Your hint that conversation may be art is interesting. Could you expand.
Carrol -----------
Sure. Last week I was doing outside calls and was over to fix an old woman's broken power chair. She is in her late eighties, creole-black, from Louisiana, moved to Oakland with her sister at eighteen after their mother died. Her grandmother had been a slave as a little girl. When I caught too many fish to keep in my freezer, last summer and fall, I used to bring Alberta the extra, mostly strippers and kelp cod. She is crazy about fresh fish. Anyway she reminded me of the narrative play `The Delaney Sisters', which opens with the ancient remaining Delaney sister cleaning up her apartment in Harlem and remembering about the artists, musicians, and writers who used to come to their apartment from the 20s to the 40s. It is staged in such a way as to imply the audience is the visitor, invited for tea, and is there to hear the stories and chatter about the days of old (Harlem Renaissance).
Well, anyway, the actress at Berkeley Rep who did the part, didn't quite have the depth, the soulful resonance in her voice to quite carry the part. She was good and all that, but that `stuff' whatever it is that makes the voice a well, a chasm of language that you can fall into with your eyes closed--she didn't have it--call it the magic of a story teller's voice.
Alberta has the voice, period. And she is a chatterbox who will talk your ear off, and it's great just to listen to her no matter what she has to say. When she came to Oakland she and her older sister moved into a boarding house and went to work sewing in some long lost garment industry here. She learned how to fix the sewing machines and turned that into a trade, then during the Thirties and Forties she worked in the war factories building electric motors, winding armatures and so on.
She is a big boned gangly old woman with a zillion grand and great-grand kids and their pictures are clustered all over the little tables and counters and walls. She had a couple of husbands and wore them out, like this old chair, or so she says. She is in a power chair because of the arthritis. She is funny and makes you laugh and enjoys making you laugh. She is a naturally social, organizing, and outgoing person, so she is the tenet representative for her floor of the housing development. People are constantly coming in to her place and going out, the place is humming.
`Now, Chuck, you don't forget old Alberta when you're off fishing and having a good time. You hear me.' I have to promise and she makes me promise out loud.
When she was complaining about money the other day, I told her to call up the Lighthouse for the Blind and read stories on tape. I sure hope she does, and I hope they will pay at least something. She has the voice you want to hear, reading somebody like Faulkner. She sounds a little grating at first, but you get used to it fast and after awhile you are just listening to it, listening to the phrasing, the age, the accent, the cadences rolling on like a really well made acoustic guitar with over tones, colors, and nuances you've never heard before.
Alberta G. is who I had in mind. And your right about the dis-junction between purpose and content. When I am listening to Alberta, I am listening directly to history and I don't care what it's about: Oakland, Louisiana, dead husbands, the chair I am fixing, the fish recipes, favorite spices. In my mind, I am reaching back in time through her voice.
Chuck Grimes