Ray Hicks carries the tales and intonation of the last century in his lanky 6’7” frame. From his ''antique house'' in Beech Mountain, N.C., where he says his toes freeze to the floor in winter, he makes his way to story festivals, where he tells Jack tales and other traditional stories. Come this fall in Jonesborough, Tenn., he'll once again be the star of the country's oldest story festival.
Su Clauson
Casting a spell. Storyteller Ray Hicks: "Stories are like panther – they won't let go of me."
Way up in Ray Hicks' North Carolina mountain cabin, the stillness is so thick you could hear a ghost rustling through the walls.
Judging from the expressions on the faces of the lowlanders parked around Ray's feet, this has probably already happened. They breathe in unison like a single, spellbound, multi-eyed creature totally in Ray's thrall. The glow of the woodstove flickers over the shadowy room. The group shivers collectively, waiting for Ray's next utterance. Ray looks into the eyes of each and resumes his story.
"So I was walking through this cut in the woods." he says, his eyes widening with remembered fear. "It was dark in there, you know, being late at night. And a cougar got after me. Screaming like a woman in trouble, she came."
The phantom cougar disappears just as Ray is "plum run out." Luckily, it was only a haint, he says.
"A haint isn't the same as a spirit, you know." Ray explains. "A haint is something you'd see if you was walking along the road in the dark that'd make your backbone want to crawl out of your back. Maybe a branch moving, or a head up on a post. In the morning, you'd go back and see owl droppings."
Ray tells of the ghost in his sister-in-law's house who pulled the sheets down over his chest and shook his bed all night. He points to the cemetery down the road where he saw a woman in 18th century garb picking up apples. With his visionary eyes, he's seen them all.
Then he smiles. Ray's large blue eyes crinkle at the edges and focus on this world again. Ray Hicks is doing what he likes best -telling the stories of Appalachian culture, whether they be ghost stories, reminiscences or old Appalachian Jack tales.
Ray's wife, Rosa, says talking is his God-given talent. The National Endowment for the Humanities calls Ray a national historic treasure. In 1983, he received their National Heritage Fellowship Award as one of the country's finest craftsmen.
"God is putting heaven on earth," Ray says, recalling how he was flown to Washington by Leer jet to accept the award. Although awed by the capital Ray and Rosa were just as impressed with the highways, hospitals, all-night groceries and other handiwork in Bristol, Tenn., only an hour and a half from their mountain home. Ray, 67, says he has visited the small city only twice in the past 25 years.
"A lot of my people have sold out and gone," Ray says. "But I stay here on the old homeplace like a rabbit in the briar patch."
Except for an occasional storytelling festival, Ray, who is regarded as the finest and most authentic traditional storyteller in the country, doesn't venture too far from his 50 acre tract on Beech Mountain. His $45, 1939 Chevy gave out years ago so he gave up the odd carpentry jobs he used to take in the valley. Now the Hickses subsist on money made from selling ginseng, sassafras and apples and the donations visitors give Ray for telling stories.
Ray's craft has always been telling tales, tales like those of Jack, that rascal who manages to outwit giants, ghosts, older brothers and other impressive foes. Jack's adventures are exceedingly ancient, crossing the ocean and going back almost to Chaucer's time, some say. Ray's repertoire includes the old familiar "Jack and the Beanstalk." as well as the less well-known, "Whickety-Whack, Into My Sack," "Jack and the Old Fire Dragon," and many more.
Ray speaks of the rapscallion with affection, but admits Jack is "so lazy he can't hardly keep the flies off hisself." Jack's wit is always what has drawn Appalachian admiration, even when the boy tricks people or tells outright lies. Ray stands 6'7" in his "bar feet." but had trouble standing up for himself in school until he took Jack as a model. Then Ray began to outwit the bullies instead of fighting them, he says. Ray is still so fond of Jack he incorporates himself into a Jack tale.
Ray's first organized public telling was at Cold Creek School, North Carolina in the 1960s. A teacher friend asked him to come down and tell Jack tales for her class. The elementary school students loved him and begged Ray to come back.
"On my second time around, a little boy from the room next door popped his head in to see what the commotion was, 'Ain't fair you git him in yer class and not ourn,’ he said. So pretty soon I was telling stories in every classroom in that school." Ray says.
Word of Ray's talent moved off the mountain and around the region. In 1964, he made a record of Jack tales for Folk Legacy records. A film crew trekked up to his cabin and sat around his living room taping Ray's stories. He started receiving invitations to storytelling festivals, three or four a year. Best of all, they paid him to talk. Eventually, the Hickses got their house wired for electricity.
But for the most part, life at the Hicks cabin continued pretty much the way it always had. Their five children grew up, and four moved off the mountain. Ray and Rosa still dig ginseng, golden seal, angelica and other wild herbs to sell. Ray never worked an official job long enough to collect pension so the property taxes on his farm seem staggering.
The unpainted two-story cabin where Ray and his 10 brothers and sisters were raised leans precariously into Beech Mountain, but Ray says his taxes were raised because he's living in an "antique" house.
"I said, “You should try living in one this winter," Ray says. “Your breath freezes on the covers. Many a time my toes have frozen to the floor."
Ray relates this humorously, without resentment or bitterness. The curious conglomeration of tin cans rigged to his stove pipe is typical of the creativity with which Ray responds to hardships. The contraption, which looks something like a still, traps heat moving out the stovepipe in water-filled cans. The device also counteracts the drying effect of wood heat. Ray says.
Some of Ray's ideas come to him in dreams.
"Stories come to me that way sometimes," he says. "Would be a dream like you'd see on television. They're like panthers, they won't let go of me."
When the 1939 Chevy was acting up, God showed Ray how to fix it by casting a vision of the engine working perfectly on the ceiling above the bed where Ray lay praying.
Ray is a deeply spiritual man, with a spirituality which seems to come from his own visions and observations of nature, rather than the mountain church where he met Rosa.
"We don't die. Everybody comes back in and out in another body." he says. “There is one soul of everything. Now that's everything alike. We don't have dog souls, they have one dog soul, and we have one soul of human spirit."
“Through the male and the female, the young-un get born back again. It's called a different name and maybe a different look, but it's the same person. And after I go back, there will come a boy walkin' around somewhur on this planet who will be Ray. Might not look the same-might be black, but I'll be back. These are just ideas that come to me."
Then Ray, wanting to break the seriousness of the mood, looks around for his scrapbook.
"Momma. where's that picture of me at the Jonesborough Storytelling festival?" he calls, and Rosa comes running with the newspaper clippings in hand.
Tiny, dark Rosa, probably looking much the same as she did at 17 when she met Ray, may disagree with some things her husband says, but if she does, she doesn't say so.
"He likes to be out talking to the people,” she says. "It's what God put him on earth to do."
Su Clauson profiled Luke Staengl in the inaugural issue of Blue Ridge Country. She lives in Christiansburg, Va.