"Old People Say..." Tales From Eleuthera stories compiled by Raeann R. Hamon stories and children's drawings put together by Kathy T. Hettinga      In January of 1991, I began co-leading Messiah College's first cross-cultural study course to the Bahamas. It was then, as a student of culture myself, that I fell in love with the islands and people of the Bahamas.      It was during these many class trips with students and fieldwork research experiences that I became aware of a way that I could give something back to my Bahamian hosts and friends who offered so much to me and our student groups year after year.      The impetus for this collection of stories originated from several conversations I had with some of my elder Bahamian friends.  They expressed a real concern that as their generation dies, many of the old tales would be lost.  Although Bahamian culture has historically been rich in oral traditions, familial, societal, and technological changes have resulted in less tale telling to younger generations.  Thus, "Old People Say... " is my attempt to capture a piece of a vanishing oral tradition for subsequent  generations.      Every attempt was made to record these stories so as to preserve Bahamian dialect and unique language usage so that the reader might "hear" the story being told. I also enlisted the artistic assistance of Eleutheran children to illustrate the tales. I read the stories to them and asked them to draw what they imagined. It is these drawings, from five- to sixteen-year-old children, that are interwoven throughout the stories.      As a family scientist/gerontologist, with a specialization in intergenerational relationships, I wanted this to be a truly intergenerational Bahamian effort. Thus, "Old People Say..." Tales From Eleuthera is a wonderful collection of stories as told by the old and as understood by the young. I've included one of the twenty stories here so that you can get a sense of them. You can purchase "Old People Say..." from: Messiah College Bookstore Grantham Pennsylvania phone: (717) 691-6024 fax: (717) 691-6043 email: bookstore@messiah.edu   Sample Story: Once there was a man whose master gave him a staff. The master said, "Now any time you find a bigger fool than yourself, you give him the staff." The man said, "Alright," and took the staff. This fool had the staff for years. The fool dress up and put flags and things on the staff and parade around with the staff. And anybody know the signs of these, know he is a fool. Anytime people together and wanted to have more fun, they call him in and let him dance and do all kinds of things to get fun, to laugh . So now he did that for years. 12 This day the fool didn't see the master. He didn't see him again the next day. So he asked where the master is. Say, "He's sick." "He's sick?" asked the fool. Say, "Yeah." Say, "Could I go to see him?" Say, "Yeah, you can go see him." He go in. He look, he see the master, he looks in. He say, "How you feeling?" The master say, "I want to leave you , I gonna leave you." The fool say, "You gonna leave me?" Master say, "Yeah." Fool asked, "Where you going?" Master say, "I'm going to a far country." Fool asked, "DO you know anybody there?" He say, "No." He say, "Now you mean to tell me you're going away, you want to die? You ain't know nobody there, you ain't know God, and you ain't got no arrangement made for yourself when you get there? 13 Then, the fool had an idea. He know of God, and he know of God the light. And the master didn't know that. He said, "Here, you have the staff. You's a bigger fool than me." So, the master had to accept the staff on his deathbed, had to accept the staff from the fool, meaning the master didn't know nothing about God and life thereafter. The master had all the fun he could get out of the fool, but find he was a bigger fool than the fool. 14
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