LYNN — The reason dogs and cats hate each other isn’t really about hate. It’s about scarcity of resources, and it all goes back to when the first cat stole a piece of ham that was meant to be shared with the first dog. The cat hid high in a tree, enjoying its ham, while the hungry dog barked from below.
Master storyteller Sumner McClain shared that story Tuesday at the Lynn Museum & Historical Society, 590 Washington St.
For more than an hour, McClain and his wife, Linda Eubanks-McClain performed “Stories Celebrating Life” in celebration of Black History Month, using a traditional storytelling method that incorporates percussion, singing, dancing and interaction with the audience.
Storytelling, McClain said, is not just to entertain, but is a way to teach moral lessons, erase ignorance, and continue oral tradition.
“We have strong feelings that everybody has a story, and stories connect us to each other and connect us to a higher power,” McClain said.
McClain and Eubanks-McClain have been performing at the Lynn Museum during Black History Month for the last three years.
Doneeca Thurston, director of the Lynn Museum and Lynn Arts, said she would like to have “Stories Celebrating Life” continue to return to the museum during Black History Month.
“A lot of their stories come from their ancestors,” Thurston said. “It’s an interesting story we share with our loved ones, and we learn while listening to them too.”
The Cambridge-based couple has been telling stories and performing in the U.S. and abroad for more than 40 years, McClain said. “Stories Celebrating Life” is a combination of folk tales, stories of historical figures and stories that McClain and Eubanks-McClain have heard or created themselves.
In one story, Eubanks-McClain told of an African-American slave escaping captivity. The slave, a girl just about to turn 14, and her parents decide to flee north during the next thunderstorm so they will be difficult to track, then follow the “drinking gourd” and North Star to freedom.
“Her name was Imani. Imani means faith and she had plenty of it,” Eubanks-McClain said.
The story about Imani was interactive, with several members of the audience using instruments to represent different weather throughout the story. The sound of a thumb piano, or mbira, mingled with the sound of an xylophone while Imani was in the sunshine or seeing a rainbow.
During the parts of the story when Imani was caught in a storm, the sounds of drums, a rainstick and noisemaker clashed to give a tempestuous background to Eubanks-McClain’s tale. Within minutes, Eubanks-McClain used her words, music and dance to tell the story of an arduous journey spanning many weeks and many miles.
“She had crossed a river, she had traveled many lands,” said Eubanks-McClain, shaking her own tamborine to represent lightning.
“And then the sun was shining and there was a rainbow,” Eubanks-McClain said. “And now she knew she was free, and the sun did shine, and so did she.”
In concluding the story, Eubanks-McClain led the audience in singing, “Follow the drinking gourd.”
McClain said he and his wife have been entertaining people of all ages with their interactive stories for more than four decades.
McClain has a background as a drama instructor and director, and social worker, and has performed in schools, libraries and museums throughout New England with the Peoples Theatre Inc., New African Company and The Elma Lewis School of Fine Arts. Eubanks-McClain has worked as a performance artist in Boston, Louisiana, Virginia and Maryland, and has been a visiting master storyteller at events in Jamaica, Ghana, Tanzania and Honduras.
Central to the art of storytelling is music, especially in traditional African and African-American storytelling, McClain said.
McClain said it’s important people feel comfortable singing or dancing, which are ancient art forms but less common in the modern day.
“In our modern culture, if you ask someone, ‘Can you sing,’ they’ll say, ‘I can’t sing.’ Our culture has commercialized everything,” McClain said. “But in our (traditional) culture, people see it the same way as breathing. You just sing. Birds don’t say, ‘I only sing in the shower,’ they just tweet.”
McClain also said “Stories Celebrating Life” incorporates animals in many of its stories. Part of the reason is African-American slaves had to speak in code to teach their children lessons, so they used animal metaphors that slave owners and overseers would not understand. For example, one story Eubanks-McClain tells explains that frogs ribbit because they were once haughty and gluttonous, and insisted on eating friendly bees, which stung the frogs and changed their voices.
“The African stories, if you really start studying them, you’ll find there are variations of the stories in all cultures,” McClain said.
