The Storyteller

The dogs outside Betty Mae's window walk on all four legs. The crows are black. And neither mockingbird nor reservation cat have been known to speak in human voice. This may seem logical, but the world of the Seminole, as portrayed through Betty Mae Jumper's stories, can easily spin into a strange and unpredictable dimension.

Take the Little People, for example. You can't really see Little People, but they live in the holes of the oldest gnarled oak trees, Betty Mae says. Look close. Kind of squint your eyes and try to see them running all around the twisted wood. Don't be scared of them, but don't hassle them either. It's not that Little People are specifically evil or anything, but they have certain ways of doing things. If you go with the Little People, your time is short.

And if none of this is making any sense, then it is time to consult the Rabbit. But watch out! Rabbit is a liar, Betty says, Rabbit's a liar, but Rabbit knows.

The first time I came upon Rabbit and his lies, the rascal was all crumpled up and slid under a leg of Betty Mae's desk. No one has ever seen the actual surface of this desk, but it is presumed to be wood and is located in the tiny Editor-in-Chief's office just to the right of the Tribal Communications reception area.

In the center of this hallowed anteroom, across from boxes of palmetto husk dolls and hand-carved balsa tomahawks, buried somewhere beneath a mound of varied and exotic clutter, is the place where the Storyteller works.

Only a working journalist, facing perpetual deadline, could truly appreciate the Storyteller's desk. It is part museum, part landfill, part gift shop, part library, a veritable mound of archaeology that exists in that nether world between the Smithsonian and the Smith Family Robinson. What Betty May Jumper needs to know is in the vicinity of this desk; whether she can find it or not is another story. Here there are news releases, Tribal government reports, phone messages, pamphlets, and research notes. There are cattle reports, powwow flyers, and photos -- some taken this week, others taken in the late 1920s when Betty Mae and her family first migrated to this part of Florida. There are dolls made by Minnie Doctor, patchwork potholders, little bows and arrows, and boxes full of tiny canoes.

Letters, invites, requisitions, resolutions, her framed honorary doctorate of humane letters from FSU. Books, paperwork, clippings, handwritten logs. Notes scrawled in margins hidden in forgotten files. Receipts, bills, folders, and musings -- bits and pieces of a colorful life spent documenting, interpreting, collecting, and preserving. This great mass of memorabilia rises and falls in foothills of flotsam, spilling onto the floor in plops of junk and history.

The day I found out about Rabbit, I was standing in this office, across from this great desk, watching Betty Mae Jumper at work. Her head was barely visible behind a stack of reports as she toiled busily away signing this, shuffling that, alternately dropping things on the floor, answering the phone, and shrieking for "Twila!" "Virginia!" and other members of her Seminole Tribune staff.

Sitting quietly nearby, absolutely stoic in her colorful patchwork dress, was one of the many female Tribal elders who hang out with Betty Mae Jumper everywhere she goes. Occasionally, Betty would look up and say something in the difficult Miccosukee language. The woman would nod, but never speak.

Absentmindedly toeing through a pile of paperwork near the desk, I spied something old and handwritten poking out from beneath. I tugged at the crumpled, water stained sheet, but it was stuck under the leg. The familiar scrawly handwriting of Betty Mae Jumper was all over the page. I peered closer: something about a rabbit. And a lion.

"Excuse me, Betty," I said as I lifted the desk and kicked the Rabbit's tale out. Several mounds of important stuff slid off onto the floor, and she glanced up in irritation. I picked up the brown-stained sheet of paper, blew off the dust, and held it up for her to see. "But what's this?"

"Oh my goodness, that's a Seminole legend. I've been looking for that," Betty Mae said, grabbing the Legend of the Rabbit and the Lion from my hand. Suddenly my eyes became adjusted to the light of what Betty Mae Jumper was doing. I began to see similar sheets of hand-penned prose over her desk and office floor -- the mortar holding her mound together. I pulled up another one and held it toward her eyes. It was titled, simply, "Seminole Do's and Don'ts."

"I forgot about that."

As the muse had hit over the years, Betty Mae Jumper had been translating from Creek and Miccosukee and writing down, in longhand English, the legends and stories of her childhood. And filing them about her desk. She didn't really know why she was doing it, just that it needed to be done.

"These stories are very old, but have never been written down," is how Betty Mae rationalized her deed. "If the oldest people on the reservation were to die, without leaving them for others to learn, then our culture would be gone, too."

Like most Seminoles from her generation, Betty Mae Jumper is intimately familiar with the old Seminole legends and stories of childhood. Many of her fondest memories recall the quiet and simple family times, accented by the gripping fables, which have meant so much to her life.

"It was always at night, when it was cool. There would be a campfire and we kids would be under the mosquito nets," she recalls, "They would tell us stories, to teach us and to help us go to sleep. My uncles, my aunts, my mother, and grandmother all told stories. It was mostly the older people who told these legends to the children."

Most of the stories Betty Mae remembers had to do with "a time when the world was very young. A time when the animals talked and walked on two feet," she says. "This was in the very beginning, before Jesus was born."

So deeply ingrained were the characters and plots of these folktales that Seminole children related to them much like children today relate to television cartoons. Fantastic as they were with talking animals and profound natural events, these stories provided a comfortable consistency in the lives of children forced to contend with the clashing cultures of dual worlds.

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