The Spark of Story

Lovely description of how the spark of Story was first lit in the author Richard Wright when he was a child:

“Once upon a time there was an old, old man named Bluebeard,” she began in a low whisper.

    
 She whispered to me the story of Bluebeard and His Seven Wives and I ceased to see the porch, the sunshine, her face, everything. As her words fell upon my new ears, I endowed them with a reality that welled up from somewhere within me. She told me how Bluebeard had duped and married his seven wives, how he had loved and slain them, how he had hanged them up by their hair in a dark closet. The tale made the world around me be, throb, live. 

As she spoke, reality changed, the look of things altered, and the world became peopled with magical presences. My sense of life deepened and the feel of things was different, somehow. Enchanted and enthralled, I stopped her constantly to ask for details. My imagination blazed. The sensations the story aroused in me were never to leave me.”

From Black Boy: A Record of Childhood and Youth, by Richard Wright. Harper, 1945.