Thus the narrative surrounding them in the Samson legend and in “What a Little Thing Did” makes the bees of the two stories very alike, despite the difference of their location in a lion’s carcass or a grass-stalk. Yet the sameness of the two stories does not explain the fabulous conflation of the bees with the lion or the grass any more than did either story separately.
Anyone with a lively imagination could propose sundry reasons for the bees’ being in a dead body or a stem of grass—that suggestiveness is one of fable’s prime virtues—but a right understanding of it would surely depend upon knowing the Awalamba’s and ancient Israelites’ reasons for the conflation. After nearly three thousand years it is too late to ask the ancient Israelites their opinion of Samson’s bees, nor is direct inquiry any longer possible among the Awalamba whose story this was in the early twentieth century. But there is one vital asset in the Lamba case that is lacking in the Biblical one, and that is an ample supply of other contemporary Lamba tales for comparison with “What a Little Thing Did.” When Clement Doke recorded the story, it was only one of many which he heard narrated in the same style and under the same customary circumstances. In his own words:9
In order to hear these folk-tales effectively, one must hear them in their native setting. The native is happiest and most communicative in the evening after the substantial meal of the day when the thought of hot sun, a long, heavy march, and a hungry stomach has been banished under the beneficent influence of a crackling log fire and a great heap of stiff ‘inshima’ porridge in the hastily constructed zareba. Overhead is an inky-black sky dotted with brilliant stars, a slight breeze is moving the tops of the trees, and all is silent save the regular gurgling noise of the calabash pipes, as the men sit or lie around the numerous camp fires within the stockade. Then the narrator will refill his pipe, and start his story: Mwe wame! (“Mates!”), and at once they are all attention. After each sentence he pauses automatically for the last few words to be repeated or filled in by his audience, and as the story mounts to its climax, so does the excitement of the speaker rise with gesture and pitch of voice. A good story-teller will tell over again a story, well-known to all, in such a way that they will leave their pipes and crowd nearer to him around his fire, so as not to miss a single detail.
Plain narrative, like the Hasidic story about the deserted wife, rebbe, and butcher, uses both fact and plausible fiction to recount something real, or presumably real. A plain story may of course be told many times by many persons and retold by the same person; it is as permanent as memory of the real things it somewhat fictitiously recounts. But the Lamba story of “What a Little Thing Did” is fable, not plain narrative. To extend Erwin Panofsky’s parable, it is not one man’s barking to tell another his conception of what actually happened at a real past time. It begins as a plain narrative might, but is soon interspersed with components that are fantasy, not experience. In contrast to plain narrative, the Lamba story’s permanence—the number of times it may happen to be retold in the passage of years, decades, or centuries—does not depend on how long memory of real things endures. Instead, fabulous narrative enjoys its own special sanction in the custom of story-telling, which assures it an opportunity of being retold indefinitely on a regular, recurrent social occasion belonging specially to it when an impressive array of emotional, ritual, poetic, and musical habits convene to sustain it.
Most plain stories survive no more than a single telling, because most actual events that men narrate to one another are not long remembered. But if plain narratives tend to be short-lived, fables tend to be immemorial, breeding not on history but on remembrance of other fabulous tales that have preceded them at previous story-tellings in a regression stretching back beyond remembered time. Only if Panofsky’s dog had been told a fabulous story by his visitor, and could then retell it to his master at a reunion many years later, only then would the dog truly approach the condition of human narrative culture. It is the complex ability to create and maintain a tradition of fable and not mere recollection of things past that makes man the story-telling animal.
So Clement Doke described story-telling in Ilamba10 as a Lamba custom, and said that it was customary to repeat old stories: “A good story-teller will tell over again a story, well-known to all...” Because fabulous stories were customarily repeated, the Lamba man or woman listening to “What a Little Thing Did” when Doke recorded it must have heard it and other tales like it before. That experience was an inevitable part of being an Umulamba. The tale contains utterly fictitious and impossible details like the bees in a stalk of grass, but because those implausible things had precedents in many stories he had previously heard, an Umulamba could accept them as valuable parts of his culture no matter how unreal they were. The sanction of fable is a tradition of telling stories, not reality or anyone’s actual experience. Those other tales he had heard collectively informed an Umulamba as to how he should understand “What a Little Thing Did.”
Without that same knowledge of other Lamba tales, we who are not Awalamba can hardly expect to understand aright either this or any other single Lamba story. Not the bees, nor the father-in-law and his way with grass-stalks, nor the son-in-law’s strange powers of self-concealment, nor any other marvelous feature of “What a Little Thing Did” will submit to proper understanding until it is seen in its proper place among the various other customary fantasies in Lamba oral fable.