Mother made three
Three killed Florrie
Florrie killed ten.
The dead carry the living.
The word of God roasted meat for me to eat.
Finally, he reached the king’s home. And there were all those suitors: doctors, lawyers, ministers, all of them asking their riddles. Now this Old Witch Boy’s real name was Cricket. He stepped up to meet all of them, all of the big men who had come to court the king’s beautiful daughter. And he looked terrible, with ragged clothes and his foot all festered up with chiggers. Each asked a riddle, and as they asked them, the king’s daughter gave the answer without any trouble. She was sitting behind a screen so no one could see her face to face.
All right, so Cricket’s time came now. He said:
Mother made three
Three killed Florrie
Florrie killed ten.
The dead carried the living.
The word of God roasted meat for me to eat.
Right! The king’s daughter sat down, and now she had to really think! “What is this now? What can the meaning be?” So she called all of her advisers to her, then—the doctor, the lawyer, the jurymen, every wise soul—but she can’t figure out the answer. Finally, she said, “Daddy, tell that man to come back with his answer, because I can’t unriddle it for him at all.” Well, the king saw that Old Witch Boy had won his daughter so he had his feet washed and cleaned, and new clothes brought. And they had him come into her room.
But all the advisers were upset because they didn’t want the king’s beautiful daughter to be married to this Old Witch Boy, so they decided to give him another test. They caught a cricket and put it in a glass and covered it over, and then told the Old Witch Boy that if he could tell them what was in the glass, then he wouldn’t kill him; otherwise he was a dead man. The Old Witch Boy said, “Poor me, poor Cricket.” And, of course, that was what they had in that glass, so he was saved.
Now the story ends and the wire bends.
—St. Vincent
INTRODUCTION
Inevitably, the experiences of slavery and the social marginalization that arose in the plantation world came to be recorded in the stories blacks told about the interactions between themselves and whites. Although these stories resemble those in the earlier sections in the way in which they establish dramatic interest through the opposition of characters in terms of differences in power and wit, they deserve special consideration for the insights they give us regarding the black response to exclusion and exploitation.
The interest of these stories extends beyond a simple community response to a large-scale social process, for they are related not only to genre tales brought from the Old World but to particular family stories as well, reminiscences and anecdotes about how specific members of the family developed ways of getting by during the hardest of the hard times. Though I have not included any of these personal narratives in this section, it is crucial to note the growing body of such lore that has become available recently, most notably in Kathryn Morgan’s Children of Strangers.1 Such works amplify the message of the narratives recorded by the Federal Writers’ Project during the 1930s that many individual slaves had developed techniques of encountering and even beating whites at their own game.
Humorous and often subversive, these stories commonly report an especially brazen or subtle act in the face of Old Master’s authority, or they record the ways in which dispossessed and often hungry people reacted to the presence of food all around them. Like Velma McCloud’s great-grandfather, who, as a slave, had become an expert in stealing pigs because his master, Planter Hammond, would give him no meat. Finally, the day of reckoning came. The slave received an investigative visit from Hammond at the very moment he was making the pork stew on which his local reputation rested. When Hammond insisted on tasting the “possum stew” that was cooking there, Great-Grandpa responded by exclaiming how “the possum … was about done to a turn!” “Must be all that good spittin’ we done,” he muttered under his breath. “The what!” “Spittin.’ … Us black folks always spits in the possum gravy.… Makes the meat good and tender.”2
This story, simply aggressive on its surface, resonates with deeper cultural meanings when considered in the light of the social etiquette of the society in which it arose. Like most of the Master-John stories included here, what seems like the report of a capping conversation, that is, coming up with the perfect comeback in a contest of wits, is filled with ironic implications both in plot construction and message: the master who does not hesitate to wander into his slave’s quarters to taste the food there (whether or not he was checking on the disposition of his pig population), the technique the great-grandfather uses of “loud talking” (that is, seeming to mutter, but in loud enough tones that he is sure to be overheard), the seeming acceptance of the white stereotype of blacks as dirty in their personal habits. All these stories repeat traditional means of getting around Old Master.
A number of stories included here make use of black stereotypes of whites. Not least of these is the idea that blacks had that whites would bet on anything, a trait not without its basis in fact, at least in the Old South, as historians have demonstrated.3 We can see such stereotypes in “They Both Had Dead Horses” and “Competition for Laziness.” This desire to wager became especially strong when the planter could confirm his stereotype of slaves and create a contest based on one of the imputed traits. Perhaps the most egregious example was the plantation “bully,” the slave used in fights to represent the pride of the plantation, neighborhood, or riverfront towns. (The verse-narrative “Stackolee,” given in the previous section, ultimately derives from this practice.) Most of the stories in this section turn on such contests—of strength or of wit.
It is precisely in this area of storytelling that some of the deepest ironies of the plantation system may be seen. For instance, one of the most virulent white stereotypes of blacks was the imputation of stupidity to the slaves, especially with regard to their supposed inability to employ language effectively. Yet, on the evidence of these stories, not only were the slaves as capable of “capping” as their descendants, but specific examples of this ability were built into the anecdotes told competitively between the planters!
As Charles C. Jones, one of the early collectors of black lore, concluded in one of his stories: “The buckra [white] had to laugh at how clever his newest slave was,” forgiving him for his transgressions because of his ability to cap effectively. The clever remark that Jones was reporting at the time was, in fact, one of the earliest references we have to the Master-John type of story. In it, the slave is confronted by his master with not having done his assigned job. The slave responds with the well-known riddle: “If there were three pigeons in the tree and I shot one, how many were left?” When the master responds, “Two,” the slave laughs and says, “If you shot and killed one of those pigeons, the other two are bound to fly away, aren’t they, and then none would be left.”4 Just such uses of riddles for equalizing a power situation are found throughout this section, including “Making the Eyes Run.”
The contemporary folklore of Afro-Americans continues to reflect social tensions of this sort, and to record equally ingenious black responses to indignity and inequality. There are many jokes, for instance, in which white man and black man are explicitly pitted against each other, with various humorous results.5 Most of these stories are drawn from the enormous vault of interethnic jokes—that is, the same fund as “Polack” and other jokes justly called “truly repulsive.” One finds in them the same strategies of dramatizing oppositions, as well as many of the same turns of phrase, as in the earlier stories, but they now appear as punch lines.
At the end of this section are a few examples of recent and openly hostile black-white stories that demonstrate both the themes’ continuity and the change of tone that has occurred in the last few decades. Chief among these examples are the verse-narratives referred to by many black Americans as toasts; “The Sinking of th
e Titanic” is one such story. The tale involves a series of conversations between Shine, the putative black stoker on board the ill-fated luxury liner, and various white characters. Shine is portrayed as a great swimmer; thus he has no fear when the iceberg is hit, and many appeals are made to him for help by the captain, his wife, and his daughter. There is also a boasting interchange between the whale and Shine. This toast is one of the most openly anti-white stories in the black “street” repertoire.
The first time I heard this story was in the late 1950s when I was living in a ghetto neighborhood in South Philadelphia. At that time, the tape recorder was not in common use, and the fact that I had a recorder caused some of the young men in the vicinity to come by; in that decade, the most common street-corner activity was a capella quartet singing, and groups dreamed of getting recording contracts or performing on radio or television, so they wanted to hear how they sounded.
I taught a few people how to operate the recorder so that they could record at times when I wasn’t home. One day, one of the neighbors asked me if I had heard any toasts. “Such as what?” I responded. He said, “Like ‘Stackolee’ or ‘Shine.’ ” And he proceeded to tease me with about ten lines of the “Titanic” verse featuring Shine. When I showed interest in hearing the whole thing, he laughed and said he would see what he could do.
Sometime later, a group came over and recorded many of the toasts for me in the form of a radio show, with the rhymed introductions that were fashionable among black disc jockeys of the period, and with some blues-singing material—including the version of “Titanic” that I reprint here. Since then, the story of Shine has been collected in many places, for it provided a convenient voice of protest during the 1960s.
NOTES
1. Kathryn L. Morgan, Children of Strangers: The Stories of a Black Family (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1980).
2. Velma McCloud, “Laughter in Chains,” reprinted in Albert Spalding, Encyclopedia of Black Folklore and Humor (Middle Village, N.Y.: Jonathan David, 1972), 35–37.
3. See, for example, T. H. Breen, “Horses and Gentlemen: The Cultural Significance of Gambling among the Gentry of Virginia,” in Puritans and Adventurers: Challenge and Persistence in Early America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1980), 148–63.
4. Charles C. Jones, Negro Myths from the Georgia Coast (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1888), 130–31.
5. A number are printed in my Positively Black (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1970); and in Daryl Dance, Shuckin’ and Jivin’ (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1978).
87
THEY BOTH HAD DEAD HORSES
The rooster chews tobacco and the hen dips snuff;
The old biddy can’t do nothing but he can strut his stuff.
Ol’ John, you know, he was a conjure man. So he could usually tell what Ol’ Massa was going to do or say, and let me tell you, that helped him out a lot. In fact, it let him really get up over Ol’ Massa one time. You see, Ol’ Massa had these two horses. Now, Ol’ John had been working for him all these years and so had these horses. And they were all getting long in the teeth, especially this one old nag. So Ol’ Massa decided he would take care of things by giving that old one to John to take care of. And you’d have to say that Ol’ John was proud to have that horse for his own, because now he could ride it around without making Ol’ Massa mad at him. But still he had to work that old nag next to the other horse when they were out in the field.
Now, things changed a little bit, because when Ol’ John got to working the horses, he just couldn’t resist hauling off and beating the one that still belonged to Ol’ Massa. Of course, he never would hit his own. So then some white folks told Ol’ Massa, and he got mad and told Ol’ John that if he ever heard of him laying a whip to his horse again, and not his own, that he was just going to take Ol’ John’s horse and kill it dead as a doornail, and that would be the end of that. But Ol’ John really knew Ol’ Massa after all these years, and he knew what a fool he could be when it came to money and betting. So he said, “Massa, now if you kill my horse, I’m going to turn around and make more money out of it than you have.” Ol’ Massa just kind of snorted.
One day, Ol’ John hit Ol’ Massa’s horse again, and, of course, everyone heard about it. So he came on down where Ol’ John was hauling roots and stumps and other trash and he took out his big old knife and cut Ol’ John’s horse’s throat. Ol’ John jumped down off his wagon and quickly skinned his horse, tied up the hide up on a stick, threw it across his shoulder, and just walked away. He was a sight, I want to tell you!
Now, remember, Ol’ John was a conjure man, and everybody around there knew about it. So he met up with this one white man who saw him walking along the road with the skin on the stick over his shoulder, looking a sight, and the man asked him, “What is that you have over your shoulder, Ol’ John?” “It’s what I use to look into what’s going on all over the place.” “You mean you can use that old skin to see things?” “That old skin and my stick,” he said. “Well, make it tell you something I need to know, and I’ll give you a sack of money and this horse and saddle I’m on.” John said, “Well, I don’t know if it’s working today.” The man said, “I’ll give you five head of cattle beside if you tell me something important.” (He was really testing him, you know.) Well, Ol’ John put the hide on the ground and he took the stick and he hit the horsehide one lick, and then he held his head down to it like he was listening to something, and then he turned to the white man and said, “Well, I’ll tell you one thing; there’s a man in your bedroom right now sweet-talking your wife, and I guess that’s pretty important to you.” The man ran right to his house to see, and that’s what he found, I guess, because here he came back shaking his head. He said, “Ol’ John, you sure can see things with that old horsehide.”
Now a big crowd had gathered around, so this next man said, “John, I’ve been having some trouble too. Do you think that old horsehide could help me out?” Ol’ John went and put the stick back inside the hide and lifted it on his shoulder and said, “Well, you know, he was an old horse and just that one beating made him pretty tired out.” The white man said, “I’ll give you six head of sheep and four horses and four sacks of money if you get the hide to tell you something I need to know.” So Ol’ John pulled out his stick and hit the hide and held his head next to it as if he was listening again. He said, “Unh, unh, there’s a man in your kitchen opening your stove and eating your wife’s good biscuits right now.” So the man ran to his house. He came back out and told Ol’ John that his old horsehide fortune-telling sure was right again. So he gave him all those things he promised.
Now, Ol’ John knew how Ol’ Massa was going to feel about him getting all the things. But he just couldn’t resist riding on past Ol’ Massa’s house with all his sacks of money and cattle and sheep there alongside of him, just whooping and cracking his whip as loud as he could. “Yee, whoopee, yee!” Crack! Massa ran out of his door and asked, “Now, John, where did you get all that stuff?” Ol’ John said, “I told you if you killed my horse I’d get one back and a lot more beside. And now I’ve got as much money and cattle as you have, and more.”
Ol’ Massa just couldn’t stand the thought of John getting more than he had, so he found out how John had done it. So he took that other horse and he killed it, skinned it, put it on a stick over his shoulder, and went to town. Everybody kind of snickered at him and one man said, “Hold on there. I’ll give you two bits for the skin of that horse to make chair bottoms.” Ol’ Massa told him that he must be crazy, that the hide was worth much more than that. He walked on some more, trying to get people to buy his horsehide, but all he could get were more offers to buy it to make chair seats. Everyone just laughed at him trying to sell it, so finally he had to throw it away and buy himself a new horse.
Now that Ol’ John was rich, he couldn’t resist showing it off. He didn’t have to work any more but since he had been fooling with horses all his life, he liked to go r
iding around showing off everything that he had. Sometimes he would get out of the buggy and take some kids or Ol’ Granny around with him. And whenever he would do this, when people asked where he got all his money and stuff, he would tell them about outdoing Ol’ Massa. Now, Ol’ Massa heard him at this one day, and he got really mad. He said to John, “You better watch out, because if you bring your old granny by me, I’m going to kill her.” Well, John just said, “If you touch my granny I’ll just turn around and beat you even worse at making money, you know.”
So, one day, along comes Ol’ John out riding his buggy with Granny by his side, and he couldn’t resist going on by Ol’ Massa’s. So Ol’ Massa came roaring out there and right in front of everybody he cut Granny’s throat, and there wasn’t anything John could do about it with all those white folks around.
Ol’ John buried his grandmother and went back and got out his old horsehide and stick, put them on his shoulder, and carried them up to town again. By this time he had quite a reputation, you know, and so it didn’t take too much reminding for people to remember that he could see things with that old horsehide and stick. They just lined up to get him to see things for them. One man told him, “Why, John, make it talk some for me and I’ll give you six goats, six sheep, a horse, and a saddle to ride him with.” So Ol’ John made it talk and the man was pleased so he gave Ol’ John even more than he promised him, and Ol’ John went back past Massa’s house with all his new stuff so Massa could see him there.
Ol’ Massa ran out and said, “Oh, John, where did you get all that?” John said, “I told you that if you killed Granny I would just have to beat you more at making money.” Well, you know that is something a white fellow can’t stand is to be made a fool, and he went a little crazy again. And he went back in and killed his own grandmother so he could make all that money too.
African American Folktales Page 29