyond the grave?"
posted by jason's_planet at 7:09 PM on November 1, 2006

That's not only a great story, it's a great story with a killer twist in the ending.
posted by AmbroseChapel at 7:16 PM on November 1, 2006

Shit. I'm like a breath away from crying.
posted by Football Bat at 8:33 PM on November 1, 2006

Goddamn. I wasn't a member when this was first posted, but I was on MeFi all the time. Somehow I missed this, and I'm grateful that you asked for it again.

Amazing.
posted by exlotuseater at 10:41 PM on November 1, 2006

And 'twas all accomplished by a single-link post.
Singularly astonishing.
I just tousled nostalgia's single hair,
and am sticky with interlude.
posted by Opus Dark at 11:10 PM on November 1, 2006

Opus! You pinafored pettifogger, welcome back!
posted by vacapinta at 11:15 PM on November 1, 2006

It's good to be back,
Down from the sun-drenched trellis,
Down from the eleventh stepped terrace,
I'm uncrucified, smooth and savory,
whistling,
From farther and farther away.

(Heya vacapinta)
posted by Opus Dark at 11:21 PM on November 1, 2006

Holy smokes, Opus Dark! It's so great to see you again.

Regarding that original thread: I wondered whether that article was Delillo's inspiration for The Angel Esmeralda (no text available online; the link is to an mp3 of a reading of the story -- and it's so worth hearing or reading). However, his story presaged the article by a couple of years. It's an uncanny resemblance.
posted by melissa may at 2:43 AM on November 2, 2006

I saw this thread and thought oh, I vaguely remember someone posting something about that.

*slaps forehead*
posted by frykitty at 7:23 AM on November 2, 2006

It happens to me all the time, frykitty -- I'll go Googling after something I vaguely recall having read about, and sure enough, there it is on my blog.

At first I thought it must be a new article on the phenomenon, because I remembered reading it way longer ago than just two years. Nope: the article itself is from 1997. I wonder how the mythology has evolved in the intervening decade?

Clive Barker bought film rights to the story a while back, but it looks like he hasn't been able to get the project off the ground.
posted by jjg at 7:38 AM on November 2, 2006

I came across this via jason's_planet's cross-post on MeCha, and this was my comment. Wish I could spend more of my day on this,

That stuff is really cool, and I don't doubt that it could exist. This author probably did encounter this community legend and collected some cool information about it. But I'm a little...suspicious. Or just unsatisfied. A lot more investigation and substatiation is needed before I'd accept it as a meaningful phenomenon.

The tricky bit is that this isn't an example of academic fieldwork -- it's some anecdotes. Sure, they're strung together with some quotes by authorities like Coles and Hamilton. The problem is that Coles and Hamilton are being quoted in a general way, and the author is using their ideas to support her theories. They clearly aren't commenting directly on the data.

I can't find too much info about Lynda Edwards, the reporter, online, except for some other pieces (similar in their dramatic style) has written for alternative newsweeklies.

If this story is true, it's very very interesting, but I need to see that there's been some more thorough work done before I believe it's not just a couple wacky conversations with kids blown out of proportion. Certainly, it's not unheard of for complex myth-cycles to emerge among socially or geographically isolated groups - I'm just way surprised never to have heard of this. I've looked through the archives of my public folklore list, and the next step would be to do a JSTOR search, which I can't do here today. Anyone up for it?

posted by Miko at 8:07 AM on November 2, 2006

Children are quite capable of creating and maintaining their own complex folklore. I think, Miko, you're aware of the Opies, so you know this. I admit that the article is so persuasive and the picture it pains so coherent that a small little bell of skepticism went off in my head, too. But I think what doesn't smell exactly right might be accounted for selective quotation by the writer. She can make this look as coherent and compelling as she wants.

That said, I missed this when it was first posted and I'm extremely glad to see it here today, especially as I'm not visiting MeFi as much these days.

And Maria's song made me weep. No exageration.
posted by Ethereal Bligh at 9:51 AM on November 2, 2006

Here's some discussion of the story on a fairy-tales forum. Sounds like Bill Ellis wasn't completely sold, either.

In this fascinating paper, a folklorist documents the spread of and changes to the "Myths Over Miami" article as an example of the folk process itself, tracing its evolution through the five stages of the folk process . She does note that "There has not been a gross study of the Miami Universe. What we know of it comes from one article with no follow-ups...Beyond this short article... there is nothing else known about the Miami Universe. Folklore is protean and expansive – the directions the children’s folklore has gone is unknown; the full extent of the folklore in 1997 is unknown (was there more than just one article’s worth of story to be had there?); whether it is still active folklore in that area (or elsewhere – has it spread?) is unknown. That is the essence of the origin set. " So this folkorist is studying not the actual utterances of the children in the article, but the article itself as a folk document and its transmission.

I see that there's been a Snopes discussion and an alt.folklore discussion, but both searches are down today.
posted by Miko at 10:20 AM on November 2, 2006

I remember blogging this back in the day. Absolutely heartbreaking in about five different ways: the hope, the despair. Thanks for bringing it to our attention again.
posted by jokeefe at 10:25 AM on November 2, 2006

Children are quite capable of creating and maintaining their own complex folklore. I think, Miko, you're aware of the Opies, so you know this.

It's not that I doubt that children are capable of creating and maintaining folklore (I can't remember whether you knew this, EB, but I am a student of folklore myself). There are reams of documentation of elaborate children's folklore from all sorts of environments.

I've just read enough academic folklore to notice that this piece is presented as fact, but does not present strong evidence. It is sloppily documented and appears to be at least somewhat embroidered. It's also very, very weird that after the widespread discussion of this article, there seems to have been no serious study or academic follow-up in what could have been an astoundingly rich field to harvest. It's very unusual for the discovery of a new body of lore to attract so little professional notice. I can't help but wonder if that's because no one could replicate Edwards' collection. Who were the children? Were transcripts or recordings made? Where are they?

It also becomes clear, as I search a bit more, that the stories don't necessarily have their origin within the community of homeless children. They are simply some among many iterations/permutations of themes, characters, and ideas in American and Central American folklore and religion, like la llorona, Bloody Mary, and elements of saints' tales and Catholic imagery. I think what this reporter found was that kids were passing around some amazing stories, that more than one kid knew a similar story, that the kids shared a community identity (Hispanic, had been through homeless shelters), and got blown away by the poetic nature of it all and the seeming coincidence. However, had she had more of a foklorist's frame of reference, none of this would have been as surprising, and she'd have been better able to handle the material.

I forgot to link to "this fascinating paper," above, so here it is. Well worth a look, a fine piece of work.

And here is the snopes discussion, which yields nothing.
posted by Miko at 10:47 AM on November 2, 2006

Miko: I, too, had hoped there would have been some good discussion of it on afu, but there wasn't. I just went ahead and emailed C. W. Sullivan, AFS's editor of Children’s Folklore Review and asked if he was aware of any academic follow-up on this. No response yet.

I don't really see exactly what your objections are, though. The reporter makes it clear in the article of the folkloric antecedents of the Blue Lady and Bloody Mary. I took it for granted that the population was pretty Catholic and drew upon that source, as well folkloric sources of Caribbean/African origin.

You seem to be skeptical that these children, who live in extreme circumstances, would have woven this into a coherent whole and would use their folklore as a cornerstone of their social interaction. I'd be more surprised that they wouldn't. When you write things like "however, had she had more of a foklorist's frame of reference, none of this would have been as surprising, and she'd have been better able to handle the material" it seems to me that you're assuming things about the writer's state of mind that you don't know. I think the writer was moved by these children, that's clear enough. Surprised? I don't know. And, at any rate, at bottom your argument seems to be that this newspaper article written by a journalist on a socioeconomic subject wasn't a journal article written by a folklorist on the genesis, transmission, and sociology of a some children's folklore.

"I can't remember whether you knew this, EB, but I am a student of folklore myself."

That would be why I assumed you were familiar with the Opies. I've never been formally a student of any kind of folklore, just an interested amateur. Oddly enough, though, my interest in children's folklore predates my interest in urban folklore. I don't really have an interest in folklore beyond those two sub-fields.
posted by Ethereal Bligh at 11:34 AM on November 2, 2006

According to the Dade Homeless Trust, approximately 1800 homeless children currently find themselves bounced between the county's various shelters and the streets.

Wow. That's completely insane. We have a big homeless problem in Vancouver, but we don't have homeless children that I know of. (Teens, yes. Children, no.) Is this common in American cities?
posted by russilwvong at 11:59 AM on November 2, 2006

You seem to be skeptical...

No, I'm not skeptical that kids can do this, obviously they can, do, have, and will. I'm skeptical that this was responsibly reported.

at bottom your argument seems to be that this newspaper article written by a journalist on a socioeconomic subject wasn't a journal article written by a folklorist on the genesis, transmission, and sociology of a some children's folklore

Mm, sort of, but that's not what I'm really interested in. I'm not surprised that that some journalist stumbled across something interesting and was unable to fully process it -- happens all the time, and is often the genesis of folklore research. The sole reason I'm skeptical is that the findings she reported nearly 10 years ago have never been replicated or more deeply studied by a more scholarly investigator. That's really just suspect; this would be of such strong interest among folklorists that it's very hard to accept that a story so widely broadcast and shared on the internet escaped the attention of the entire profession. I'm not saying she made it up, but a single informant -- which is all we have evidence of -- does not constitute a real folk community or body of lore. It's an unsubstantiated report.

I've asked my Public Folklorists list for commentary on this and will post back if anything turns up.
posted by Miko at 12:04 PM on November 2, 2006

This discussion of the story on an RPG forum is really pretty good. A lot of my questions are raised there, as well. The fishy part is what many here say - that no graduate student in 10 years has picked up on this phenomenon. Is that because there's not really enough there to study?

Particularly interesting, if it's true, is the very last comment regarding Bill Ellis, who is one of the most respected minds in the field:

I sent this to a friend of mine who is a professor, who then sent it to Bill Ellis, the Penn State professor who is quoted in the article. When the fact-checkers called him to check the quote, he informed them he'd been misquoted. This apparently happened a lot in the article, so that publication dropped it, and it got published by a less thorough venue.

He believes that the majority of the article comes from a single kid, and that these stories are not widespread, even in the Miami area.

posted by Miko at 12:22 PM on November 2, 2006

"He believes that the majority of the article comes from a single kid, and that these stories are not widespread, even in the Miami area."

That would be a shame, if true.

I didn't find the lack of academic followup on this very suspicious because, not being an academic folklorist myself, I can imagine all sorts of reasons it wouldn't have been followed up.

My own skepticism was more triggered by the fact that this story is almost too good to be true. It reminds me in some ways of the Stephen Glass stories I (sigh) credulously read way back in the day. Glass wrote stories that you wanted to be true; and in its own way, this story inspires that, too. It's so compelling.
posted by Ethereal Bligh at 12:31 PM on November 2, 2006

I didn't find the lack of academic followup on this very suspicious because, not being an academic folklorist myself, I can imagine all sorts of reasons it wouldn't have been followed up.

Yeah, that's the thing -- it's so very unlikely that something like this would be left alone. Florida has a state folklife department, and Chapel Hill in not-too-far-away NC has what's probably the nation's most intense graduate folklore program. In addition to those, several other American universities are sending graduate students out for ethnographic fieldwork of this type, nationwide and worldwide. This would be such a plum project for a folklore graduate student -- that's why I'm just astounded that ten years could have passed with no followup. It's rarer and rarer to find an as-yet-professionally undescribed active body of lore in a folk community. A dissertation on this would be publishable and highly interesting.

And that's just the field of folklore I'm thinking of - you'd expect interest from sociologists and anthropologists as well.

I don't think the content itself is impossibly good - it's believable enough when compared to other story cycles and bodies of childrens' lore. I just can't get beyond the idea that it's never been replicated.
posted by Miko at 12:47 PM on November 2, 2006

The sole reason I'm skeptical is that the findings she reported nearly 10 years ago have never been replicated or more deeply studied by a more scholarly investigator.

That's an extremely good reason to be skeptical.

My own skepticism was more triggered by the fact that this story is almost too good to be true.

And that's another.

We'd all like this to be true, but unless Miko turns up some later work with these kids, I'm voting for reportorial exaggeration/credulousness (hopefully not outright fabrication).
posted by languagehat at 12:54 PM on November 2, 2006

..hopefully not outright fabrication..

Well...as Miko pointed out above, elements are indeed real.

I believed in La Llorona when I was a child. She was always out there in the night and it was not hard to imagine you could hear her screams. Here's a website which collects children's artwork of La Llorona.
posted by vacapinta at 2:03 PM on November 2, 2006

A kid-quote from vacapinta's link:

She weeps for her children
as she pushes the weeping-reeds aside
(who have problems of their own).--Lysistrata
posted by Opus Dark at 4:25 PM on November 2, 2006

"Wow. That's completely insane. We have a big homeless problem in Vancouver, but we don't have homeless children that I know of. (Teens, yes. Children, no.) Is this common in American cities?"

Homeless children exist everywhere there are homeless people. They're just harder to find most of the time as they stay hidden or are hidden by parents/other caretakers; it can be a dangerous world especially for a little kid.
posted by Matt Oneiros at 8:53 PM on November 2, 2006

Well...as Miko pointed out above, elements are indeed real.

By "outright fabrication" I don't mean "every single thing in the piece is invented"—I've heard of La Llorona myself—I mean there isn't actually such a cult among street kids, the reporter read up on this stuff and made one up. The towns Jason Blair "reported" from exist too.
posted by languagehat at 5:27 AM on November 3, 2006

I got a phenomenal answer to my list query from Bill Ellis himself. I don't think it would be appropriate to post his entire note, since it's a personal communication and he didn't reply to the list. But he does say that the author first submitted the story to another magazine, and that he was contacted by fact-checkers who were unable to verify other facts in the story. He had also been quoted out of context.

He suspects the reporter "encountered some very compelling storytellers" who conflated older La Llonora and Bloody Mary tales with "content from apocolyptic popular novels and movies." He says the stories are "not typical of the common legends that I have documented in my research." Dr. Ellis suggests that the tales were probably real, but circulated among a small, close group of friends and were not as widespread as the reporter stated. He shares the viewpoint that the author may have engaged in some embroidery to make the mythology seem more widely known and shared than it really was.

He adds "My own work on inner-city children at a summer camp (some of which is included in my Aliens, Ghosts, and Cults) shows a similar propensity to shape standard "monster of the camp" legends to the realities of ghetto life."
posted by Miko at 8:39 AM on November 3, 2006

Great work, Miko! Dr. Ellis's comments certainly make a large amount of suspicion justifiable. The only directly relevant bit of evidence against the story, though, is that a magazine's fact-checkers had problems with it. And this we get second-hand. So, strictly speaking, we still have only a lot of suspicion but no real evidence against the writer.

It's also sort of ironic that a variation on your primary argument is one to which your argument is vulnerable. The best proof we're likely to get against the story is that researchers went looking for these children in these places and didn't hear these stories and couldn't find them. But that would have been noteworthy, too, especially for those folklore researchers and for the academic folklore community concerning a very high profile article (not when it was published, but not too long after, as Google demonstrates). I'd particularly expect that Dr. Ellis would have been contacted by any of those researchers you expected to have rushed to the field to verify the news article.

I'm serious in this point, but not too serious. My real point is that absence of evidence arguments are very weak as a rule, no matter how attractive.
posted by Ethereal Bligh at 6:56 PM on November 3, 2006

I'd particularly expect that Dr. Ellis would have been contacted by any of those researchers you expected to have rushed to the field to verify the news article.

He has been for 10 years, so much so that most Google hits on his name are related to this story.

absence of evidence arguments are very weak as a rule

Not in this field.
posted by Miko at 9:34 AM on November 4, 2006

Never mind, -- not most, I just tried it. Perhaps a few years ago that was true. Anyway, he mentioned in his note to me that he was perennially being contacted by others in the field looking for substantive documentation, and can't provide it.
posted by Miko at 9:37 AM on November 4, 2006

I'm confused—it's not clear to me if you're saying that researchers are contacting him after trying to followup on the article and not finding anything, or if you're just saying they contact him about this looking for documentation. Those are different things.
posted by Ethereal Bligh at 6:51 PM on November 4, 2006

Researchers contact him after coming across the article. Wanting to know if there has been any formal folkoristic study of this group of legends, they ask Dr. Ellis what he knows. He tells them that he knows the first magazine to which the article was submitted was rejected because the facts of the story did not check out. He also tells them that, as an authority on children's legends of the occult and as one of the nation's leading folkorists and educators, he has not encountered, heard of, or seen documentation of any other instances of this legend in the ten years since it was reported.
posted by Miko at 8:42 AM on November 6, 2006

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