Feeling sure that he had cracked under the pressure, his comrades sprang to his side. From there, they beheld the feared Seminole invasion. Hundreds of braves in gaudy war paint and fully armed? No. It was only one old, mangy dog seated on the top of an empty cistern, hitting it with his wagging tail.
Telling time: 7-8 minutes
Audience: 3rd grade - adult
This story is taken from the eyewitness account of H. P. Huse which appeared in the Wide-Awake magazine, published shortly after the Seminole Wars of 1835-42. It serves to remind us that certain atmospheric conditions play havoc with sound waves, and that fears overwork our imaginations. The teller needs to steadily build the suspense in this story right from the beginning. In order to do this you must build on the fear which is always present during a war: Both sides play for keeps and build support and sympathy by painting the enemy as being bloodthirsty and cruel.
Introduction
Tall Tales & Nonsense Stories
While tall tales and nonsense stories are always crowd-pleasers, all tall tales or nonsense stories will not please every audience.
Young children enjoy nonsense and repetitious stories if the story is about something with which they can identify. Tall tales of fishing, hunting, and sports are probably a sure bet for a male audience, and the female audience will likely enjoy tall tales about dieting, romance, and fashion.
The success of a tall tale or nonsense story, like other humor, depends greatly on the mood of the audience and the ability of the teller. Timing, enunciation, and voice projection is vital.
“Epaminondas,” a Southern nonsense story, has been told to receptive audiences for decades, and “Moonshine Hollow” is superb for a mixed audience. Although, “Epaminondas” is much better told than read, it can be successfully read aloud, but telling is essential for the success of “Moonshine Hollow.”
Do Tell!
Epaminondas
Epaminondas might be classified as a slow learner, but you can’t blame him for that. And you will have to give him credit for always doing just what his mammy told him to do.
Now, Epaminondas liked to go to see his auntie, who lived about a mile down the sand road from his house. She had more of this world’s goods than Epaminondas and his mammy. And Auntie was always ready to share.
One day when Epaminondas went to see his auntie, she had made a cake. Now, it wasn’t just an ordinary cake — no. It was twelve layers high, with all this chocolate goo between the layers, and on the top, and on the sides. She gave Epaminondas a nice slice, and he was sure it was the best cake in the world.
When he was ready to go home, his auntie gave Epaminondas a big piece of that cake to take home for him and his mammy.
Epaminondas was proud to be the bearer of such a great gift. He took that cake in his hand, and started along home. The further he walked, the tighter he closed his hand; so, by the time he got home, all he had in his hand was a little dough-ball and some chocolate goo between his fingers.
“What’s that you got, son?” asked his mammy.
“The best cake you’ve ever et!” answered Epaminondas. “Auntie sent it to ya.”
His mammy’s mouth started watering. She looked at his hand, and said, “Epaminondas, you ain’t got the sense you wus born with. Son, when someone gives ya a piece of cake, put it on top of yer haid, put yer hat over it and walk along home. Ya think ya can ’member that?”
“Yessum, Mammy.”
The next time that Epaminondas went to see his auntie, she was churning butter. And she gave him some of that sweet cream, homemade butter on hot biscuits with plenty of guava jelly. He had to admit that it was as good as that chocolate cake. When he was ready to go home, Auntie gave him a nice big cake of that butter to take home with him.
Epaminondas started home. “Mammy is gonna be so proud of this here butter,” he said to himself. “I gotta take it home jest lack she told me to, and she’ll be proud of me.”
So he put it on his head, put his hat over it, and started home. But it was a hot day, and soon that butter was running all down in his eyes, all down in his ears, and all down his back. When he got home all the butter he had was on him.
His mammy took one look at him, and said, “Laud have mercy, Epaminondas, what have ya got all over ya?”
“Butter, Mammy. Auntie sent it to ya.”
“Oh, me, Epaminondas, ya ain’t got the sense ya wus born with. Don’t ya know that when someone gives ya butter, yore suppose ter go to the garden, and git ya a big cabbage leaf. Put the butter on the cabbage leaf, and then take it to the spring, and cool it, and cool it, and cool it, until ya really get it cool. Then ya can bring it along home. Do ya understand?
“Yes, Mammy.”
“Do you think that you can ’member that?” “Yes, Mammy.”
The next time that Epaminondas went to see his auntie, her dog had had puppies. And his auntie gave Epaminondas the pick of the litter. He was so proud of that puppy, and he knew just how he had to take it home. He went into the garden, and got two of the biggest cabbage leaves he could find. Then he took the puppy to the spring, and cooled it, and cooled it, and cooled it, until he got it really cool. Then he took it along home.
His mammy took one look, and threw up her hands. “Laud, have mercy, Epaminondas, what have ya got?”
“A puppy, Mammy. Auntie gave it to me.”
“Epaminondas, ya ain’t got the sense ya wus born with. Look what you’ve gone and done. You’ve almost drown dis pore little puppy. Don’t ya know, when somebody gives ya a puppy, you must reach way down deep in ya pocket, and git a ball of string. Take one end of the string, and tie it round the puppy’s neck, and then ya can jest lead him along home. Do ya understand that?”
“Yessum, Mammy.”
The next time that Epaminondas went to see his auntie, she was making bread. Oh, the smell of that homemade bread — fresh out of the oven. His auntie gave Epaminondas several slices while it was still warm, and then she gave him a nice, big, crusty loaf to take home for him and his mammy.
Epaminondas remembered exactly what his mammy told him. He reached deep into his pocket and got out a ball of string. He tied one end of the string around the loaf of bread and just led it along home.
When his mammy saw him, she asked, “Epaminondas, what are ya ’pose to be draggin’ ’hind you?”
“Bread, Mammy, Auntie sent ya a big nice loaf of her bread.”
Mammy sighed a deep sigh. “Epaminondas, ya ain’t got the sense ya wus born with. Ya ain’t never had the sense ya wus born with, and you never goin’ ter have the sense ya wus born with. And I’m tired of tellin’ ya how to truck. Ya jest stay home, and I’ll go to Auntie’s.”
A few days later, Mammy got her bonnet and her shawl. She put her basket on her arm, and walked to the front gate. “Epaminondas,” she called, “I’m goin’ to Auntie’s, to take her one of my mulberry pies. And I want you to stay home.”
“I’d sure lak ter go.”
“I won’t be gone long, and I want ye to stay here. I’ve got three more mulberry pies coolin’ on the steps; so, be careful how ya step on them. Keep the flies and chickens off of the pies till I get back.”
“Yessum.”
Epaminondas kept the flies and chickens shewed away from the pies while they were cooling, and then he got to thinking about what his Mammy had said — to “be careful how he stepped on them”; so, he decided that he’d better step right on the middle of each one of those pies, and that was exactly what he did.
I don’t know the ending to this story, for no one has ever told me the ending, but I bet you can end it, for me, can’t you?.
Telling time: 10-12 minutes
Audience: pre-school - adult
Everyone enjoys “Epaminondas.” There are a number of variations — talking animals, Chinese, and Appalachian Jack to name a few. But the original is my favorite, and judging from the laughter of the audience, it is also the favorite of many. The best assurance to avoid seeming to
be poking fun at some race or culture is to make Epaminondas a member of your culture. Everyone, even small children and grown men, are amused at being able to be a jump ahead of the teller in this story. Easy to learn, fun to tell, always a crowd pleaser, “Epaminondas” is a story which I have been telling for more than sixty years and still get numerous requests to tell.
Gator Tadd or How the Green Swamp Got Its Name
A number of years back — a hundred to be more specific — there lived, in Jacksonville, a man who stood seven feet, eight inches tall and weighed more than three hundred pounds, named Sir Thadious Abelard deDiare. In spite of his distinguished name, his unusual size, and his outstanding artistic ability, everyone called him “Gator Tadd.”
Can’t say for sure whether or not he was a native. Some said he was, and others said he just drifted down here looking for warm weather, where his paint wouldn’t freeze. This might have been so, for he was a master painter and made all his paint from his own secret recipe.
Gator Tadd did some impressive jobs around Jacksonville. He painted all the insurance companies’ high-rise buildings. He did them fast and right. With his twenty-five-gallon bucket in one hand and his twenty-five-inch brush in the other, there just wasn’t a job too big for him to tackle.
He said, “If there ever was a crime ‘gainst nature, it’s this way they’ve got here of late of blowin’ paint on with a spray gun, like they’re tryin’ to kill cockroaches, skeeters, or sandfleas.”
Gator Tadd like to slap his paint on with a good twelve-inch brush, and he was never known to leave a run, a sag, a brush-lap, or a brush-bristle on the surface. Whether he slapped it on up and down, crosswise, or antigogglin’, when Gator Tadd finished a job, the paint was as smooth as melting ice.
Gator Tadd never had a helper. He really didn’t need one, for he could get himself up the side of a building as quick as a monkey can shin up a palm tree. If he needed anything on the ground, he just flipped it up to where he was working with his drag. (For any of you who are uninformed on the Cracker arts, a drag is a cow whip.)
Gator Tadd enjoyed an audience when he was working and for sometime he had one, but there just weren’t as many people around then, and his antics became “old hat.” People quit coming around to watch, and so he lost interest in painting buildings.
He decided to take up signboard painting. He erected a hundred-foot signboard on the south bank of the St. Johns River and started soliciting the Jacksonville merchants for business. He promised them that he’d make the sign so real and true to life that no one would have to read it to get the message. That was a big selling point, for the merchants knew that there were many people with money to spend who could not read.
His first customer was The Tender Tasty Meat Market. He painted the letters they wanted on his signboard, and then he added some big juicy T-bone steaks. Those steaks looked so natural that the gators started attacking the signboard. Gator Tadd knew he had to do something about that. He looked over the entire herd, picked out the best-looking girl gator, put a bridle on her, and rode her back into Alligator Creek, and you know every one of those bull gators followed her. (Folks who saw him do this figured that such antics was how he got his name.) But the gators kept coming back, and soon the owners of the ocean liners, which brought visitors to Florida, started complaining that the gators were scaring the tourists away; so, the chamber of commerce made Gator Tadd remove the steaks.
Later he got a job painting the signboard for The Sunshine Bakery. Gator Tadd painted the words they wanted and a big loaf of bread. He painted it so well that every morning, when the sun hit that signboard, you could smell that bread baking. And if you looked at it, your stomach started rubbing a blister on your backbone. Some birds pecked at that picture until they wore their bills off and starved to death, because they didn’t have anything left to peck with. Others just sat there — perched on the top of the billboard — trying to figure out the problem till they just keeled over. Either way, it was death to birds. The Audubon Society complained so much that Gator Tadd had to paint the loaf out.
These two incidents got people afraid to hire Gator Tadd, even though the butcher and the baker were doing a whopping business.
Finally, The Hot Ziggedy Thermonuclear Heater and Range Company hired him to do a sign for their new heater. Gator Tadd painted the heater with a fire going good inside and heat pouring off in every direction. I guess that in some ways it was the best job Gator Tadd ever did. During the coldest winter ever recorded by the Weather Bureau, on the first day of January, the dandelions and phlox started blooming in the little plot between the billboard and the river.
It was when the bums and river rats started making the place a hangout that the citizens and storekeepers in the neighborhood put up a howl. The hobos drove nails into the billboard so they could hang kettles and cans on the top of the heater. That way they could cook their food and heat water to shave. And they found it more comfortable on the ground in front of that heater than in any flophouse in the city so they slept there, too.
Finally, the company came up with the idea of having Gator Tadd make the heater a lot hotter to drive the bums and river rats away. So he did. He changed the stove from a fiery red to a white hot, and made the heat waves a lot thicker. This drove all the bums across the river, but it also blistered the paint on all the boats in the river. Then, one day, a boathouse began to smoke, and then to blaze. The insurance companies faxed an ultimatum to the Hot Ziggedy Thermonuclear Heater and Range Company to jerk that billboard down and be quick about it, or they’d take them to court.
Now, uninformed historians have falsely accused Gator Tadd of starting that great Jacksonville fire that destroyed more than two thousand buildings on May 3, 1901. But Gator Tadd’s signboard had been torn down and doused in the St. Johns River a full month before that fateful Friday when flames left the entire city a charred, gruesome specter.
After the fire, Gator Tadd packed his satchel and moved south to Orlando.
In Orlando, Gator Tadd perfected his own special type of skywriting. His signs didn’t fade away in a minute like the smoke that pours out of a plane and gets torn to pieces by the wind before you can hardly spell out what it says. He got lots of jobs advertising on the sky. It was all pretty and fancy colors, and it’d stay right there for days if the weather was fair. Of course, birds would fly through it, and when it’d rain the colors would all run together, and then, when the clouds rolled by, there’d be what folks got to callin’ a rainbow. It really was nothing but Gator Tadd’s skywriting all jumbled together.
Nobody never did understand how Gator Tadd managed to do his sky painting. When people asked him, he’d say, “That’s for me to know and you to find out.” And it seems that no one ever found out. But this much is known:
Between Orlando and Tampa is a whole bunch of lakes, marshes, and woods which cover about nine hundred square miles or 576,000 acres. When Gator Tadd came to Orlando this area was known as “the swamp.” It was in the middle of this swamp that Gator Tadd rented a thousand-acre field and roped it off with barbed wire charged with electricity. Although Gator Tadd would not let a living soul inside, people knew that was where he launched his sky hooks to hold his scaffold for his sky painting. You could hear some big booming sounds, like big fireworks, and folks figured that he was firing his sky hooks out of a cannon, and that they fastened onto the sound barrier.
After a while, if you took a spyglass, you could see Gator Tadd’s long scaffold raising up, up, up in the air and Gator Tadd, looking about as big as a spider, squatting on it.
But that too played out. It wasn’t that people didn’t like his sky painting any more, but the airplanes got to buzzing around as thick as flies around a molasses barrel, and one day, one of the pesky things brushed against his scaffold and upset Gator Tadd’s paints. After that, Gator Tadd was never seen in Orlando again. The pilot of the plane said that trying to catch his paint, Gator Tadd lost his balance and fell. Some figure that the big
bull gators, which were having a convention in the swamp at the time, put a bridle on him before he caught his breath after the fall.
But that day he was working on a big job in blue, yellow, and green. Of course, you know that blue and yellow makes green when it’s mixed, and that paint got mixed! Many people declare that Gator Tadd landed in the middle of one of those deep lakes in the swamp, and by the time he swam to shore, an advertising agent was there with a contract in hand to sign him up as the “Green Giant.”
Now, you’ll have to decide for yourself what happened to Gator Tadd, because I want to have no part in influencing a conclusion which would have to be made from hearsay. But you can look on any Florida state map and verify that they still call not only his thousand-acre field, but all that 576,000 acres, The Green Swamp.
Telling time: 18-19 minutes
Audience: 4th grade - adult
This is an excellent example of a tall tale. The teller puts no emphasis on the exaggerations — just throws them in the text and acts as if he expects everyone to believe them, and they will — for a short time. Don’t expect to have too much laughter unless you have in your audience some sharp 4th and 5th graders who want you to know that you are not pulling the wool over their eyes. But the lack of laughter does not spell doom. The audience will enjoy the story if it is told well.
Moonshine Hollow
Sal Itchigum here, a lookin’ fer my feller. Anybody seed Bill? Bill who? I might’ve known a bunch of ole whippersnappers wouldn’t know who Bill wus.
Well, Bill ain’t his real name. I jest call him that. His real name is Bilious — Bilious Buttonbuster. And he’s my feller. Leastwise, he wus.
T’other day I was ironin’ over a hot fire when I heard someone a comin’. I knowed it wus Bill so I ran real quick and got me a pan of water and rinched off my face, smoothed down my hair, pinched my cheeks, and rubbed my lips so they’d be nice and rosy. Then I got out my store-bought co-log-ne. You know what store-bought co-log-ne is, don’t you? That channel number five? And I put a little dab under each arm, and back of each year. Then, I went to the door to meet my feller. Well, it weren’t Bill, at all. Some pan-handler from up the State summers.
Tellable Cracker Tales Page 7