Ray Hicks and the Doctors
By Joseph D. Sobol, Ph.D.
Now & Then magazine, Vol. 19, No. 2 (Summer 2002)
When I arrived at the Medical Center in Johnson City, Tennessee, one evening in the spring of 2001, Ray Hicks, the patriarch of American traditional storytellers, was in one of those tiny cubicles in the innards of the emergency room on a narrow, rolling bed a foot too short for him. A cultural standoff was in progress.
He’d been there since just after noon. The hospital staff seemed to be hoping that he’d get tired and go home—after first making an appointment to come back and see a specialist like a good citizen of the nation of Modern Medicine. Ray’s family knew that he was not now, nor had he ever been, a citizen of that nation, and that if they took him home, they’d never get him back down. So each camp was trying to wait the other out.
Ray’s wife, Rosa, was there, and two of their daughters, Juanita and Jeannette, and also Emily Eddy, the librarian from Jonesborough, Tennessee, who had been so alarmed at Ray’s condition on her last visit to his house that she absolutely insisted on coming back the following Monday to drive him to Johnson City. Ray had missed the previous October’s National Storytelling Festival for the first time since he’d broken his back in 1976. All this winter, he had struggled, unable to keep food down or to digest it, and he had grown as thin and wasted as a blighted pine tree. He was in a great deal of pain and discomfort, there where his unpadded bones rubbed the unpadded gurney, and if he hadn’t been so weak, he surely would have bolted hours ago.
I went to the desk-duty nurse and asked her a rhetorical question. “Did you know,” I asked, “that you have one of the greatest traditional storytellers in America in that room in there, and that you’ve had him in there waiting for six hours?”
She said she’d heard something about that, yes, and that they had to have a doctor come and look at him in order to admit him, and the doctors were all very busy. But they would keep on working at it.
So they worked at it for another hour or so, and we kept Ray company as best we could. Finally, at around quarter to eight, a green-scrubbed intern came sweeping into the cubicle with a medical student at either arm, each holding a clipboard. The intern had been briefed. “Well, now, is this Mr. Raymond Hicks, the famous storyteller? he asked.
Everyone began to stammer in protest till Juanita summarized: “His name is Leonard Ray Hicks, but everyone just calls him Ray.”
“Well then, Mr. Hicks, I’m here to take your medical history. What seems to be the matter today?”
When Ray heard the word history, he suddenly figured he was in the right place. So he put his hands behind his head and stretched out a bit and said, “We-e-ll, it all started back in nineteen and seventy-five when I went to entertain at the governor of Tennessee’s place in Nashville, Tennessee, and on the way back, my water stopped. …”
All the other adults in the room began furiously interpreting between Ray and the intern as we tried to translate from the endless and seamless world of stories to the fragmented terrain of medical data. He’d had a prostate operation in 1975, it hadn’t gone well, and he’d had discomfort ever since. He broke his back in 1976 in a truck accident, he’d spent many months recovering, and still had pain from that. He hadn’t been able to keep food down or let it out all winter, and he’d been losing weight that he couldn’t afford to lose. And that was it—that was his whole medical history.
“So how are you feeling right now, Mr. Hicks?”
And Ray began: “When I was a boy, we had two cows.
“And I had to take ’em over the mountain to graze ’cause they’d eat up all the tender grass near the house. And one day when we uz over yander, it came on to stormin’ and a-thunderin’ and a-lightenin’, and I was scairt I’z gonna be struck and killed. So I ran and hid inside a hollered-out tree stump.
“And then I saw that there was a nest o’ white blood-suckin’ spiders in that holler log, and they was a-crawlin’ up my pants legs and a-bitin’ and suckin’ my blood. And I didn’t know whether to climb out o’ there and maybe get struck and killed by ligthnin’ or to stay in there and get bitten up by them blood suckin’ spiders.
“And,” Ray concluded, “that’s about how I feel right now.”
“Hmm,” said the intern impatiently. “What about drinking, Mr. Hicks? Do you have a drinking problem?”
Ray looked around at us with that glint in his eye. “Only problem is—cain’t afford it none.” And Ray began to discourse on the differences between patent whiskey and moonshine and the different grades and potencies of the latter when the doctor cut him off.
“What about smoking? Do you still smoke?”
“Don’t smoke nothin’ but what I roll my own. Prince Albert. Healthier than the store-bought kind—it don’t have so many chemicals.”
The intern was not very interested in the subtleties of store-bought vs. homemade whiskey and tobacco. He kept on asking brief questions and struggling to deflect the answers before Ray could get up any kind of head of steam. It was like watching a game of cultural pingpong, where the service kept changing sides. Finally Ray took dead-aim between that intern’s eyes; he rared back and said, “Now what you’uns are a-sayin’ puts me in mind —
“— of a feller lived up near me who swore that he had a cat in his stomach.
“And none of his friends could tell him no different. He just said he had a cat in his stomach and it a-botherin’ him.
“And his friends got together, and they went in it (note—yes--it means conspired) with a doctor. Real medical doctor, jus’ like you-uns. And they talked it over, and they decided that to help this feller, they was gonna have to operate. Only they was gonna go out and get them a cat. And when that feller woke up from the operation, they was gonna hold up that cat. And say, ‘Here it is—we got ’im!’
“So that’s what they did. They took this feller, and they put him under fast asleep, and when he opened his eyes, they held out this cat—they had ’em a gray tomcat. And they held it up to the feller, and they said, ‘Here it is—we got ’im!’
“Now that feller opened his eyes, and he looked at that gray tomcat. And he looked at the doctor and at his friends all standin’ round, and he said:
“‘That ain’t the one. The one inside o’ me’s a black ’un.’
“So if you’re fixin’ on operatin’ on somebody,” Ray said to the intern, “you got to remember—first you got to find out what color’s the cat!”
Now the intern had slowly relaxed during this performance into the state all storytellers know as the Story Listening Trance. His mouth hung open. His eyes had glazed over. He had lost all his doctorly authority and rigor. In fact, he had lost his tongue and his senses altogether and simply stood there, staring sullenly at Ray for a long time while the medical students snorted and chortled and slapped their clipboards. And every time I looked at that intern’s stunned face, I would be catapulted back a step or two with glee till eventually, and I can’t explain how this happened, I fell to the hard linoleum floor and actually bounced up again like one of those inflatable clown dolls that can’t stay down. The room was in utter pandemonium around the tableau of Ray, smiling in triumph from the prone position, and the defeated and slack-jawed doctor standing over him.
Finally the intern roused himself and announced in a crestfallen way that he would now have to administer a prostate exam. All except for Rosa and the medical students had to scurry out of the room. The curtain was drawn for a long, solemn moment. Then it was thrown back, and the intern marched out, flanked by his medical students, their clipboards held high. He said something in medicalese to the duty nurse, and the troika disappeared down the corridor.
Word went up and down—they would admit Ray Hicks to the hospital. When I went back in the cubicle, Ray was muttering to Rosa, “The places that feller was a-pokin’ me, I was fixin’ to snap his finger off.”
But Ray’s spirits were now much improved. When I came to his bedside, he said, “I know now why they’re gonna let me in here. It’s so’s I can teach to ’em.”
And so it was. Ray spent the next several days in the Johnson City medical Center, teaching to the doctors, nurses, staff, and other patients—to anyone who came near him—about grace in the face of change.
The following day, Ray was diagnosed with cancer of the prostate and colon that had metastasized to his bones. He would be treated with some short-term chemotherapy and released to home hospice care. When I went to visit that day, Ray was downstairs receiving more tests. Rosa was there, and Susan O’Connor of the International Storytelling Center in Jonesborough.
Susan was shaking her head in wonder. “Ray took a walk this morning after they told him,” she said. “And when he got back to the door of his room, he just turned around to all the people in the corridor, and he announced—in that great Ray voice, you know—he said, ‘If I’m gonna go, I might as well go singing!’ And he raised up his hand and started singing this song that went something like, ‘I’m gonna lay down my old guitar.’ Then he just turned around and went back in his room, leaving everybody kind of awestruck. I wish you could have heard it.”
I wish I could have heard it too. But I got to hear the story.
Gonna lay down my old guitar.
Gonna lay down my old guitar.
I wish I could strop it to my side,
And carry it along with me.
They had put Ray on the pediatric ward—for reasons of space, they said—but somehow it seemed right. The following day when I went to visit, the doctors came in to give him his shot of chemo. They shooed us out of the room and closed the door. While I waited outside, I saw a little girl coming down the hall with her grandmother. The little girl was freckle-faced and blue-eyed, with just a few colorless wisps of hair and patches of fuzz on her scalp. Her grandmother was shaking with palsy and clinging to the railing along the wall. It was hard to say which one was sicker.
I said hello to the little girl, and then I had an idea. “Hey,” I asked her, “do you like stories?”
She nodded.
“Well, today’s your lucky day because one of the best storytellers in the country is staying right there on your hall, which makes you neighbors. So maybe sometime when you and he aren’t busy, you can stop by for a visit, and he can tell you a story.”
She nodded.
Just then the door opened, and the doctor swept by. “Well,” I said, “maybe if he’s feeling OK now, you can come in and introduce yourself.” So we went in.
“Ray,” I said, “this is your neighbor, Kimberly. She’s staying on this hall, and she says she likes stories.”
Ray asked her last name and the grandmother’s last name, and after careful consideration, they determined that they were probably nearabout kinfolk. So after that ritual was completed, Ray began:
“Now this story is about a time when grownup folks didn’t mind hittin’ and beatin’ children. Parents, teachers, neighbors, the same. They’d beat a child till he had bruises in his bones sometimes. It happened to me. Teachers, they’d whup you with a board or a strop, put bruises in the bones o’ your legs, arms. Sometimes’d never come out.
“Now one time that happened to Jack. His father beat him for not cuttin’ the wood, doin’ the chores. Put bruises in his bones. Jack decided he was gonna light out. Run away. Get out o’ there.”
And Ray went on to tell the story of “Jack and the Animals,” in which Jack rounds up a crew of old, sick, feeble, abandoned animals—a horse, an ox, a dog, a cat, and a rooster—and they manage to defeat poverty, brutality, crime, and the lack of love just by cleverness, grace, and by sticking together. Ray lay back in the hospital bed and told the story with total concentration while the IV monitors bleeped and the hospital intercom crackled and summoned the doctors to this or that emergency code—and all of that ceased to exist. In the end, Jack and the cast-off animals had a home, plenty of gold, and a new family made up of one another. And the little girl and her palsied granny stood in the doorway and listened and stared only at the storyteller.
And at the story’s end, when Jack and the animals were happy and safe, I turned to the little girl and said, “You know, you’re a lucky girl to have heard that story today from this man.” And she nodded and skipped off down the hall.
And when she was gone, her grandmother said, “She don’t even have a daddy. Her daddy’s plumb mean. Found him another woman ’fore she was even born. Won’t even send her a Christmas card.”
And it hit me that Ray had somehow selected the one story in the Jack tale repertoire in which Jack’s father is plumb mean too. How he knew is between him and the mysterious source of all human grace. But I thought that whatever else happens in that little girl’s life—and no matter how long or how short—that on that day, she was like Jack—and like the rest of us who’ve had the grace to have had a transcendent storyteller in our lives—just plain lucky.