“I’m just a farmer that owns a farm, runs a sawmill, and makes sawdust every day,” professional storyteller Roy Haney says modestly. But the Liberty man, who runs the Haney Family Sawmill, has been featured on stage and television with his talents. He was the special guest at the 16th Annual Dot’s Storytelling Day at the DeKalb County Complex on May 1. Sponsored by the Smithville Study Club, this year’s event operated under the theme “Tales, Tidbits and Tornadoes.”
“It was just normal that on a Friday night we’d go sit on the front porch at my ma and pa’s house-my grandmother and grandfather’s house,” Haney recalls. “It was the normal thing to do. We’d turn off all the lights because you don’t want to draw bugs. You didn’t have to worry about a fire because the doggone yard was bare from all the chickens beating the grass. That was the time that tied our (family) history together. I heard stories from the Civil War as if it were first person. You’ve got to understand. Ma talked to the people that these stories happened to. In my family, as it turned out, there’s always one or two storytellers. By circumstance I became the storyteller. I thought and didn’t really realize until I was an adult that not everybody was told stories one after the other of their family lore.”
“That’s one of the things you’ve got to realize. Storytelling is like a seed. If you plant it, and you take care of it right, telling it right, giving it warmth, giving it moisture, giving it nutrients telling that story, that seed grows and that story gets told again. That’s your family becoming larger. There’s nothing more important right now than us taking care of our family. That’s what it’s all about.”
Haney shared several stories from his life including one about his 96-year-old mentor Snake Williams who taught him to hunt, fish and trap.
“He named a dog Mandy after my great, great, great, great grandmother. All his life he has coon hunted. Snake is one of the premiere coon hunters in the United States. Mandy is one of the best coon hounds in the country, and Snake had been offered more than $5,000 for Mandy, and he won’t take it. Mandy was his partner. He’ll go out on the old home place. In Jackson County we’ve got hollers---pastures up on top of the hills, hollers down. I’ve been there a thousand times with him. He’ll let Mandy go down the holler. All of a sudden Mandy yelps. This is noon. Coons ain’t out at noon, but all of a sudden Mandy goes, “Yip! Yip!” That means Mandy is on a trail. Snake got over there to the edge of the holler and looked down. Mandy weighed about 35 pounds. Snake looked at a coon that weighed more than Mandy. Mandy doesn’t have a pack of dogs to back Mandy up. Mandy is by herself, and this old he coon has backed up against a log, he wrote in this letter, looks at this little dog and says, “I’ve got lunch.”
“That old he coon knew exactly what Mandy was going to do. Trouble is Mandy had never read the manual. Mandy never braced, hit that coon head over tea kettle, and they both went over the log, and Snake says he’ll get out of there now. And he did. He ran right over to a beech tree. He turned around against that beech tree and said, “I’ll never make this mistake again. Snake wrote that Mandy went after that coon again and hit that coon head on. Coon says that’s mistake number two today, and the coon started up that beech tree. The only problem is Mandy grabbed her by the hind leg and won’t let it go up the tree. Problem with that the coon’s bigger than Mandy, and Mandy gets pulled off the ground. When Mandy got pulled off the ground, you’re not hearing a growl, you’re hearing (cries for help). The coon got up the first limb and went inside the tree. There was a hole there. Mandy flipped right upside down in that hole. Snake has got down to the bottom of this tree, and he hears the most awful barking, scratching there ever was. He ran up to the house and got a little chainsaw. He got that tree cut down. When it fell, it busted open, and he found a little blood and a little guts. That coon and that dog had got so mad that they had ate each other up. And that’s called a tall tale.”
Ms Senior White County Sherry Hickey, Jerry Parker, Walteen Parker, Helga Thompson Guylene Atnip, Susan and Jerry Hinton and Bill Conger shared stories from their lives. The 16th Annual Dot’s Storytelling Day was started in 2005 by the late Dot Tittsworth, who loved the art of storytelling. This year’s event at the DeKalb County Complex raised $1,020 for the DeKalb Imagination Library.
