CHARLESTON, S.C. (WCSC) – A Lowcountry historian-turned-storyteller is shedding light on cultures worlds apart and the connections between them.
Damon Fordham knows the art of storytelling. It’s in his blood.
“I had a father who loved to tell stories and who lived through a lot of history, and so he loved to talk about these things and I loved to listen,” Fordham says. “And then I was pretty much a bookworm as a kid. So I read a lot of things and when I would read some of the very things that my father would talk about, say World War II, the Great Depression, segregation and such, it really struck a cord that I was able to connect these things.”
Fordham, an adjunct professor of history at The Citadel is writing his own stories to tell and experiences of Black communities in the Palmetto State are taking center stage. Fordham is preparing to release his new book, “Black Folk Tales and Chronicles of South Carolina.”
“This book is a preservation of this wisdom, humor and knowledge of our elders of previous generations because that tradition of the elders telling stories and life lessons and all that, that largely died out within the ‘60s and ‘70s,” he says. “But see, my parents were old enough to be my grandparents, you see? So I was able to be that last generation to get a hold of that.”
Fordham says being born in Spartanburg, growing up in Mount Pleasant and Columbia and attending the University of South Carolina, allowed him to be able to listen and learn from the past experiences of those around him. Their stories now line the pages of his fifth book.
It has been a project two years in the making.
“What I would like [readers] to walk away with is exactly know that many of the ancestors in previous days went through some hard times,” he says. “But these stories reveal some of the ways that they got through those hard times and the type of ways that they used humor in order to deal with that, as well as how they used their experiences as well as mythology and folklore to give life lessons not only to the youth, but also to adults.”
He says he works to find a balance between highlighting the tragedies and triumphs of Black communities.
“There’s some people who concentrate on nothing but the tragedies because they feel that that will quote, ‘wake people up’ and there are some who only concentrate on the triumphs because they believe that people don’t need to hear the bad things,” he says. “If all you focus on are the tragedies, it would freeze people into hopelessness and think that nothing could be done. But if all you feel—concentrate on are the triumphs, then people will not know what to do when the tragedies come. So, what I do is a balance of these things so that when people go through tragic times, they will know from the history of these tragedies not only that they’ve been there before, but how to go about dealing with that situation.”
Fordham finds a direct connection between South Carolina and the tradition of oral storytelling that he observed during his travels throughout West Africa he also hopes to bring focus to his book.
“This is what kept us as people together for many years and it would be a tragedy if all of that wisdom would be forever lost—and humor—be forever lost to the graveyard,” he says.
Fordham’s book will be released on Tuesday. He’s also hosting a launch event that day at Buxton Books in Downton Charleston, located at 160 King Street, at 5:30 p.m.
The public is invited to attend.
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