But one day, as part of his work of being king, he made a decision that was so poor, she couldn’t help herself. She went right ahead and she butted into his business. When he found out, he yelled, “I told you. I told you on our wedding day I would not tolerate a wife who went butting into my business. That’s it. This marriage is over. Just go on back to your daddy’s house. Leave!”
She said, “All right, but before I go, could we have one last meal together? And could I look around and choose just one thing—something I could take with me to remember what it was like to have been queen and all?”
“Oh, one meal. One keepsake. That’s all you want. Fine.”
She went to their cooks (after all, they were a king and queen, so other people cooked their food for them). She asked the cooks to fix up all the king’s favorite foods for supper that night. And when he came to the supper table, there it was loaded with all sorts of real rich, real sweet foods—all of his favorites. When the king sat down to eat, she didn’t do a thing but pour him a glass of wine to drink. And every time he drank the least little bit, she refilled his glass. He’d drink, and she’d fill it. He’d drink, and she’d fill it. Drink. Fill it. Drink. Fill it. Drink fill it drink fill it drink fill it drink fill it. (You get the idea.) And pretty soon the combination of all that rich, sweet food and way more wine than anyone ought to drink at any one meal and the king was passed out right there at the table. Oh, his breathing was good. She knew he was going to be all right, but he wasn’t going to be waking up anytime soon.
She had the cooks help her pick him up. They carried the king outside and loaded him up in the wagon. She hitched the horses to the wagon, climbed up in the driver’s seat, flicked the reins of the horses, and drove on down to her daddy’s house. Once there, her daddy helped her carry the king inside. They dumped him in the bed that had been hers as a child. Then she climbed into bed next to her husband and slept till morning.
The next morning, the king woke up. His head hurt so much he could barely move it. When he looked over and saw his wife in bed beside him, he said, “What are you doing here? I am pretty sure I told you to go on back to your daddy’s house. Now why are you here?”
She smiled at him, then suggested, “Honey, maybe you ought to take a look around and see where you are.”
Carefully and slowly, the king looked around the room. “I’m not home. Where am I anyway?”
“Don’t you remember? You told me I could look around our place and choose one thing to take with me to remember what it was like to have been queen. Well, what I liked most about being queen was living with you, so I brought you on back to my daddy’s house with me.”
The king was absolutely tickled to think that with all the fancy things they owned in that great big house of theirs, the one thing his wife wanted most was him. So he said, “Honey, I am sorry I hollered and carried on like I did last night. I suppose if every once in a great long while you feel a pressing need to go butting into my business, I might be able to get used to it. Let’s go on back home.”
And going on back home is exactly what they did.
COMMENTARY
ATU Tale Type 875 The Clever Farm Girl
This folktale is told in a wide variety of different cultures. I had heard so many different versions of the story over the years that I was quite familiar with the basic plot before I ever encountered this variant. In 1991, I spent lots of time looking for Kentucky folktales so I could add a wide variety to my repertoire before Kentucky’s bicentennial in 1992. Yes, this was a marketing strategy on my part because I knew there would be increased interest in Kentucky stories that year, and I wanted to be ready with stories from different genres and for many different ages. I was thrilled to encounter a Kentucky-collected version of a tale I already knew I would enjoy telling.
My retelling is based on a version of this story collected in the early twentieth century by Marie Campbell from Doc Roark, a traveling doctor in the Letcher County area of southeastern Kentucky.1 In her notes on the story, Campbell writes, “The version given above as No. 10 is close to ‘The Innkeeper’s Clever Daughter,’ pp. 95–97, Ausubel’s A Treasury of Jewish Folklore.”2 Indeed, the story is culturally widespread. In D. L. Ashliman’s guide to folktales, he lists twenty-six versions of this tale, including ones from Chile, Italy, Greece, Norway, Russia, Israel, Germany, and West Virginia.3
In my retelling I have used my own words, but kept faithful to Campbell’s Kentucky-collected plot. I did deliberately make several changes.
Campbell’s version answers the second riddle with, “The richest thing in creation is the earth.”4 I elaborated on that by having the daughter explain that everything comes from the earth, so the earth is the richest thing of all.
At this point in the story, I will sometimes step out of the story by saying something like, “You know, she was right, too. Anything in this room would work the same way. Take that T-shirt you are wearing . . .” and I’ll find out what someone’s T-shirt is made of. It’s almost always cotton or cotton and polyester. Most audiences readily acknowledge that cotton comes from a plant that comes from the ground. When I tell them petroleum is used in the creation of polyester, they readily agree that petroleum comes from the earth too. I tend to use this digression in school settings.
I changed the bird she catches from a pigeon to a quail because it seemed to me a ground nester would be easier to catch. The daughter wraps herself up in a quilt, not a net, in my version because in the part of Kentucky where I grew up fish nets were not common, but everyone had quilts.
The idea of her marrying someone after knowing them such a short time disturbed me, but I believed such a marriage—if a good marriage—could work. So, I added my description of a good marriage.
Campbell writes, “She kept on pouring out wine for the king till she got him dead drunk.”5 My “Drink. Fill it. Drink. Fill it. Drink fill it drink fill it drink fill it drink fill it” repetition usually lights up the eyes of my listeners. It also provides a bit of comic relief that somehow softens this use of alcohol. (Several other variants of the story have her use a sleeping potion.)
In Campbell’s version, the king asks the farmer if his daughter can marry him, and the king tells his wife she may take one thing with her when he tells her to leave. Well, in retelling a folktale, the story gets filtered through the teller, so in my version the king addresses his marriage proposal directly to the daughter, not to her father. In addition, she is the one who asks for a final meal and the opportunity to take one thing with her.
I clearly see her as a very independent, smart, and clever woman, and yes, I admire her spunk. I also see the king as regretting sending her away the moment she does not protest but instead asks for just one meal and one keepsake, because they truly are enjoying a good marriage. However, his pride cannot allow him to back down.
In addition to just enjoying this story, I also like telling it because I am a farmer’s daughter. Trust me when I say the typical story featuring a farmer’s daughter sleeping with the traveling salesman was never a plot I found appealing. Insulting? Yes. A tale I wanted to bring to my audiences? Absolutely not!
THE FORTUNE TELLER
One evening, several years ago, I was wandering along the midway at the Meade County Fair. I walked past the Ferris wheel and Tilt-A-Whirl. I walked along a row of booths. I saw the ring toss, the baseball throws, and the shooting gallery, all offering the possibility of winning huge stuffed animals. Then I saw the sign: “Fortunes Told. Past Lives Revealed. $1.”
My first thought? What a hoax! My second thought? Aaw, what the heck, why not?
So I paid my dollar and walked inside.
The woman who greeted me certainly knew how to dress the part. She wore layers of skirts and shawls. Gold bangle bracelets adorned her arms. Huge gold hoop earrings hung from her ears. A silky print scarf held her dark curly hair away from her face. She led me over to a table with a chair on each side. Even in the dim light, I could see the table was covere
d with at least three different printed tablecloths, each a bit smaller than the one beneath. On top a crystal ball rested on a deep midnight blue stand. She motioned me into one of the chairs, and she sat in the other. Well, I thought, I’m getting my dollar’s worth in costuming and decorating if nothing else.
The woman looked into my eyes. Then she stared into the crystal ball for what seemed like a very long time, although in reality it was probably well under a minute. When she looked up, her eyes looked troubled, even sad. And then she spoke, “I can’t see anything about your future,” she said, “but I do see your troubled past.”
Oh man, I thought, this is such a rip-off. Who doesn’t have some trouble in their past, and how convenient her crystal ball won’t reveal my future. What better way to discourage me from finding her at next year’s fair and proving her wrong!
“In your past,” she said, “and I mean in your past life, not the past of your current life.” She hesitated, then said, “I’m not sure how to tell you this, but you were a dog.”
“A dog?”
“Yes, and even worse, you were severely mistreated. In fact you were murdered. Shot.”
“Yeah, right. I was a dog, and I was shot,” I scoffed.
But she looked at me kindly. “I know this is not easy to believe, but you were shot, and even in this life your body bears the mark of the bullet.”
When she saw how skeptical I looked, she told me where the bullet struck me, and she was right. I’ve always had a strange indentation right here.
COMMENTARY
At this point in the story, I usually gesture to my collarbone, because there is an area there where I can make it look as though my finger is going into my skin a bit. I keep talking about that indentation, and how strange it was that she knew that. Usually one of my listeners asks to touch the spot. If no listener asks, I will add something like, “I know you may find this hard to believe, but the spot is right here. If you want to touch it, I don’t mind.” When someone from the audience comes up to touch the spot, the moment they touch me, I bark, fast and loud.
Yep, it’s a trick story. It works well one time with each small audience! It’s a fun story to tell, but it demands the teller be able to keep a very straight face and serious demeanor throughout the whole set-up.
I learned this story from Mr. Patrick Black, a math teacher at T. K. Stone Middle School in Elizabethtown, Hardin County, Kentucky. In January 2009, I was conducting a Kentucky Arts Council–supported arts residency with T. K. Stone sixth graders. One day I was eating lunch in the teachers’ lounge when Mr. Black walked in. He asked another teacher, Mrs. Jennifer Upchurch, “Has Jesse recovered from the story yet?” They both chuckled and began telling what had happened.
It seems Mr. Black had noticed that Mrs. Upchurch’s high school-age son, Jesse, had been doing his homework in her room every day after school. Jesse worked hard each afternoon, taking his studies very seriously. Mr. Black suggested to Mrs. Upchurch that he could walk in, tell her the story, and trick her son into touching the spot. Black knew he needed Upchurch cooperating in the set-up or Jesse would suspect a trick. (Mr. Black has a reputation for keeping things lively.) So, Black went to Upchurch’s room, talked about different things, and then steered the conversation to the incident in the story. As planned, Mrs. Upchurch touched the spot and commented on how strange it felt. That prompted her son to touch it too. Mr. Black reported that when he barked, Jesse’s math book flew one direction, his calculator flew another, and he jumped back against a desk with such force, it turned over too!
Mr. Black first heard this story in his mid-twenties on a triple date with friends on Halloween Eve. They were traveling from one haunted house to another. Mr. Black was driving, and one of the other fellows told the tale. While Mr. Black no longer remembers who told it, he does remember thinking—Mine! Immediately, he not only knew he wanted to retell the story to others, but he also had ideas about how he wanted to tell it.
The first time he remembers telling it was when he was a teacher on an eighth-grade class trip to Charleston, South Carolina. The students had been on a ghost walk and were riding back to their lodgings in a dark bus. To Mr. Black, they seemed primed for this story. He did not tell it to the entire bus, but just to a few eighth-graders sitting near him. He still remembers how they shrieked, and how in the dark he had not realized just how close the student’s hand was to his neck when he started barking—so close he almost bit it! Even now, Mr. Black is delightedly remorseful when he talks about the incident.1
Mr. Black and I use different details to pull our listeners into the story. I enjoy setting up how cynical I was about the prospect that someone could tell me anything about my future or past. As I mention details of the fortune teller’s booth, I can see my listeners sometimes nodding in agreement that she looks the part, and that revealing a “troubling past” is clever of her. When Mr. Black tells the story, he sets it up with some of his buddies encouraging him to see a palm reader. They’ve already had their palms read, and they think he should too. When he refuses to waste his money, his buddies insist on paying for him. The palm reader comments on Mr. Black’s having more than one life line—one line matching his current life, the other a short broken line indicating a previous life cut short. The palm reader eventually reveals that Black was once a dog who died from a gunshot. When Mr. Black refuses to believe her, she proves it to him by telling him where his scar is located. Both Mr. Black and I work to assure our listeners that, like them, we are not easily taken in. Then, when we appear to have heard something surprisingly true, our listeners are more willing to believe because, like them, we began as skeptics until we had the proof that turned us into believers.
Telling this tale has indeed been fun for me. I only tell it when I have a small audience, no bigger than a single class-sized group. One gift I’ve given my nieces and nephews is to visit their classrooms once a year to tell stories. My brother Alan’s children, two high school students and one fifth grader, all had me tell this story to their classmates shortly after they first heard me tell it at a family gathering. It really set up the story well when they suggested I “tell about what happened at the fair.” In a class of juniors at Franklin County High School, where my niece Kate was a student, so many volunteers wanted to touch the spot that I had to squelch an argument by promising they could take turns. By that time Kate’s eyes sparkled so much, I could no longer look at her for fear of breaking out laughing. The young man who touched first jumped back so quickly when I barked, he landed on the floor and slid backward across the room! Yes, I believe he intentionally exaggerated his reaction, but we all had a good laugh together, including the young man.
I’m lucky to have encountered Mr. Patrick Black, one of those natural storytellers who are also wonderful teachers. In fact, Mr. Black was Kentucky’s Middle School Teacher of the Year in 2003. I suspect the ability to tell a story serves him well in his classroom, even though this particular story is not likely to show up in mathematics class.
THE PRINCESS WHO COULD NOT CRY
A long time ago there once lived a princess who could not cry. Her mother, the queen, said, “Darling, that you cannot cry would not matter if you didn’t laugh at everything.” The king and queen became so worried about the princess, they offered a huge bag of gold to anyone who could make her cry.
A wise man arrived at the palace with a plan to make the princess cry. “Feed her nothing but bread and water for a full week. She’ll be crying then.”
The queen protested, “Bread and water? I’m afraid she’ll starve. Couldn’t we feed her bread and milk instead?”
“No! Bread and water! You do want her to cry, don’t you?”
The king and queen wanted the princess to cry, so they commanded that she be fed nothing but bread and water for a full week. At the end of the week the queen went to see the princess.
“Hi, Mama, watch this!” The princess kicked her foot, and her shoe sailed off her foot and hit the wall on the far side of
the room. “Isn’t that something? My foot’s so skinny my shoe just flies right off! Want to see me do it again?” The princess laughed and laughed.
The queen cried.
And then she commanded the princess’s usual diet be restored.
Another wise man offered to make the princess cry. Now, this wise man had studied all the cultures of the world to learn how to make every ugly face and every ugly sound there was. He was certain he could make the princess cry.
For a full day the wise man was locked into a room with the princess. At the end of the day her parents came to check on her. The princess sat laughing and laughing. The exhausted wise man was sent home.
“Oh, Mama, he was funny. How soon can he come back?” the princess laughed and laughed.
The queen cried.
More wise men tried, and more wise men failed. The princess laughed and laughed. The queen cried and cried. At last every wise man in the world had failed.
In this same kingdom there lived a poor mother and daughter. The mother was ill but could not afford the medicine that could make her well. Most of the time she was too ill to work, but they ate the food from their garden and managed as best they could. The girl was smart. She had heard about the gold to be won from making the princess cry, so she had been thinking about how she could win it. One morning, the daughter said, “Mama, I think I can make the princess cry. And with the gold I could buy your medicine.”
“Oh, honey,” said her mother, “you can’t make the princess cry. All the wise men in the world have tried and failed.”
But the smart girl had an idea. She walked to the kitchen for a knife, and then to their garden for an onion. She put both into a sack, put the sack in her bike basket, climbed on her bicycle, and pedaled to the palace. Once there, she announced, “I’ve come to make the princess cry.”
Kentucky Folktales Page 12