History, Stories and Beasties

     Some people have an amazing ability to tell stories from history as though they were there.  I have heard Christian ministers explain what Jesus said, and what he meant, as though he were there, even though Jesus likely spoke Aramaic, and they didn’t, and they had to rely on two thousand years of variation through translation. The Rev. Samuel B. McKinstry, I think of the African- American Methodist Episcopal Church in Seattle,was wonderful. “Hannah?” he asked. “You know her, hard-hearted Hannah, the vamp of Savannah.”  You have heard them, quoting Jesus in Jacobean English.

       When I was a tourist in Haiti in the late 1970s, I heard an old-fashioned African-style griot, reciting the history of the island. He started with the sing-song accent of creole dialect, so that you would think he was singing, but it was only speech.  But he recited the history of Napoleon’s efforts to invade the island as though he had been there—he knew what Napoleon thought and did, and how Henri Christophe and Toussaint L’Ouverture successfully resisted his efforts, as though he were involved in their strategy sessions.

     Vake Sampson had that ability to convey history.  Yesterday as I write, October 24, was the anniversary of the birth of Antony van Leeuwenhoek, born in 1632, close to 300 years before Vake was born, but he talked to me about Leeuwenhoek as though he knew him personally.  Leeuwenhoek advanced the use of microscopes, although others had invented them. His discoveries of bacteria, and of the properties of various bodily excretions, won him membership in Britain’s “Royal Society” of scientists.  As Vake told it, Leeuwenhoek was kind of a boozer, and when he had first scraped plaque from his teeth, he saw moving microbes that he called “beasties.”  But after he spent the night drinking, he had killed off most of the beasties.

     Now, how Vake knew those things, I shall never know. Leeuwenhoek was Dutch, and “beasties” is not even a Dutch word. But Vake told that tale of what Leeuwenhoek did, and what he discovered, as though he were a first-person witness,  convincingly.