The African American Folklorist Of the Month - Todd Lawrence

Todd Lawrence

David Todd Lawrence
By: Lamont Jack Pearley

In this issue, I interview our current African American Folklorist of the month, Dr. David Todd Lawrence, Associate Professor in American culture and Difference English at the University of St. Thomas in St. Paul, Minnesota. Todd teaches African American literature and culture, folklore studies, and cultural studies. Recently honored at the Annual American Folklore Society's conference for the project "The George Floyd and Anti-Racist Street Art," which Lawrence and the team he's part of called the "Urban Art Mapping Project" took to the streets to begin preserving and documenting street arts and the emotions of the community after George Floyds death, culminating into an entire community effort. Check out the George Floyd and Anti-Racist Street Art database https://georgefloydstreetart.omeka.net/ 

LJP: I would like to introduce, welcome, and speak with the folklorist of this upcoming issue. Todd Lawrence! How are you doing, sir?

DTL: I'm doing great, man. I'm doing great. Thanks for having me on.

LJP: Thank you for accepting to be on. We met at the American folklore society's annual meeting, right? We spoke via email with a plethora of other great folklorists for quite some time. And so we galvanized the African American folklore section, part of the American folklore society. So I want everyone to know that they can also join the AFS and become members of the organization, Section, and Facebook group. You can find the section group on Facebook the American folklore society slash African American folklore section. Now with all this great banter out of the way, let's get into your journey, good brother. Haven't you, as a matter of fact, tell us what you do right now? What is your position? Give us a nice bio.

DTL: Okay, so I am Todd Lawrence. I teach African American folklore, African American culture and literature, folklore, and Cultural Studies at the University of St. Thomas in St. Paul, Minnesota. I've been at the University of St. Thomas for my entire career. I did my graduate work during my Ph.D. at the University of Missouri. So I went to St. Thomas right after I got done in Missouri. So I've been here for almost, this might be my 19th year, I think. I'm starting my 19th year at the University of St. Thomas. Yeah, yeah. They haven't got rid of me yet. I think if you do it, if you're doing a good job, they're always thinking about like, how can we get rid of this guy? So yes, I've been there for a long time. I teach many different classes, yet the majority of what I teach is African American literature. And within African American literature, I focus mainly on the mid-century black genre writing, so I do a lot of stuff like mystery novels, crime novels, and things like that. 

LJP: Black noir is what you're saying?

DTL: Absolutely. Absolutely. Yeah. So, you know, I'm the only African American in my department. So when that's the case, you teach a little bit of everything. So I teach all the way back to the beginning of African American literature. I don't really do African literature. But we try to keep that connection alive when we're talking about African American literature. So yeah, we go way back to Phyllis Wheatley and all those folks around back in the day. So

LPJ: you know, something interesting, forgive me, just in case, I have to jot something down from one of your statements, I had to get my notebook. Interesting. So let me pose it as a question. Do you believe in these situations, collegiate, university departments, and organizations like AFS kind of group everything from the diaspora together rather than giving each its own respected lane? 

DTL: I don't know if I'd say that or not. I mean, I think you do, so if I understand your question, right? You know, if you're teaching, working in academia, in fact, I was just talking about this with a friend the other day. The tendency is to really separate, let's say, an African American literature, it's just sort of independent, our literature in general, to separate it up into the kind of areas of African American and Native American, and you know, you know, medieval British or whatever. So we have these kinds of particular regions, specialized areas that people teach in. But what tends to happen when you're at smaller universities is that you end up really crossing over and doing a lot of things. And that's, it's not just a small university. So people throughout their careers by themselves interested in particular items. And I think English studies, which is a department, my department, I'm in the English Studies Department, tends to be really broad in what you can do in a department like that. So, and in a lot of places, folklorists find themselves in an English department. English folklore fits into what happens in an English department because you're really studying storytelling language, and kind of like composition, but the oral composition, right, like, it all fits together. So I think, you know, sometimes we would like to have, I'm the kind of person interested in many different things. In my teaching in my work, you know, to try to find, like, what's the thing that really holds it all together? It really is African American folklore and African American culture. But it's really narrative because I mean, I've even done projects where I'm not even focusing on African Americans, right. Like, I've done ethnographic projects where it was just like, working on the idea of home for people in a particular city or something like that, you know, so, I mean, I do a lot of different things. I suppose what I sometimes say when I'm thinking about myself as a folklorist is that I'm really an ethnographer, and thinking about myself as an ethnographer means that I'm not really limited. I'm conducting ethnography on this group of people or this specific folklore genre or something like that. It's really, I like to do ethnography. I like to engage with groups of people, with communities, and, you know, sort of collaborate with them and have them share with me things that are important about their experience. And that can vary, you know, that the groups can change, something that they're sharing can vary, it can vary, you know, they might be telling you stories, they might be telling you about jokes or telling you about, you know, whether it's like a kind of narrative.

I've worked on this project. Probably my most significant project, about disaster narratives and counter-narratives of blackness in a community whose town was destroyed. The book is really a narrative that the people in the town tell about their city's inception and all the stories that have kept their town alive over the years and continue to keep their community alive. Even after there is no more town. They had to move to a different place or dispersed across the country because they're not living in the same area anymore. But they engage in this tradition of homecoming, which many African American communities do, right? In the summertime, this time of year, get together, everybody comes back. And so they had a real vibrant homecoming tradition. And so that's one of the ways they keep their community alive, even though they don't live in the same town anymore. That place where they all grew up, where they really felt rooted to, nobody lives there anymore, you know, so, like that. I don't know if that explains precisely?

LJP: No, it does.  It's, as they say, a loaded statement because there was so much to unpack right, in a good way, you know,

DTL: you might have to stop me sometimes.

LJP: No, no, no, because that's what this is about. The great thing is, speaking of narrative, you have to be able to talk to tell the story, right? So, you mentioned quite a few things here. But I want to unpack. I don't know which one to go into first, from answering the question of why folklore? Especially as I see it, and I could be wrong, on a Ph.D. level, usually not always falling in line with English because it's based on literature and vernacular. But here's something I really want to go into before we even return to that. You made a clear distinction between ethnography ethnographer and folklorist and folklore. Could you explain that? But I would like you to go a little more in-depth because one of this platform's purposes is to inform the layperson who does this work and doesn't even realize they're doing the work. Yeah, Right?

DTL: Yeah. So it's really an I mean, I guess in a way, it's a significant distinction, but in a way, it's a small distinction. Ethnography is a methodology, right? Like it's the research methodology that folklorist used to study what they study. So it's a difference between saying, like there are folklorists who specialize in Proverbs, for example. And so if you ask them, like, what's your specialty? What are you an expert on? They would say I'm an expert on Proverbs. There might be folklorists who specialize in contemporary legend and even particular kinds of new legends. And so if you ask them, What is your specialty? They might say, "Well, my specialty is contemporary legends connected to healthcare and doctors," or something like that. Right? Other people might say, "Well, I'm an expert on jokes, joke cycles," or something like that, right? And I'm not really an expert on any particular genre of folklore or like any particular folklore genre, or any particular group of people. That's another thing that people might say that they're an expert on. Certainly, in the past, that was more common for people to say, like, what if someone says, "Who do you work with?" Or, "what do you work on?" They might say, "Well, I suppose I work with this particular group of people," you know, and usually, it was a group of people that's 'other,' right? Yeah, it's not like, you know, this particular neighborhood around the corner, it was like these people who live on an island across an ocean somewhere. And I'm an expert on them, that was pretty common for people to way back in the day,

LJP: Right, right.

DTL: It's less likely to say something like that now because that's a sort of remnant of our discipline's colonialist history. But what I'm saying is, I'm not really an expert. Yeah, we definitely come back to that. But I'm not really an expert in that. I just think of myself as an ethnographer. Meaning whatever I'm doing, I'm doing ethnography. So ethnography, meaning, collaborating with groups of people to understand their culture, their stories, that any parts of their culture, whether it's like their whole culture, whether some small aspect of their culture, whether it's something that happened to them, etc., etc. So I think much more about ethnography as a methodology, like, how we should do it, what it takes to do it properly, and how difficult it is to do it properly. What dynamics should we be thinking about that we actually engage in when we're doing ethnography? So I think about that much more than I think about any particular group of people. Or any particular genre or something like that. So that's why I say it that way. And the other thing is, you know, I would say, for me as a scholar, and I kind of said this a little bit before, um, I'm not one of those scholars that's going to tell you, "I do this! And that's what I do. That's what I'm an expert on." Like, if you thought, well, let's find out who's the scholar on Ralph Ellison. Well, I'm not like an expert on one particular author. On the English side, I'm not an expert on any specific genre. On the folklore side, I'm thinking more in terms of methodology when it comes to folklore. And I'm thinking more in terms of like, broad genres when it comes to literature. And generally, like, if I had to say, in literature, what I really am interested in, and write the most about, it's people who are outside, right? It's even within African American literature and culture, it's outsiders, it's people who are oppositional to the mainstream, which I suppose ...

LJP: Subculture?

DTL: Right, right subcultures for sure. I guess you could argue that all black people are, in some ways, oppositional, but I'm thinking of even within, within black culture. You know, I, when I started out when I first got a job, I was writing a lot about pimps and pimp culture, right. You know, so then I got into, my dissertation is on the Black Arts Movement. That was revolutionaries, you know. That culture of the 60s, right. The Black Power movement and all that. How that movement worked through literature, worked through drama, poetry, and all that kind of stuff. I've always looked at people on the outside—some sort of pushing against the accepted way of being.

LJP: Well, that's pretty revolutionary in itself, right, looking at those who are revolutionaries and seeing how the movement shaped or reshapes what's considered pop culture, right. I want to talk to you about your transition. Because many people I've had the honor to interview kind of stumbled into folklore based on something they were interested in. A good portion comes out of literature or English. But as strong as your literary background is, I have to commend you because that's real old school. We need more of that.

But that's not here nor there. How did you get into the folklore space? Was it African American History, was it the literature, the pimp revolution, or the Black Power revolution? You know, how did you know you were a folklorist or ethnographer?

DTL: I will be like most of those other people you spoke to. I sort of stumbled into it. I don't think I knew what folklore was or really had any kind of cognizance of folklore until I was in a Ph.D. school. So at the undergraduate level, I did a master's degree in African American literature. That's what I was interested in. And I got into a Ph.D. program at the University of Missouri. At the time, they had a folklore program. Elaine Lawless was there, Anand Prahlad and a couple of other folks were there. But I didn't go there to study folklore.

I went there to study Mark Twain actually, which might be strange. I kind of like, I didn't really have a focus necessarily, but I did. I had, so who I talked to was a famous Twain scholar named Tom Quirk. And talking to him, I found out about him and wanted to study Mark Twain and maybe American realism, something like that. So they were pretty strong in American literature at the time. That's really what I went there for. But really, once I got there, I just started to see, I met some folklorists, and they were doing really cool work. And then I took a class, I think, I can't remember which one was the first one I took, it might have been something like, it was probably feminist ethnography or something like that. I took that was with Elaine. I was in that class. The rhetoric of the blues, reggae, and the blues, I think with Prahlad, you know, and that was really suffused with folklore. And I started to realize, like, the stuff I'm really, really, really interested in, I can do it in folklore, and nobody's gonna give me any trouble about it. Because there have been times when I was, you know, reading and talking and writing about American literature when I was saying things, you know, in class, like, "well, this is racist," right? And people would be like, "Well, you can't talk about that," you know, at the time that was 25 years ago, you know,

LJP: Right, it was Taboo.

DTL: Right. They were saying, telling me what I couldn't say, or telling me, "that's not what we do," or something like that, you know, there were many instances of that. And in folklore, no one ever said that, you know, I would be like, "let me write about black preachers," or, "let me write about Rastafari mysticism around Marcus Garvey," or something like that, you know. Once I got in, I had this whole thing about writing about Marcus Garvey all the time, and I was really fascinated with how Rastafari talked about him. And, in the other elements of their belief, which were, you know, so much sort of traditional, and oral, nature and so I just like, you couldn't do that anywhere else. Maybe in religious studies, maybe. And there were some crossovers, you know, so there were, you know, religious studies as a department, there were other departments on campus that their students came into classes in folklore, you know, with Elaine and Prahlad, as well. And so we started to really have those kinds of, like, connections between students in our program and other departments. And I just really loved it. I just felt liberated. I felt like I could do the work that I wanted to do. I could read and study things that were really interesting to me. And most importantly, I really started to realize that I come from folklorists and that I've been around folklore. Everybody has, but I mean, for me, it became really, really stark to me that I've been around, you know, the stuff my whole life, and I didn't know what it was.

I didn't know what to call it. My dad is like a proverb master in a lot of ways, right. But my grandma's, you know, the storytelling, she's the keeper of the tradition I come from. A small town in Missouri, a little black town called Pennytown, no one lives there anymore. Black people came to this town in the late 1860s and started a town in Central Missouri. Right. And my grandmother was a historian. She grew up there and became the historian, preservationist of the history and the traditions of this place. 

LJP: wow!

DTL: I didn't really understand her. And I didn't really understand why it was important when I was younger. And, you know, as I got older, and as I got into folklore, and start to realize, like, Oh, this is what a homecoming tradition is, this is what these songs mean, this is what these stories are. And then you know, more and more, mostly as I did more work as a folklorist, I started to see how it connected to my own experience, my own family, and my own personal history. And it became even more potent for me. So in a way, it helped me to connect my own experience in life and all that to my work in a way that I never would have really been able to do if I was, you know, writing about, you know, Mark Twain or anybody else whose name I can't remember right now.

LJP: So, this definitely leads me to a question. Do You think that something we've lost it in the last maybe 15 years? Because everything is so expensive, especially certain places, parents are working and kids not necessarily staying with their grandparents, as much as they used to, at least that's what's portrayed in the last year or two. I've seen a lot of traditional families. But outside of that, do you think that could be why? That's the issue regarding keeping the family stories and traditions alive? Do you believe that folklore and ethnography were introduced to individuals at a younger age when their grandparents share things? When parents and uncles and aunts share these things? They would be more receptive to it at a younger generation? I know that two double-edged questions. Take whichever one you want first?

DTL: No, I think it's a good question. I think. So I think there's a couple of aspects of that that are important to highlight. The first thing is that we all have folklore, whether we are aware of it or not. And you know, what tends to happen is people don't know that they have folklore. I mean, like you're saying, like, nobody tells you, "oh, that story that you're describing, that's folklore," or, "Oh, you know, that urban legend that you're passing around. That's folklore." or "Oh, that conspiracy theory that you're telling all your friends that's folklore," nobody's there to sort of point that out. Because folklore exists in people's lives and everyday experiences as they're sort of in their communities and doing their thing. But then folklore exists as a kind of academic, a university category where people study it. Right. So, I mean, there are ways to break down that barrier between like, "Hello, I'm the professor, and I want to study your folklore."

Many of our public sector friends in folklore have done really great work in breaking down that barrier, right. Like, they're running organizations, nonprofits, you know. Quasi-government entities. Whatever. Whether they're on the ground with people engaging with them in their everyday lives, with those traditions and things that they're doing. Whether it's around art, whether it's music, whether it's on storytelling, whether it's around adornment, whatever it is, you know. People might not think about the clothes you're making to wear or your choices about how you're going to adorn yourself when you go out into public. Like, that's folklore. That's something in the regular part of our lives that we don't think about it. You know, like, Oh, this is special. Often it's our family members, older family members like you said, so I think that's kind of a part of the question. You're asking, we have less time with our older family members, the people who carry the tradition. That might be true and, maybe we do not understand how those things are important. But the truth is there's something else for young kids, and like myself, I'll just use myself as an example. If you're a young kid like me and come from this sort of place, you didn't quite understand, what's the importance of these stories? Why is everybody going out on the first Sunday of August to celebrate homecoming, sing these particular songs, we, you know, the preacher gives this particular sermon, etc., that you don't understand. You might think, well, that kid is disconnected from the traditions of his family and family history. That could be true. But that kid still has his own folklore, too, right? Like, that kid has more of the friend groups of his subcultural groups of the music that he loves of the art that moves him. How he dresses, that's all folklore, too, right. You know, I just always like to stress to my students that you don't get too focused on thinking of folklore as the old stuff. And new stuff, the stuff that's happening in your life right now, is not folklore. That's not true. And I don't think it's actually true. The more ways there are to communicate, the more ways there are to spread folklore. You know, I mean, there was a time, not too long ago, when folklorists would say, "when I was in school, they taught us, folklore can never be written down, it was transmitted orally, it's got to be someone telling a story to someone else. It's got to be someone doing a performance in front of someone else. It's got to be in person. It's got to be orally transmitted." And then some folks were like, wait a minute, what about the internet? You know these early, back in the day people were like, no, it can't be the internet. You've got folks like Trevor Blank, and people like that around the country writing about folklore and the internet. And you've made the argument and have won that argument, that there's folklore online, and we all see it. Memes are folklore. You know, like, there's all kinds of these form letters, everything out there, all kinds of stuff that's written, that's folklore, as well. So we've had to change the way we think about these things, and that a lot of that came from this idea that folklore was old, and it was what people who were preliterate with oral cultures. They had folklore. People who were educated and write didn't have folklore. That's not true. We've seen that that's not true, right. We now know that we live in a world where the ways that we can communicate with each other are endless, and there's folklore. In each one of those things. There's folklore on apps. You know that there's folklore everywhere, right? So to me, that just means that everything that we have available to us amplifies the kinds of folklore that can be and how it functions in our everyday lives. So our lives are changing, our lives' social realities are changing, we're not necessarily staying at home with our grandparents or running around on the farm, or, you know, like all the stuff that people used to do. I suppose our lives are definitely changing. But there's still folklore there. The one way that it might really impact us is if we don't have people saying, hey, that's important. You think this thing isn't important, actually is important, you know, the story that 'he/she' is telling or this particular piece of history or joke or whatever. That was me, you know, like my dad used to say these rhymes, you know, all these rhymes all the time. And I'd be like, why are you saying these rhymes, dad? Years later, I was like, Oh, my God, these are amazing things. These are the sort of formulaic phrases. He would always say things like, "when you do, you know." Things people say, like, "now you're cooking with gas," and things like that. But he had like, hundreds of these sayings for every particular occasion. Another one, "the blind man is right," and I'd be like, What is he talking about? And then I started to realize, oh, man, those things! Where did that come from? Where did he get it from? I started to ask him about that. He would say, "I don't know, my dad used to say them," or something like that. Right? And then there it is, right. And now you're just like, Oh, that's important. That could be revealing something that could be interesting to look at. And if you're his son like me, you end up finding yourself saying those things too, right? Like, oh my god, did I just say it too? Right? You know, because it just passed on. Right.