The Story Behind the Story

uncovering disappeared truths to break cycles of complicity

What stories lie beneath the ones we tell ourselves about ourselves? What truths are lost as we pass down generational narratives uncritically? And what can we learn about who we are and how we became who we are when we interrogate the stories we are told for their underlying truths?

After Christmas and New Year’s, my sister and her wife came to visit my family and me in Bismarck, ND – a long, cold journey from Atlanta, GA. I had not seen her since her wedding last May. Of all my siblings, she is the one I most relate to, despite our twelve-year difference in age. We look the most alike; we act the most alike; we share similar mannerisms and appreciation for silliness and absurdity. While we don’t share much of our childhood narrative – she was five years old when I went to college – what we do share more than makes up the difference.

On her recent visit, we laughed about old stories we were told about our Great-Great Grandfather, “Old Will Hubbard,” who, apparently, had a penchant for riding trains and trollies. He was, in his prime, we are told, a circuit-riding preacher but, in old age, his long, white tobacco-stained beard seemed to better capture his personality than his preaching tabs. In one story, my sister and I laughed about him inviting a young woman to sit on his lap in a crowded trolly when no other seat was available – “I’m just a harmless, old man,” he explained – only to ask her to get up after a few blocks, because he was “not as old as I thought I was.” In another such story, my sister rolled her eyes as I recounted how he invited a young, bored woman in his train car to take a peak at his Cosmopolitan. To which she replied, “You touch nary a button, Sir, and I’ll call the conductor.”

These are stories, not jokes, I told my sister-in-law. These were just a few of countless such tales I learned as the eldest son and grandson, all of which fell somewhere between historical truth and family lore. But each story was deeply seeded – for a young boy, anyway – with core assumptions about the way the world was to be oriented and how I was to orient myself to the world. Baked into these stories about our family patriarch were my lessons about what it meant to be a man, particularly in relation to women. My sister-in-law, ever clever, offered a riddle to demonstrate how prejudice and patriarchy are often unseen and unspoken in an otherwise innocent tale.

A father and his son are in a car accident. The father dies at the scene, and the son is rushed to the hospital. At the hospital the surgeon looks at the boy and says, “I can't operate on this boy; he is my son.” How can this be?

If you think about it for a minute before reading on to the answer, you will find yourself, as I did, stretching the riddle to accommodate an explanation that how the boy had two fathers, perhaps like 1980’s sitcom My Two Dads, or how the surgeon was the sperm donor for the boy. Once my sister-in-law told me the answer – that the surgeon is the mother – I felt red-hot shame burning my cheeks. It became clear that, in the world that my childhood shaped me to live in, it was easier to imagine a boy with two dads than a boy whose mother is a surgeon.

The story beneath the story often tells the greater truth.

When I first moved to Rapid City, SD, I wondered about the address of one of the churches I was called to serve – Sioux San Drive. What could that street name possibly mean? When I asked, I heard that it had something to do with the old Sioux San Hospital that was located on that road. But how did the hospital get its name? Sure, the land that our church was built on in the 1950’s was treaty land, taken by the federal distributed by the federal government to local schools and churches, even a national guard base. Did the street name tell a story, somehow, of the removal of the Lakota peoples from the land, using the archaic Old English word “sans” to mean “without Sioux”? What was the story beneath the story?

Before we left Rapid City last Fall, I drove past the entrance to the old Sioux San Hospital, which had been torn down to make room for a beautiful, new IHS hospital, Oyate Health. As I looked at the wall of the old entrance, I noticed there were traces of the story beneath the story. After the letters “Sioux San,” you could make out the letters “A, T, O, R, I, U, and M” etched into the wall. Sioux Sanitorium.

The story beneath the story is that the Sioux San Hospital was not a treatment facility built and operated to improve the health of the displaced Indigenous peoples who once called Mni Luzahan home. Rather it was a sanatorium – or a lock-down facility for Indigenous peoples who were suspected to have TB – operated out of the old Rapid City Boarding School. As it turns out, many of the patients who contracted TB and died there were buried on the same hill as the Indigenous children who died generations before at the boarding school. You might say those grounds had been disappearing Indigenous bodies for generations.

It is no wonder, then, that the seven letters of the institution had been disappeared as well. All to conceal the story behind the story. What remains now are the imprints of those hard truths in an old stone wall and the fast-fading memory of a community. As I think about that stone wall with the words Sioux San_______, I wonder what imprints have been left on me by the stories behind the stories I was told as a boy. And, I wonder how, left untold, those disappeared truths might mold another generation for complicity in systems of oppression.

I wonder how we might break that cycle for our children and their children. By telling hard truths. By surfacing the stories behind the stories. Complicit no more.