March 5, 2002 – Every year during Black History Month, Elmo D. Roebuck Sr. goes about the island telling and singing stories to anyone who will listen. Not just any stories: Virgin Islands stories.
He feels strongly about keeping alive the particular heritage of Virgin Islands stories – the same as, and yet different than, other Caribbean or African or Southern United States versions. Jumbi stories, yes; Bru Anansi stories, yes, however you spell it; and ones that remind Roebuck of Aesop's tales: How the Crab Got the Crack in His Back, How the Rabbit Got his Short Tail, Where Did the St. Thomas Lions Go.
All of the stories he tells, he learned from family. His grandmother taught his father, Ector Roebuck Sr., and his father taught him, through long years when the two of them together told and sang stories across the island. All of the tales have purely local differences from other versions, and Elmo Roebuck wants to be sure the literature and the tradition of storytelling are kept alive.
This year, he was invited by Charlotte Amalie High School librarian Merry Phillips to perform at the Media Center, where he told and sang stories to art classes, and explained the local tradition of storytelling.
"The kids were hypnotized," he marvels, just as entranced as preschoolers have been with the stories. The same attention was granted him earlier at Addelita Cancryn Junior High School, he said, where his storytelling was before a large group. "You could have heard a pin drop" – a major feat among junior high students.
The CAHS event was part of a program organized by Rotary East of St. Thomas to provide Rotarians to speak to students in school media centers. Rotary East has donated a variety of books through this program to CAHS and Ivanna Eudora Kean High School libraries. Both Phillips and Elmo Roebuck are members of Rotary East.
Elmo Roebuck has gone storytelling at a number of schools during this year's Black History Month, and at St. John's Annaberg restoration for National Park Service events. At one school, he recalled, "the principal said 'You told me that story when I was a child!'"
At Gomez Elementary School, he said, they made a two-hour video of his presentation. That tape is certainly destined to be a classic in the oral history archives of the Virgin Islands.
