After listening to a great many stories on Storycorps, there were two that particularly resonated with me: “Family Politics” and “Francine Anderson.” Both stories are, in some way, about the relationship between a daughter and her father. However, both stories also touch upon how of their relationships with their fathers were affected by societal influences.
The story told by Francine Anderson is a story of a black family trying to buy gas in rural Virginia in the 1950s. Francine recounts that “The first time I realized there was real danger there, I was five years old.” The story is about her father attempting to buy gas and being faced with the indignity of being told buy a man at the gas station that, “we don’t serve your kind around here.” In that moment she says that she, “felt ashamed for her dad…(because) he had been made smaller in her eyes.” She could sense the fear in him. I believe that what she means by this is that this was the first time that she saw her father as a person who was living within a system, much of which was beyond his control. In the story she says that a man did come out to help them and for this her father was grateful. She concluded the story by saying that the most interesting thing to her is how people’s reaction to the story is usually based up the race of the person hearing the story. While white listeners tend to applaud the white man who did the right thing, black listeners are usually focused on the irrationality of such behavior being legal. The story begins by going directly into the story and ends with the picked playing of an acoustic guitar, accompanied by a piano that plays a single note melody. The story is told entirely in a first person perspective, with narration or an interviewer.
The second story I analyzed was the story of the Stanley family. The story begins without any bumper music and is a conversation between Jenn Stanley and her father Peter Stanely. The story is essentially about the change in perspective of a young girl, who once looked up to her father as an infallible figure, and over time came to understand that he is, as she sees it, often wrong. It seems that most of their contention is centered around their differences in political perspectives. Ultimately, what we see is that while they may argue there is still love between them. Peter’s greatest concern is that his daughter sees him as a “good man,” to which she responds that he is, “not right all the time, but (he is) the best man, and (he is) a great dad.
