Some stories just beg for the telling

By JoAnne Young


I listened this week as a diverse group of people, about 175 of them, went to microphones set up for them in Omaha and Lincoln. They had been invited to tell their experiences, concerns, ideas and solutions surrounding racism and police interactions to eight Nebraska senators elected to make laws that oversee the state’s judicial system. 

I don’t know what the senators took away from those listening sessions. What I heard was 175 compelling stories, and I would love to tell every single one of them. 

Because here’s the deal. Our brains are wired for story – to tell them and to hear them. It’s been that way from the beginning of time. Even in our sleep, we craft stories from the chemistry that is our thoughts and memories, and call them dreams. Some insightful, some fright filled, many forgotten by morning. 

My love of storytelling is at the same time learned and organic. 

In my grandmother’s family, there was said to be an uncle who could enrapture people for hours with his tales. I may have had at least one encounter with Uncle Mace, but it’s a hazy childhood memory. He died when I was 10. My aunt, his niece, was also a storyteller. A columnist and author of several books, who dug into stories that came out of the history of Oklahoma. A typewriter was central to her home décor. 

I have been lucky enough in my career to be able to tell a few stories, to listen as someone chronicled at least a part of their lives and then trusted me to retell it. 

There is at least one story that has been with me a few years that I haven’t retold, but I know it deserves at least a longform telling. Maybe a book. I have researched it, visited other states to track down people and details, spent hours on the internet and some time on the phone talking to friends and relatives of the true-life characters that inhabit this story. 

Frequently, I can tell them more about the story than they can tell me. 

It’s always a surprise that a story can be so shrouded from the annals of family lore. Especially one that involves, as this one does, courtrooms and crimes and a dead baby girl lying in an old cemetery with no marker to show she existed, even for a short time. 

“Good lord. I’ve never heard this story. That’s fascinating,” a great-great-grandson  told me recently.

“Some things are harder to talk about than others,” his sister told me a couple of days later. “My family never talked about this.”

I found the story in a morgue, a newspaper morgue. It leapt out from the light of a microfiche reader. 

I have never met the people who populate the story. Its pivotal moment happened a hundred years ago, and they are lying in cemeteries spread from the southwest to the east coast. But I have come to know them through the gathering of details about their lives. 

I have no journals or diaries of their thoughts or feelings. Just the facts. 

I have thought from time to time I should find another story, like literary nonfiction writer Erik Larson (“Devil in the White City,” “Isaac’s Storm”), who chooses stories that have an ample supply of documents, journals and recorded history. But I can’t let go of this. One of the characters must want this story told. 

Maybe it’s the baby in the unmarked grave.

On May 29, she would have turned 100. And she has a hell of a story to tell.