The Jack Tales

by Richard Chase

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Table of Contents

  Frontispiece

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Preface

  Introduction

  Jack in the Giants’ Newground

  Jack and the Bull

  Jack and the Bean Tree

  Jack and the Robbers

  Jack and the North West Wind

  Jack and the Varmints

  Big Jack and Little Jack

  Sop Doll!

  Jack and the King’s Girl

  Fill, Bowl! Fill!

  Hardy Hardhead

  Old Fire Dragaman

  Jack and the Doctor’s Girl

  Cat’n Mouse!

  Jack and King Marock

  Jack’s Hunting Trips

  The Heifer Hide

  Soldier Jack

  Appendix

  Parallels

  Glossary

  About the Author

  Footnotes

  Copyright © 1943 by Richard Chase

  Copyright © renewed 1971 by Richard Chase

  ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write to Permissions, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company, 215 Park Avenue South, New York, New York 10003.

  www.hmhco.com

  Hardcover ISBN 978-0-618-34693-6

  Paperback ISBN 978-0-618-34692-9

  LC: 43-012028

  eISBN 978-0-547-52997-4

  v1.0315

  TO ALL THOSE OLDER AMERICAN CITIZENS

  from whom I have had the privilege of learning these stories;

  and

  TO YOUNG AMERICANS WHO WILL FIND THIS BOOK.

  For Granny Shores said that you would “surely delight in the old handed-down tales” and Old Mr. Ward told me, at the start, that it was for your sake such a book should be made.

  Preface

  Anglo-American folk music has had much attention in recent years. We are beginning to discover and to recognize the rich heritage of our people in songs and ballads, folk hymns and carols, country dance tunes and figures—living traditions that are known and loved wherever these people have pioneered.

  When the great English folklorist, Cecil Sharp,1 visited Mrs. Jane Gentry in Hot Springs, North Carolina, and recorded sixty English folksongs from her, he came very close to another side of our tradition and he would very probably have taken down this material, too, had he but known that Mrs. Gentry liked to tell what she called “The old Jack and Will and Tom tales.” Mr. Sharp asked her only for songs. It remained for Mrs. Isobel Gordon Carter to do the first collecting of The Jack Tales as known to Mrs. Gentry. These tales were published, exactly as Mrs. Gentry told them, in the Journal of American Folk-Lore for March 1927. But more of this later.

  My own first knowledge of The Jack Tales came in the spring of 1935 through Marshall Ward, a young fellow from western North Carolina. Marshall had heard me talk to a group of teachers about our folksongs.

  “I don’t know whether you’d be interested or not,” he said to me afterward, “but my folks know a lot of old stories that have been handed down from generation to generation like you were saying about the old songs.”

  “What sort of stories are they?”

  “They’re mostly about a boy named Jack, and his two brothers, Will and Tom.”

  “Is that the same boy who climbed a beanstalk?”

  “We call that one ‘Jack and the Bean Tree.’”

  “And did he kill a lot of other giants besides that one up the bean tree?”

  “Yes, the time he hired out to the King to clear a patch of newground. But we don’t tell any of the tales the same way you read them in books.”

  “Can you tell them?”

  “I can; but I don’t like to unless there are a lot of kids around.”

  “Who did you learn them from?”

  “From my father and Uncle Mon-roe.”

  “Where did they learn them?”

  “From Old Counce Harmon. He was my great-grandfather.”

  “How many do they know to tell?”

  “About two dozen—Jack Tales and others.”

  This was the beginning of the long trail.

  In time, I visited “Uncle Mon-roe,” Mr. R. M. Ward, of Beech Creek, North Carolina, and this book is the result of my chance conversation with Marshall Ward and of many enjoyable days and evenings spent with his “folks” on and near Beech Mountain.

  II

  R. M. Ward and his people are Southern mountain farmers. Descended from the earliest settlers2 of that region, one of the most beautiful in the southern Appalachians, they live in the quiet security of a well-established rural economy. They are honest, industrious, and intelligent citizens; and they have rare qualities of kindliness and poise which make them excellent company. On one occasion, both Monroe Ward and his brother Miles stood before a group of distinguished professors, folk-lorists, and musicians at the White Top Folk Festival Conference, and, as much at ease as if they were at their own fireside, fascinated that group of strangers with a number of these tales.

  The Ward, Harmon, and Hicks families of Beech Mountain are all fine, hospitable folk, and they have taken a keen interest in our setting down this tradition of theirs for publication. We have heard Jack Tales on all sorts of occasions: sitting on front porches in the evening, sitting on hard clods in the middle of a tobacco patch, leaning in the corner of a rail fence after helping weed the turnips, lounging on hay in the barn, and on cold winter nights sitting up close to blazing logs in great open fireplaces.

  One interesting phase of the enjoyment of the tales in that region is a very practical application: that of “keeping the kids on the job” for such communal tasks as stringing beans for canning, or threading them up to make the dried pods called “leather britches.” Mrs. R. M. Ward tells us: “We would all get down around a sheet full of dry beans and start in to shelling ’em. Mon-roe would tell the kids one of them tales and they’d work for life!”

  This use of the tales seems to be a common custom in that neighborhood where everyone knows about “Jack” and where many others besides “Old Mon-roe” like to try their hand at telling about that boy’s scrapes and adventures. It is through this natural oral process that our Appalachian giant-killer has acquired the easygoing, unpretentious rural American manners that make him so different from his English cousin, the cocksure, dashing young hero of the “fairy” tale.

  Through the memories of some of his kinsmen we have been given vivid glimpses of “Old Council” Harmon, who was, as far back as we can trace, the chief source of this cycle. His delight in “worldly” things seems to have given much concern to some of his more somber church brethren.

  Smith Harmon, the postmaster at Beech Creek, told us: “Old Counce sure did like to have a good time. When he was younger he’d get read out of church ever’ now and then. He’d behave for a while, and not make music, or dance, or sing any love songs.3 But seemed like he loved the old music4 so much he’d bust out again and get the church folks down on him once more. When he got to be an old man, though, they didn’t pay him much mind.”

  Monroe Ward has told us: “Old Counce was a sight to dance. He was just as good a church member as any of ’em, but he just couldn’t stand5 music. Time anybody would start in picking on the banjo, he ’uld hit the floor;6 hit didn’t differ even if he was in church. Seventy years old, he could clog and buck-dance just as good as a boy sixteen. He knowed how to run reels,7 too. They didn’t dance back then like they do now. They had reels—four-handed reels and eight-handed reels. They’d get a set8 on the floor and some not knowing much about it, they ’uld get bothered up, till Old Counce would get in it and he’d straighten ’em out an
d get ’em a-goin’ again. But ever’ time he took part in any such goin’s-on somebody would tell it on him and the next Sunday the preacher’d get after him again.”

  With children, however, there was a different outlook.

  Miles Ward has given us this account: “Ever-when I’d see Old Counce a-coming, I’d run to meet him so I could walk with him back to the house. Then he’d sit and take me up on his lap, and I’d ask him right off for a Jack Tale. He’d tell me one, too: never did fail me. He loved to tell about Jack.”

  Monroe Ward is close to his grandfather in his love of fun: as his neighbors have often said to me, “Law, Mon-roe sure is antick, now, ain’t he?”

  At first it seemed that The Jack Tales were known only to these Beech Mountain folk and to other descendants of Council Harmon. Wherever Jack Tales turned up, the trail led back to Wautauga County and “Old Counce” Harmon. It was two years after I had seen the issue of the Journal of American Folk-Lore containing Mrs. Jane Gentry’s versions of The Jack Tales that I learned through her daughter, Mrs. Grover Long, of Hot Springs, how Mrs. Gentry had learned the tales from her grandfather, Council Harmon. Mrs. Long, by the way, also knows many of the tales and tells them delightfully.

  Another descendant, Mr. Sam Harmon, now deceased, was found in Tennessee. Several Jack Tales were recorded from him by Mr. Herbert Halpert.

  But we have recently found two Jack Tales in the family tradition of Mrs. D. W. Lethcoe, of Damascus, Virginia; and in Wise County, Virginia, we have found three tales unknown to the Wards: “Jack and the Bull,” through Mr. James Taylor Adams, of Big Laurel, and recorded from Mrs. Polly Johnson, of Wise; “Jack and King Marock,” recorded from Mrs. Nancy Shores, of Pound; and “Soldier Jack,” recorded from Gaines Kilgore, of Pound. And, very recently, a Jack Tale was found in Charlottesville, Virginia.

  Miss Elizabeth Eggleston, of Hampden-Sydney, Virginia, has told us of Kentucky versions of two of the Wards’ tales, known to Mrs. Sally Middleton, of Martin’s Fork, in Harlan County. The existence of these other Jack Tales would indicate that they might be more common than we have yet realized. Certainly these tales, as separate units if not as a cycle, must once have been quite commonly known here in America.

  It has not been possible for me to explore even all the known sources before the printing of this book. It may be that the publication of The Jack Tales will bring to light many other such stories known by word of mouth in other parts of America, or new elements belonging to some of these present tales, and that all these materials can be incorporated into another work.

  III

  In reading these stories, it must be kept constantly in mind that this is an oral tradition. The Jack Tales are told, not read, by these people from whom we have recorded them. No two individuals in Beech Mountain section ever tell the same story exactly alike; nor does the same man ever tell any one tale quite the same twice over. Both Mr. Ward and Mrs. Long say that they never retell any tale just the same way. This is, of course, a part of the story-teller’s art.

  Monroe says, “I allers try to tell ’em the old way, but I har-rdly ever use jest ex-actly the same wor-rds.”

  Monroe Ward delights in varying the details of a story, especially the give-and-take of dialogue. His brother, Miles, has incorporated several tales9 into one which he calls “Jack’s Travels.” On the occasion when we first heard this, Miles stretched it out to last about two hours.

  In editing these stories, we have taken the advice of our informants, and the publisher, and retold them, in part, for this business of getting them into print. We have taken the best of many tellings and correlated the best of all material collected into one complete version. The dialect has been changed enough to avoid confusion to the reading eye; the idiom has been kept throughout.

  Additions or omissions of any important element in any tale are accounted for in the Appendix, where also will be found other points of particular interest that concern each tale.

  We pass on this suggestion, based on the advice and the actual practice of our informants, to those parents who find this book and want to enjoy The Jack Tales with their children: Try to tell them without the book. After you have got the drift of any tale, forget the printed page, and tell it as you please.

  Young people who learn or read these tales will not need this advice. They will discover “Jack” and all the other “kids” in the neighborhood will hear about him—under the apple tree in the yard, out on the front porch steps, down at the swimming hole, or walking to and from school.

  For all true folk traditions have this dynamic appeal. They stick with us, and they grow and change with every individual who receives them. Setting such things down in cold print is, really, a hazardous undertaking. They do not exist in any book. The old Scottish woman did well to warn Sir Walter that if he printed her ballad it would “never be sung mair.”

  It is only when our old songs and old tales are passing from one human being to another, by word of mouth, that they can attain their full fascination. No printed page can create this spell. It is the living word—the sung ballad and the told tale—that holds our attention and reaches our hearts.

  We have not all had grandfathers like Council Harmon, and yet we can, as we rediscover these things, learn them from books; but no one has ever really enjoyed traditional tales fully until he can tell them “by heart” and with no thought but of the telling and of the faces of his listeners.

  IV

  Most notable about The Jack Tales is their cycle form: It is always through the “little feller” Jack that we participate in the dreams, desires, ambitions, and experiences of a whole people. His fantastic adventures arise often enough among the commonplaces of existence, and he always returns to the everyday life of these farm people of whom he is one. There is nothing fantastic about Jack himself, even though he is many times aided by forces as mysterious as those with which he contends. In the series of these tales he meets and conquers, in his way, all the varied, real, and imaginary enemies of a highly spiritual folk, never heroic, but always ready and willing in a modest, dryly gay fashion.

  Folk prosody rarely has presented so well-rounded a figure as Jack. Reynard is a one-sided rogue, the heroes of European collections of tales are many; other central characters are supermen or gods. Br’er Rabbit10 seems to be the only one who shows many facets of character in a connected series of stories. Jack, however, is thoroughly human, the unassuming representative of a very large part of the American people.

  One clear indication of the great age of this particular family tradition is the appearance in two of their tales of a figure much like the god Woden, in his aspect as The Wanderer, Old Graybeard, The Stranger who helps adventurers in their need. Mysterious, prescient, with a magic staff in his hand, he helps Jack as he once helped Sigurd in the ages before English was spoken here in the mountains of this new land.

  V

  So many people have had a hand in the making of this book that it would be difficult to account for them all. John Powell’s interest and encouragement really kept me going when I wasn’t sure that Jack would ever find the right publisher. Both he and Mrs. Powell gave sound advice on many points. Martha Warren Beckwith and Doctor Stith Thompson helped with good letters of advice and information. Mrs. Isobel Gordon Carter wrote me about her knowledge of Mrs. Jane Gentry and about her experiences with our folktales. Berkeley Williams, Jr., made trips with me to Beech Mountain and helped in the editing of several difficult places in the Preface and in the tales. The boys and girls of Virginia’s 4-H Clubs, at the State Short Course, made excellent listeners when I told my editing of certain tales to them. I am also indebted to Mrs. Annabel Morris Buchanan, who let me use recordings of several Jack Tales which she set down from Mr. Ward’s telling.

  All those from whom the tales were collected are fully accounted for in the Appendix.

  Katherine Chase, my wife, helped collect some of the tales and it was she who typed them all into a neat manuscript.

  And
Anne Gay Chase, our twelve-year-old daughter, helped with her own knowledge of folktales and fairy tales which she has been reading since she was seven.

  VI

  One of the most interesting results of telling these Jack Tales is that people ask if I have heard a tale they know. One of my hopes, in seeing this collection published, has been that Americans old and young, who know any such old tales, Jack Tales or others, by word of mouth (not out of books) that have been handed down in a family or a neighborhood, would write to me about them. Useful information received would be gratefully acknowledged and incorporated in future work the author hopes to do.

  R.C.

  PROFFIT, VIRGINIA

  January 1943

  To whom it may concern as to the Jack tales and others told By R. M. Ward of Wautauga county in state of NC—P o Beech Creek I did learn the most of these tales from Council Harmon my mother’s daddy in the year of 1886 and 87 and 88 and he was about 80 or 85 years old when I learned the tales from him He was very lively and funny and always had a good time with us children he told me he learned the tales from his grandfather and he said the tales was learned from the Early settlers of the United States Council Harmon was married twice and had seven children By his first wife he had eight children by his last wife Council Harmon was a farmer and did work a farm as long as he was able to work and after he quit farming he came to our house and Did stay with us about 5 years and he told us these tales at night

  R. M. Ward

  August 20, 1938

  R. MONROE WARD

  APRIL 1875–NOVEMBER 1944

  Jack in the Giants’ Newground

  One time away back years ago there was a boy named Jack. He and his folks lived off in the mountains somewhere and they were awful poor, just didn’t have a thing. Jack had two brothers, Will and Tom, and they are in some of the Jack Tales, but this one I’m fixin’ to tell you now, there’s mostly just Jack in it.