“Many bad creatures inhabit the earth. They bother and kill people, and the tribes cannot increase as I wish. These En-alt-na Skil-ten—People-Devouring Monsters—cannot keep on like that. They must be stopped. It is for you to conquer them. For doing that, for all the good things you do, you will be honored and praised by the people that are here now and that come afterward. But, for the foolish and mean things you do, you will be laughed at and despised. That you cannot help. It is your way.
“To make your work easier, I give you squas-tenkʹ. It is your own special magic power. No one else ever shall have it. When you are in danger, whenever you need help, call to your power. It will do much for you, and with it you can change yourself into any form, into anything you wish.
“To your twin brother, Why-ayʹ-looh, and to others I have given shooʹ-mesh. It is strong power. With that power Fox can restore your life should you be killed. Your bones may be scattered but, if there is one hair of your body left, Fox can make you live again. Others of the people can do the same with their shooʹ-mesh. Now, go, Sin-ka-lipʹ! Do well the work laid for your trail!”
Well, Coyote was a chief after all, and he felt good again. After that day his eyes were different. They grew slant from being propped open that night while he sat by his fire. The New People, the Indians, got their slightly slant eyes from Coyote.
After Coyote had gone, the Spirit Chief thought it would be nice for the Animal People and the coming New People to have the benefit of the spiritual sweat-house. But all of the Animal People had names, and there was no one to take the name of Sweat-house—Quilʹ-sten, the Warmer. So the wife of the Spirit Chief took the name. She wanted the people to have the sweat-house, for she pitied them. She wanted them to have a place to go to purify themselves, a place where they could pray for strength and good luck and strong medicine-power, and where they could fight sickness and get relief from their troubles.
The ribs, the frame poles, of the sweat-house represent the wife of Hah-ahʹ Eel-meʹ-whem. As she is a spirit, she cannot be seen, but she always is near. Songs to her are sung by the present generation. She hears them. She hears what her people say, and in her heart there is love and pity.
COYOTE JUGGLES HIS EYES
As he was walking through the timber one morning, Coyote heard someone say: “I throw you up and you come down in!”
Coyote thought that was strange talk. It made him curious. He wanted to learn who was saying that, and why. He followed the sound of the voice, and he came upon little Zst-skakaʹ-na—Chickadee—who was throwing his eyes into the air and catching them in his eye-sockets. When he saw Coyote peering at him from behind a tree, Chickadee ran. He was afraid of Coyote.
“That is my way, not yours,” Coyote yelled after him.
Now, it wasn’t Coyote’s way at all, but Coyote thought he could juggle his eyes just as easily as Chickadee juggled his, so he tried. He took out his eyes and tossed them up and repeated the words used by the little boy: “I throw you up and you come down in!” His eyes plopped back where they belonged. That was fun. He juggled the eyes again and again.
Two ravens happened to fly that way. They saw what Coyote was doing, and one of them said: “Sin-ka-lipʹ is mocking someone. Let us steal his eyes and take them to the Sun-dance. Perhaps then we can find out his medicine-power.”
“Yes, we will do that,” agreed the other raven. “We may learn something.”
As Coyote tossed his eyes the next time, the ravens swooped, swift as arrows from a strong bow. One of them snatched one eye and the other raven caught the other eye.
“Quoh! Quoh! Quoh!” they laughed and flew away to the Sun-dance camp.
Oh, but Coyote was mad! He was crazy with rage. When he could hear the ravens laughing no longer, he started in the direction they had gone. He hoped somehow to catch them and get back his eyes. He bumped into trees and bushes, fell into holes and gullies, and banged against boulders. He soon was bruised all over, but he kept on going, stumbling along. He became thirsty, and he kept asking the trees and bushes what kind they were, so that he could learn when he was getting close to water. The trees and bushes answered politely, giving their names. After a while he found he was among the mountain bushes, and he knew he was near water. He came soon to a little stream and satisfied his thirst. Then he went on and presently he was in the pine timber. He heard someone laughing. It was Kokʹ-qhi Skiʹ-kaka—Bluebird. She was with her sister, Kwasʹ-kay—Bluejay.
“Look, sister,” said Bluebird. “There is Sin-ka-lipʹ pretending to be blind. Isn’t he funny?”
“Do not mind Sin-ka-lipʹ,” advised Bluejay. “Do not pay any attention to him. He is full of mean tricks. He is bad.”
Coyote purposely bumped into a tree and rolled over and over toward the voices. That made little Bluebird stop her laughing. She felt just a little bit afraid.
“Come, little girl,” Coyote called. “Come and see the pretty star that I see!”
Bluebird naturally was very curious, and she wanted to see that pretty star, but she hung back, and her sister warned her again not to pay attention to Coyote. But Coyote used coaxing words; told her how bright the star looked.
“Where is the star?” asked Bluebird, hopping a few steps toward Coyote.
“I cannot show you while you are so far away,” he replied. “See, where I am pointing my finger!”
Bluebird hopped close, and Coyote made one quick bound and caught her. He yanked out her eyes and threw them into the air, saying:
“I throw you up and you come down in!” and the eyes fell into his eye-sockets.
Coyote could see again, and his heart was glad. “When did you ever see a star in the sunlight?” he asked Bluebird, and then ran off through the timber.
Bluebird cried, and Bluejay scolded her for being so foolish as to trust Coyote. Bluejay took two of the berries she had just picked and put them into her sister’s eye-sockets, and Bluebird could see as well as before. But, as the berries were small, her new eyes were small, too. That is why Bluebird has such berrylike eyes.
While his new eyes were better than none at all, Coyote was not satisfied. They were too little. They did not fit very well into his slant sockets. So he kept on hunting for the ravens and the Sun-dance camp. One day he came to a small tepee. He heard someone inside pounding rocks together. He went in and saw an old woman pounding meat and berries in a stone mortar. The old woman was Su-see-wass—Pheasant. Coyote asked her if she lived alone.
“No,” she said, “I have two granddaughters. They are away at the Sun-dance. The people there are dancing with Coyote’s eyes.”
“Aren’t you afraid to be here alone?” Coyote asked. “Isn’t there anything that you fear?”
“I am afraid of nothing but the stetʹ-chee-hunt (stinging-bush),” she said.
Laughing to himself, Coyote went out to find a stinging-bush. In a swamp not far away he found several bushes of that kind. He broke off one of those nettle bushes and carried it back to the tepee. Seeing it, Pheasant cried:
“Do not touch me with the stetʹ-chee-hunt! Do not touch me! It will kill me!”
But Coyote had no mercy in his heart, no pity. He whipped poor Pheasant with the stinging-bush until she died. Then, with his flint knife, he skinned her, and dressed himself in her skin. He looked almost exactly like the old woman. He hid her body and began to pound meat in the stone mortar. He was doing that when the granddaughters came home. They were laughing. They told how they had danced over Coyote’s eyes. They did not recognize Coyote in their grandmother’s skin, but Coyote knew them. One was little Bluebird and the other was Bluejay. Coyote smiled. “Take me with you to the Sun-dance, granddaughters,” he said in his best old-woman’s voice.
The sisters looked at each other in surprise, and Bluejay answered: “Why, you did not want to go with us when the morning was young.”
�
�Grandmother, how strange you talk!” said Bluebird.
“That is because I burned my mouth with hot soup,” said Coyote.
“And, Grandmother, how odd your eyes look!” Bluejay exclaimed. “One eye is longer than the other!”
“My grandchild, I hurt that eye with my cane,” explained Coyote.
The sisters did not find anything else wrong with their grandmother, and the next morning the three of them started for the Sun-dance camp. The sisters had to carry their supposed grandmother. They took turns. They had gone part way when Coyote made himself an awkward burden and almost caused Bluejay to fall. That made Bluejay angry, and she threw Coyote to the ground. Bluebird then picked him up and carried him. As they reached the edge of the Sun-dance camp, Coyote again made himself an awkward burden, and Bluebird let him fall. Many of the people in the camp saw that happen. They thought the sister were cruel, and the women scolded Bluebird and Bluejay for treating such an old person so badly.
Some of the people came over and lifted Coyote on his feet and helped him into the Sun-dance lodge. There the people were dancing over Coyote’s eyes, and the medicine-men were passing the eyes to one another and holding the eyes up high for everyone to see. After a little Coyote asked to hold the eyes, and they were handed to him.
He ran out of the lodge, threw his eyes into the air, and said: “I throw you up and you come down in!”
His eyes returned to their places, and Coyote ran to the top of a hill.
There he looked back and shouted: “Where are the maidens who had Coyote for a grandmother?”
Bluejay and Bluerbird were full of shame. They went home carrying Pheasant’s skin, which Coyote had thrown aside. They searched and found their grandmother’s body and put it back in the skin, and Pheasant’s life was restored. She told them how Coyote had killed her with the stinging bush.
Zora Neale Hurston (1891–1960) was born in Notasulga, Alabama. Many hear her name and think of her novel, Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937), but she was also a sociologist and a folklorist. She even tried her hand as a playwright when she collaborated with Langston Hughes on a play that was never finished titled The Mule-Bone: A Comedy of Negro Life in Three Acts. Hurston spent most of her written words portraying the struggles of African Americans living in a racist society. At the time of her death, Zora Neale Hurston was not a public figure, but toward the later end of the twentieth century, her popularity soared, which caused many of her collections to be published posthumously. Uncle Monday is a shape-shifter and conjurer of central Florida, and as Hurston traveled collecting regional tales, she came upon his story.
Uncle Monday
Zora Neale Hurston
PEOPLE TALK A WHOLE LOT about Uncle Monday, but they take good pains not to let him hear none of it. Uncle Monday is an out-and-out conjure doctor. That in itself is enough to make the people handle him carefully, but there is something about him that goes past hoodoo. Nobody knows anything about him, and that’s a serious matter in a village of less than three hundred souls, especially when a person has lived there for forty years and more.
Nobody knows where he came from nor who his folks might be. Nobody knows for certain just when he did come to town. He was just there one morning when the town awoke. Joe Lindsay was the first to see him. He had some turtle lines set down on Lake Belle. It is a hard lake to fish because it is entirely surrounded by a sooky marsh that is full of leeches and moccasins. There is plenty of deep water once you pole a boat out beyond the line of cypress pines, but there are so many alligators out there that most people don’t think the trout are worth the risk. But Joe had baited some turtle lines and thrown them as far as he could without wading into the marsh. So next morning he went as early as he could see light to look after his lines. There was a turtle head on every line, and he pulled them up cursing the ’gators for robbing his hooks. He says he started on back home, but when he was a few yards from where his lines had been set something made him look back, and he nearly fell dead. For there was an old man walking out of the lake between two cypress knees. The water there was too deep for any wading, and besides, he says the man was not wading, he was walking vigorously as if he were on dry land.
Lindsay says he was too scared to stand there and let the man catch up with him, and he was too scared to move his feet; so he just stood there and saw the man cross the marshy strip and come down the path behind him. He says he felt the hair rise on his head as the man got closer to him, and somehow he thought about an alligator slipping up on him. But he says that alligators were in the front of his mind that morning because first, he had heard bull ’gators fighting and bellowing all night long down in this lake, and then his turtle lines had been robbed. Besides, everybody knows that the father of all ’gators lives in Belle Lake.
The old man was coming straight on, taking short quick steps as if his legs were not long enough for his body, and working his arms in unison. Lindsay says it was all he could do to stand his ground and not let the man see how scared he was, but he managed to stand still anyway. The man came up to him and passed him without looking at him seemingly. After he had passed, Lindsay noticed that his clothes were perfectly dry, so he decided that his own eyes had fooled him. The old man must have come up to the cypress knees in a boat and then crossed the marsh by stepping from root to root. But when he went to look, he found no convenient roots for anybody to step on. Moreover, there was no boat on the lake either.
The old man looked queer to everybody, but still no one would believe Lindsay’s story. They said that he had seen no more than several others—that is, that the old man had been seen coming from the direction of the lake. That was the first that the village saw of him, way back in the late eighties, and so far, nobody knows any more about his past than that. And that worries the town.
Another thing that struck everybody unpleasantly was the fact that he never asked a name nor a direction. Just seemed to know who everybody was and called each and every one by their right name. Knew where everybody lived too. Didn’t earn a living by any of the village methods. He didn’t garden, hunt, fish, nor work for the white folks. Stayed so close in the little shack that he had built for himself that sometimes three weeks would pass before the town saw him from one appearance to another.
Joe Clarke was the one who found out his name was Monday. No other name. So the town soon was calling him Uncle Monday. Nobody can say exactly how it came to be known that he was a hoodoo man. But it turned out that that was what he was. People said he was a good one too. As much as they feared him he had plenty of trade. Didn’t take him long to take all the important cases away from Ant Judy, who had had a monopoly for years.
He looked very old when he came to the town. Very old, but firm and strong. Never complained of illness.
But once Emma Lou Pittman went over to his shack early in the morning to see him on business and ran back with a fearsome tale. She said that she noticed a heavy trail up to his door an across the steps as if a heavy, bloody body had been dragged inside. The door was cracked a little and she could hear a great growling and snapping of mighty jaws. It wasn’t exactly a growling either, it was more a subdued howl in a bass tone. She shoved the door a little and peeped inside to see if some varmint was in there attacking Uncle Monday. She figured he might have gone to sleep with the door ajar and a catamount, or a panther, or a bob-cat might have gotten in. He lived near enough to Blue Sink Lake for a ’gator to have come in the house but she didn’t remember ever hearing of them tracking anything but dogs.
But no; no varmint was inside there. The noise she heard was being made by Uncle Monday. He was lying on a pallet of pine-straw in such agony that his eyes were glazed over. His right arm was horribly mangled. In fact, it was all but torn away from right below the elbow. The side of his face was terribly torn too. She called him but he didn’t seem to hear her. So she hurried back for some men to come and do something for him. T
he men came as fast as their legs would bring them, but the house was locked from the outside and there was no answer to their knocking. Mrs. Pittman would have been made out an awful liar if it were not for the trail of blood. So they concluded that Uncle Monday had gotten hurt somehow and had dragged himself home; or had been dragged by a friend. But who could the friend have been?
Nobody saw Uncle Monday for a month after that. Every day or so, someone would drop by to see if hide or hair could be found of him. A full month passed before there was any news. The town had about decided that he had gone away as mysteriously as he had come.
But one evening around dusk-dark Sam Merchant and Jim Gooden were on their way home from a squirrel hunt around Lake Belle. They swore that, as they rounded the lake and approached the footpath that leads toward the village, they saw what they thought was the great ’gator that lives in the lake crawl out of the marsh. Merchant wanted to take a shot at him for his hide and teeth, but Gooden reminded him that they were loaded with bird shot, which would not even penetrate a ’gator’s hide, let alone kill it. They say the thing they took for the ’gator then struggled awhile, pulling off something that looked like a long black glove. Then he scraped a hole in the soft ground with his paws and carefully buried the glove which had come from his right paw. Then without looking either right or left; he stood upright and walked on toward the village. Everybody saw Uncle Monday come thru the town, but still Merchant’s tale was hard to swallow. But, by degrees, people came to believe that Uncle Monday could shed any injured member of his body and grow a new one in its place. At any rate, when he reappeared his right hand and arm bore no scars.
The village is even skeptical about his dying. Once Joe Clarke said to Uncle Monday, “I’god, Uncle Monday, aint you skeered to stay way off by yo’self, old as you is?”
The Big Book of Classic Fantasy Page 144