UFO

UFO or the Devil: Story Transcript, Transcription Conventions, and Context for the Narrative*

M:     	(1) So that's why I say..UFO or the devil got after our black asses,

	(2) for showing out.

	(3) > I don't know what it was <

	(4) but we walkin up the hill,

	(5) this ^ way, comin up through here.

CM:     (6) Yeah.

M:      (7) And..I'm like on this side and Renee's right here.

	(8) And we walkin

	(9) and I look over the bank*...{.2}

	(10) and I see this...{.3}< BI:G BALL >.

	(11) It's glowin,...{.2}

	(12) and it's orange. ...{.3}

	(13) And I'm just like...{1.0}

	(14) °"nah..you know just-° nah it ain't nothin" you know.

	(15) And I'm still walkin you know*

	(16) Then I look back over my side again,

	(17) and it has °risen up*°...{2.0}

	(18) And I'm like "(/)SHI::T."...{.5} you know.

	(19) So but Re(/)nee- I still ain't say nothin to her

	(20) and I'm not sure she see it or not,...{.2}

	(21) so I'm still not sayin anything

	(22) we're just °walkin.° ...{1.0}

	(23) Then I look over the bank again

	(24) and I don't see it,

	(25) and then I'm like °"well, you know."° ...{.3}

	(26) But then...{.2}for some reason I feel some heat > or somethin other <

	(27) and I < look back >

	(28) me and Renee did at the same time

	(29) and it's right behind us. ... {1.0}

	(30) We like-...{.2} /we were scared and-/..

	(31) "AAAHHH" you know=

RC:  	(32)        (laughs)

M:      (33) > =at the same time. <

	(34) So we take off runnin as fast as we can,

	(35) and we still lookin back

	(36) and every time we look back it's with us. ...{.5}

	(37) It's just a-bouncin behind /us/

	(38) it's no:t.. > touchin the ground, <

	(39) it's bouncin in the air. ... {.5}

	(40) °Just like this...{.2}behind us°

	(41) as we run. ... {1.0}

	(42) We run all the way to her grandmother's

	(43) and we open the door

	(44) and we just fall out in the floor,

	(45) and we're cryin and we scre:amin

	(46) and < we just can't breathe.> ...{.3}

	(47) We that scared..

	(48) "What's wrong with yall" you know

	(49) and we tell them..you know..what had happened.

	(50) And then her grandmother tell us

	(51) it's some v mineral.. this or v that

	(52) they just form

	(53) bah bah v bah v bah

	(54) and...{.3} the way we v ran..it's the v heat

	(55) and..you know... {.3}Bull(\)shit.

	(56) You know..but so I never knew in my LIFE...{.2}about that

	(57) but we didn't do that anymore. ...{1.0}

CM:     (58) Right.

M:      (59) When dark goddamn came

	(60) our ass was at home.

*The Ohio State University Press has generously made available an audio file containing a recording of this narrative at http://www.ohiostatepress.org/index.htm?journals/narrative/herman-audio.htm

NSF Grant BCS-0236838 supported research on the story. I am also grateful to Tyler Kendall, Christine Mallinson, Walt Wolfram, and the North Carolina Language and Life Project for their gracious assistance with this research.

Transcription Conventions

... { } represents a measurable pause, more than 0.1 seconds; approximate durations given in curved brackets (...{.3} = a pause lasting .3 seconds)
.. represents a slight break in timing
- a hyphen after a word or part of a word indicates a self-interruption or "restart" by the current speaker
* indicates a rising intonational contour, not necessarily a question
. indicates a falling, or final, intonation contour, not necessarily the end of a sentence
, indicates "continuing" intonation ("more to come"), not necessarily the end of a clause
: indicates the prolongation of a sound just preceding it; more than one colon indicates a sound of even longer duration
_ underlining indicates stress or emphasis, either through increased loudness or heightened pitch. UPPER CASE letters indicate extremely loud talk, and UNDERLINING is added for even louder speech productions
° ° Two degree signs indicate that the talk between them is noticeably quieter than the surrounding discourse
^ v mark rises and and falls of pitch; the first symbol indicates sharper rises in pitch than those marked with underlining in stressed or emphasized words
(\) indicates downward change of pitch within the boundaries of a word; inserted before the syllable in which the change occurs
(/) indicates upward change of ptich within the boundaries of a word; inserted before the syllable in which the change occurs
> < indicate that the talk between these symbols is compressed or rushed relative to the surrounding discourse
< > indicate that the talk between these symbols is markedly slower than the surrounding discourse
[ indicates overlap between different speakers' utterances
= indicates an utterance continued across another speaker's overlapping utterance
/ / enclose transcriptions that are not certain
( ) enclose nonverbal forms of expression, e.g. laughter unaccompanied by words
[....] in short extracts indicates omitted lines

Transcription conventions adapted from:

Jefferson, Gail (1984). "Transcription Notation." Structures of Social Action: Studies in Conversation Analysis, ix-xvi. Eds. J. Maxwell Atkinson and John Heritage. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Ochs, Elinor, Carolyn Taylor, Dina Rudolph, and Ruth Smith (1992). "Storytelling as Theory-Building Activity." Discourse Processes 15: 37-72.
Schegloff, Emanuel. n.d. "Transcription Module." <http://www.sscnet.ucla.edu/soc/faculty/schegloff/TranscriptionProject/index.html>
Tannen, Deborah, ed. (1993). Framing in Discourse. Oxford: Oxford UP.

Context for the story

This story, which I’ve titled UFO or the Devil, was told by Monica, a pseudonym for a 41-year-old African American female, to two white female fieldworkers in their mid-twenties engaged in a research project on the dialects spoken in western North Carolina.

The narrative was recorded on July 2, 2002, in Texana, North Carolina, near where the events recounted are purported to have occurred. Below I provide both a sketch of Texana and a transcript of the narrative, but it should be noted at the outset that the interview during which Monica told this story was not a structured, sociolinguistic interview per se. Rather, the fieldworkers happened to encounter Monica while visiting her sister, whom they had already interviewed on several occasions. After establishing a rapport with Monica, they then retrieved their recording equipment from their car and continued what had become by that point a relatively informal conversational interaction.

The fieldworkers initially prompted Monica with questions about her family background and her experiences in places she had lived, but once the interaction got underway it was largely Monica who directed the flow of the discourse, apart from a few follow-up questions by her interlocutors. Thus the story that I have titled UFO or the Devil (based on a phrase used by Monica in the first line) was told as part of a larger sequence of narratives through which Monica cumulatively presents a portrait of herself. In this self-portrait, Monica emerges as someone who was profoundly shaped by experiences in her family and community settings; who has explored multiple educational and career options, while living in several urban centers in addition to the more rural environs of Texana; and who is now in a position to look back at these formative experiences and gauge their impact on her current sense of self. As the transcript reveals, the narrative that I have excerpted from this much more extended interaction (the total duration of the tape-recording is more than 145 minutes) concerns not only Monica’s and her friend’s encounter with what Monica characterizes as a supernatural apparition -- a big, glowing orange ball that rises up in the air and pursues them menacingly -- but also Monica’s and Renee’s subsequent encounter with Renee’s grandmother, who disputes whether the girls’ experience with the big ball really occurred.

Background on Texana, North Carolina

Located in Cherokee County, which is otherwise nearly totally white, Texana is a community consisting almost exclusively of African Americans; indeed, with about 150 residents, only 10 of whom are white, Texana is the largest black Applachian community in western North Carolina (Mallinson 2006: 69, 78). It is situated about one mile from Murphy, North Carolina, as well as other small white communities, and interactions among residents of Texana and these neighboring communities are sometimes tense (Mallinson 2006: 78). Indeed, as Christine Mallinson discusses (2006: 71-6; cf. Mallinson 2008), the ethnic profile of members of the Texana community is considerably more complicated than this initial characterization would suggest. As Mallinson notes, "Texana residents are descendants of African, Cherokee, Ulster Scots-Irish, and Irish-European ancestors -- which is the case for many black Appalachians, particularly those whose ancestors were slaves" (2006: 71). In consequence, feeling that the ethnic categories listed on questionnaires and surveys are unable to capture their complex heritage, most Texanans self-identify as black, since this designation refers to skin color rather than a pariticular ethnic or racial background (2006: 75).

The complex ethnic situation in Texana bears importantly on the way Monica uses her narrative to position herself and others -- to invoke a concept that I discuss more fully in chapter 3 of Herman (2009: chapter 3). From the start of her narrative, Monica indexes herself as a member of the enclave African American (or at least non-white) community based in Texana and positioned contrastively against the surrounding, predominantly white population of Cherokee County. (As the discussion in chapter 3 of Herman 2009 suggests, this formulation captures only part of the positioning logic at work in the narrative.) Prior to the time of the interview, Monica had written features for a local newspaper during black history month, and she had also spoken openly about how racism and sexism had prevented her from advancing in the medical field despite her completion of a training course for emergency medical technicians (Mallinson 2006: 89, 97). More generally, as Mallinson remarked in a personal communication, "From what I learned about [Monica], race is very salient to her . . . she told us a lot stories about gender/racial prejudice that she faced in her life, how racist Cherokee County is, how she felt growing up in Texana and what happened after she moved to Dayton, Atlanta, etc."

Mallinson, Christine (2006). "The Dynamic Construction of Race, Class, and Gender through Linguistic Practice among Women in a Black Appalachian Community." Unpublished doctoral dissertation. Department of Sociology, North Carolina State University.
Mallinson, Christine (2008). "The Linguistic Negotiation of Complex Racialized Identities by Black Appalachian Speakers." In K. King, N. Schilling-Estes, L. Fogle, J. Lou, and B. Soukup (eds.), Sustaining Linguistic Diversity: Endangered and Minority Languages and Language Varieties (pp. 67-80). Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press.

Analysis of the Story

Further analysis of this story can be found in the following sources:

Herman, David (2007). "Storytelling and the Sciences of Mind: Cognitive Narratology, Discursive Psychology, and Narratives in Face-to-Face Interaction." Narrative 15.3: 306-334.
-----. (2009). Basic Elements of Narrative. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell.
Herman, David, and Joshua Steskal (2007). "Emotion Discourse as Design Heuristic: Creating Emotional Intelligence for Virtual Narrative Agents." Intelligent Narrative Technologies: Papers from the 2007 AAAI Fall Symposium. Technical Report FS-07-05. Eds. Brian Magerko and Mark Riedl. Menlo Park, CA: Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence, 2007. 45-48.