The Tar Baby: A Global History

The Tar Baby

The

Tar Baby

A GLOBAL HISTORY

Bryan Wagner

PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS

Princeton and Oxford

Copyright © 2017 by Princeton University Press

Published by Princeton University Press, 41 William Street,

Princeton, New Jersey 08540

In the United Kingdom: Princeton University Press, 6 Oxford Street,

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Jacket art: 1) Planisphère, ou carte générale du monde (1676)

by Pierre Duval, Bibliothèque nationale de France,

2) Type courtesy of Patricia M. / Flickr,

3) Black paint © Angela Waye / Shutterstock

All Rights Reserved

ISBN 978-0-691-17263-7

Library of Congress Control Number: 2016945502

British Library Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available

This book has been composed in Bodoni Std, Ultra and

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For NORA & CAMILLE

CONTENTS

Prologue  ix

Chapter 1

IDEAS OF CULTURE  1

Chapter 2

STATES OF NATURE  20

Chapter 3

STICKING FAST  51

Chapter 4

SAY MY NAME  74

Chapter 5

THE BRIAR PATCH  90

EPILOGUE  114

TWELVE EXAMPLES  126

Acknowledgments  169

Notes  171

Select Bibliography  245

Index  257

PROLOGUE

The tar baby is an electric figure in contemporary culture. As a racial epithet, a folk archetype, an existential symbol, and an artifact of mass culture, the term tar baby stokes controversy, in the first place because of its racism. At least since the 1840s, tar baby has been used as a grotesque term of abuse, and it continues to feel like an assault no matter the circumstances in which it is employed. At the same time, tar baby has operated as a figure of speech suggesting a problem that gets worse the harder you try to solve it. The term takes both of these senses in the tar baby story, a short fable that was common in vernacular tradition before it was reproduced on the gilt-edged pages of illustrated children’s books and on the silver screen.

By far the best-known version of the tar baby story is the one published by Joel Chandler Harris in his inaugural folklore collection, Uncle Remus: His Songs and His Sayings (1881). This was not the tar baby’s first appearance in print, as other versions anticipated Uncle Remus by more than a decade, but it was The Wonderful Tar-Baby Story, told in the manufactured voice of an imaginary ex-slave, that made the difference to the story’s future transmission, documentation, and reception. Again and again, Uncle Remus’s version of the tar baby was syndicated, translated, adapted, illustrated, excerpted, and interpolated in newspapers, magazines, folklore anthologies, and children’s treasuries, as it was also repurposed in comic strips and advertising campaigns for products like Brer Rabbit Blackstrap Molasses. In 1939, Walt Disney Studios purchased the franchise rights to the Uncle Remus stories. Seven years later, the tar baby was featured in Song of the South, one of the first feature-length films to combine animation and live action. Following the film’s release, Disney’s management of the Uncle Remus franchise proved to be a successful experiment in convergence and cross-promotion. Content from the film appeared in picture books and read-along recordings, television programs and stereoscopic slides, board games and theme park attractions—all made possible by the deepening coordination between Disney and media corporations like Golden Books, Capitol Records, and the American Broadcasting Company. It is a measure of the extraordinary influence wielded by the culture industries at mid-century that the story is still strongly associated with Song of the South decades after Disney removed the film from commercial circulation. First through Harris and then through Disney, the tar baby has been reduced to a master outline that has predominated over all other expressions of the story.¹

FIG. 0.1. Edward Gorey, [Rabbit Stuck to Tar Baby]. Colored pen and ink. From Ennis Rees, Brer Rabbit and His Tricks, with Drawings by Edward Gorey, (New York: Young Scott Books). By permission of the Edward Gorey Estate.

FIG. 0.2. J. M. Conde, ‘I wish,’ said the little boy, ‘I wish I could fly.’ Pen and ink. From Joel Chandler Harris, Uncle Remus and the Little Boy (Boston: Small Maynard and Company, 1910), 12.

It is important to understand that there is more to the tar baby story than Uncle Remus. The disproportionate attention given to Remus’s version of the tar baby has obscured the story’s actual range. The tar baby exists in literally hundreds of versions derived over several centuries on at least five continents. Since the 1880s, collectors have claimed that they heard the tar baby over and over in the field, leading some of them to speculate that the story was omnipresent in world culture. According to some estimates, the tar baby was transcribed more frequently than any other story during the decades in the late nineteenth century when collectors were flooding into the field to transcribe stories, songs, and sayings they saw as the last vestiges of primitive culture. In these decades, the tar baby became a topic of intense concern in the emerging disciplines of professional social science, most remarkably in folklore and anthropology, where the story served as a paradigm case in the study of global culture, a trend that continued into the early twentieth century as the tar baby remained a sticking point in research undertaken by leading scholars including Elsie Clews Parsons, Franz Boas, and Melville Herskovits.²

The tar baby has been central to our understanding of cultural traditions that slaves brought from Africa to America. According to Herskovits, the tar baby was the keypoint in the debate over the nature and composition of black culture. The story’s significance was magnified over time as it was cited as evidence against the views of sociologists such as E. Franklin Frazier, who argued that slaves retained little more than scraps of memories from the African past. The story was also invoked in arguments against Stanley Elkins, a historian who claimed that slavery destroyed the personalities of its victims, rendering them passive in the face of their oppression. As a counterexample to these claims, the tar baby showed that slaves were neither deracinated nor submissive. It was a story that survived the brutality of the Middle Passage, a story that was passed down from generation to generation and continent to continent, demonstrating the independence that slaves retained even under the worst conditions. Slaves learned to survive by imitating the trickster and using deception to overcome the strength of their masters. The tar baby showed that culture not only survived but thrived under slavery, and it showed that culture’s purpose under slavery was practical, and even political, as stories like the tar baby taught slaves how to push back against their masters. It would be an overstatement to say that the tar baby was the origin for these new ideas about culture and politics, but there is no question that the story remained a leading case throughout the twentieth century, an example against which these new ideas were tested, refined, and reformed.³

One of the problems with this conventional approach to the tar baby is a matter of evidence. Scholars have attempted to determine the origin and chart the trajectory of the tar baby as a basis for interpreting the story’s meaning. This approach treats the story’s worldwide diffusion as something that can be measured, and thereby used as evidence, when in fact it is something that we can never know for sure. Oral traditions do not leave dated traces, which means it is impossible to reconstruct a story’s movement based on the mere fact of its existence in more than one place. All we can say for sure is that the story was told in these places. How it arrived, and where it originated, are matters for speculation. Given the available evidence, which is unreliable and inconclusive, it comes as no surprise that the tar baby’s diffusion has been subject to open-ended and acrimonious debate. If we want to interpret the tar baby in political terms, we need to reckon with the fact that the shape of its diffusion is not only unknown but likely unknowable. It provides no foundation for a theory of politics.⁴

First and foremost, this empirical problem returns us to the task of interpreting the tar baby, a task that had been suspended by some of its most astute commentators, who tried to make their objective knowledge of the story’s circulation into the basis for a theory of politics. Critics have worked out the metaphysical problems of political agency posed in the tar baby by invoking the story’s mercurial transmission as evidence for the cultural autonomy of its storytellers, but in my view, the theory of politics generated by this critical approach remains inadequate to the story’s complex meditation on the problems of action, identification, and consciousness. We have put the right questions to the tar baby, in other words, but our answers have been insufficient.

This book aspires to be more comprehensive than previous accounts of the tar baby, looking beyond oral tradition to discover examples of the story’s narrative elements outside the domain claimed by folklorists. We know that the tar baby was circulating at the same time, and in many of the same places, as the new thinking about property and sovereignty that developed in colonial law and political economy. One of the purposes of this book is to demonstrate that the story addresses many of the same problems—labor and value, enclosure and settlement, crime and captivity—represented in the tracts and charters conventionally associated with the so-called great transformation in world his-tory.⁵ Interpreted in this broader comparative context, the tar baby looks less like an ethnographic example and more like a universal history that seeks to grasp all at once the interlocking processes by which custom was criminalized, lands were colonized, slaves were captured, and labor was bought and sold, even as it also meditates on the feeling of disenchantment and the impact of science on the conflict over natural resources. We should understand the tar baby, in other words, not only as an artifact of globalization but also as an account of globalization whose scale of reference matches the scale of its diffusion.

This book departs from previous thinking about the tar baby, but it relies on critical precedents established as the story was taken up by various disciplines in the humanities and social sciences. For the purposes of this study, I have been willing to engage with any example previously seen as a version of the tar baby story. I am especially interested in versions collected and published during the major phase of collection between 1865 and 1945, as these are the examples that supplied the material for the standard interpretation of the story. A bibliography of examples from this major phase of collection appears at the back of the book. In addition, I have retained the tripartite model used by folklorists, which divides the story into three stages: a beginning, in which a trap is set to catch a thief; a middle, in which the trap is sprung; and an end, in which the thief escapes or receives comeuppance. I have also retained the anatomy of narrative elements (such as the stickfast motif, the mock plea, and the no-reply formula) commonly used by folklorists, even as I have abandoned their attempt to trace the story’s diffusion in space and time.⁶

My interpretation of the tar baby mostly ignores the dialect that is one of the story’s most notorious features. Intended as entertainment, this dialect almost always denigrates the people who told the story. Collectors justified their use of nonstandard spelling and syntax on the grounds that they were reproducing the story verbatim. Dialect was meant to preserve the tar baby’s authenticity, its connection to an oral tradition that was supposed to be untouched by books, newspapers, and other modern technologies. However, as many scholars have pointed out, the simulation of spoken language in these ethnographic works has less to do with phonetic accuracy than with adherence to artificial literary conventions that imposed rules for substitution (d- for th-, as in dat for that) and transformation (the subtraction of postvocalic -r, as in mawnin’ for morning) even as they also encouraged liberal use of eye dialect, a term of art that refers to a misspelling phonetically identical to its root (as in wuz or soshubble). These dialect conventions are artifacts of ethnographic representation, and as such they are worthy of study, but they are extraneous to my main concerns.⁷

The book is divided into five chapters. The first is devoted to reception history. It addresses both the longstanding controversy over the direction of the tar baby’s diffusion and the implications that followed from this controversy in intellectual movements ranging from the new social history to symbolic anthropology. The next three chapters correspond to the three stages in the story: the setting of the trap, the springing of the trap, and the trickster’s escape. In each chapter, the analysis seeks to understand the tar baby in relation to its cognates in natural law and political economy. In an epilogue, I turn to the story’s self-conscious representation of the speaking animal, a figure that condenses the story’s general reflection on personhood and property.

The book concludes with twelve examples of the tar baby story chosen to illustrate the story’s conventional features, its variation, and the scale of its geographical distribution. I have included a map indicating where the stories were collected as well as the dates on which they were published. The map illustrates how rapidly scholars discovered how far the story had traveled. It should not be necessary to refer to these sample stories while reading the chapters, but obviously they are available for consultation. They are intended to provide a highly selective and concentrated exhibition of the story’s range and ambition.

The Tar Baby

Chapter One

IDEAS OF CULTURE

A rabbit and a wolf are neighbors. In the summer, the rabbit wastes his time singing songs, smoking cigarettes, and drinking wine, while the wolf stays busy working in his fields. The rabbit then steals from the wolf all winter. The next year, the wolf decides he will catch the rabbit by placing a tar baby, a lifelike figurine made from tar softened with turpentine, on the way to his fields. When the rabbit meets the tar baby in the road, and the tar baby does not reply to his greetings, the rabbit becomes angry and punches, kicks, and head-butts the tar baby until he is stuck at five points and left to the mercy of the wolf. The rabbit is not, however, trapped for long: he tricks the wolf into tossing him into the briar patch, where he makes his escape.

This composite obviously, perhaps inevitably, fails to capture the true range of variation in the oral tradition of the tar baby. In the hundreds of versions on record, the thief is sometimes a rabbit, other times a spider or a monkey. The owner is sometimes a wolf, other times a possum or a lion. The thief sometimes takes grain from a field, other times fruit from an orchard or water from a well. This flexibility is normal in any vernacular tradition, and any interpretation of the tar baby needs to account for the regular substitution of characters, props, and incidents that occurs as the story is related again and again. Accordingly, one of the central tasks undertaken by scholars interested in the tar baby has been to explain how the story traveled so widely, and why it changed, when it did, along the way.¹

FIG. 1.1. A. B. Frost, ‘Gracious Me! An’ den He Howl.’ Pen and ink. From Joel Chandler Harris, Told by Uncle Remus: New Stories of the Old Plantation (New York: Grosset and Dunlap, 1903), 44.

This longstanding interest in the tar baby, in where the story has been and how it has moved from one place to another, has proven extraordinarily fruitful. This chapter outlines the tar baby’s intellectual reception in anthropology, literature, history, and folklore—disciplines that were being professionalized in the same decades when collectors were publicizing their surprising discoveries about the scale of the story’s worldwide circulation. Although the most elementary questions asked about the tar baby—how it traveled from location to location, why it traveled as far as it did—have never been, and likely never will be, answered empirically, this has never put a stop to speculation. Indeed, it has always been the things we cannot say for sure that have inspired the most influential discourse about the tar baby. The mystery of the story’s diffusion, in particular, helped to shape the terms in which it became possible to think more capaciously about culture.²

During the late nineteenth century, the tar baby was one of the examples most often cited by collectors interested in the cultural traditions that slaves had transmitted from Africa to America. Joel Chandler Harris, in particular, was convinced that the tar baby, like the other tales told by Uncle Remus, came from Africa, and in his introductions to the Uncle Remus books, he sought to substantiate this connection by comparing the stories he collected in Georgia to stories collected by Wilhelm Bleek in South Africa and Charles Hartt in Brazil. Based on the similarities among these stories, Harris suggested that they represented the culture that united the African diaspora. According to Harris, stories like the tar baby expressed a racial point of view. They were political allegories in which the relative position of the weaker animals corresponded to the global perspective of the race.³

FIG. 1.2. A. B. Frost, ‘Brer Rabbit, he Put his Han’ ter his Head.’ Pen and ink. From Joel Chandler Harris, Told by Uncle Remus: New Stories of the Old Plantation (New York: Grosset and Dunlap, 1903), 45.

Others followed Harris in this interpretation, looking for analogues to Brer Rabbit wherever there were people of African descent. Some scholars, such as Thomas Crane and Héli Chatelain, recognized prototypes for the tar baby in trickster tales found in Liberia, Congo, Mauritius, South Africa, and the Gold Coast, and they tracked the changes that occurred in the story as it traveled to such places as Cuba, Jamaica, Mexico, and Louisiana. Like Harris, these collectors were committed to an approach that they inherited from Johann Gottfried Herder and the Brothers Grimm, an approach that assumed folk traditions conserved national or racial identity as they were transmitted from generation to generation. In 1892, David Wells put the point succinctly. It was possible, Wells noted, to reconstruct the history of a race by tracing the alterations in its typical legends. In 1896, Alice Bacon agreed with Wells, suggesting that stories like the tar baby were the chain that linked the American with the African Negro. Every story in Uncle Remus, Bacon elaborated, can be shown to exist in a more primitive shape in Africa, and among people who cannot be suspected of having imported it. As early as 1877, William Owens was prepared to affirm what seemed obvious: that stories like the tar baby were as purely African as the faces of the people who told them. Summarizing this prevailing wisdom in 1914, Charlotte Sophia Burne noted the importance of the African slave-trade to the dissemination of folk-tales, citing as her main example the Tar-Baby story, which was known to have been inherited by the coloured population of the United States from the tribes of Angola and the Congo. Writing in 1933, Alice Werner makes the same point. Not only the Tar-baby but literally every story in ‘Uncle Remus,’ she proposes, can be shown to exist in a more primitive shape in Africa, and among people who cannot be suspected of having imported it from America or elsewhere.⁴

At the same time as these various critics and collectors were casting their argument for the diasporic provenance of the tar baby, others suggested that the entire tradition concerned with speaking animals, including the collection of ancient fables attributed to Aesop, could only have come from Africa. As early as the thirteenth century, a Byzantine scholar named Planudes speculated that Aesop was a black man from Ethiopia, but this idea did not gain broader acceptance until the nineteenth century when writers like William Godwin and William Martin Leake developed an argument based not only on the evidently false etymological connection (Aesop to Aethiop) that Planudes had made, but also on specific examples, such as Washing the Ethiopian White, and on the flora and fauna that recur in the fables. While these claims about Aesop’s blackness remained conjectures, they were common enough to shape the interpretation of the trickster stories that had become, thanks to Harris, strongly associated with African Americans. Some critics, like Arna Bontemps, have even argued that the only question is not whether but how Aesop’s fables were turned into the animal stories told by slaves, with others, like J. H. Driberg, suggesting that if Aesop was not an African, he ought to have been given the powerful correspondence between his fables and the modern trickster tradition.⁵

The tar baby’s importance to the African diaspora was also emphasized in later studies, including James Weldon Johnson’s Native African Races and Culture (1927) and Melville Herskovits’s The Myth of the Negro Past (1941), which made the case for the influence of African retentions in New World slave societies more comprehensively and systematically than had previous collectors, like Harris, whose research was limited in its coverage and frequently based on specious generalizations. Even as scholars broadened their base of evidence, the tar baby story remained an important touchstone in the argument for African cultural survivals. According to Herskovits, the story was a primary example of the cultural luggage that Africans brought with them to America. These claims were supported by field research, as the tar baby had in fact been recorded in locations throughout the African continent from peoples including the Makua, Mbundu, Duala, Dinka, Manganja, Hausa, Fantee, Baronga, Namwanga, Nyungwe, Yao, Temne, and Ewe. As Herskovits notes, the tar baby was considered so characteristic of West Africa that collectors had used the version narrated by Uncle Remus as a point of comparative reference when seeking out their own folklore on the continent. Collectors sometimes substantiated their claims for the tar baby’s diasporic provenance by citing informants who learned the story in Africa before coming to America, as is the case with Lattevi Ajaji, who told the story to John Lomax in Texas. Other times they explained that their informants had learned the story from a friend or relative who had heard it in Africa. Collectors also argued for an African origin by tracking cognates—elements whose strong similarity suggests direct transmission or a common source—marking parallels between The Wonderful Tar Baby Story and stories like The Leopard in the Maize Farm (collected by John Weeks in the Lower Congo) or The Spider and the Farmer (collected by Alfred Burdon Ellis in the coastal territory later known as Ghana). Even when there was no evidence for direct transmission, it seemed plausible to assume a link between stories with such similarities, especially when the stories in question were shared by a racial population presumably related by blood.⁶

This line of argument has always been controversial. Right from the beginning, some scholars disputed Harris’s claim that the tar baby story came from Africa. Even before Harris published his first book, he received a letter from John Wesley Powell, the head of the Smithsonian Bureau of Ethnology, proposing another possible origin for the Uncle Remus stories that Harris had been printing in the Atlanta Constitution. Encountering The Wonderful Tar-Baby Story when it was syndicated in his own evening newspaper, Powell recalled that he had heard versions of the story during his fieldwork with the Southern Paiute in Utah, though at the time he had no idea that the tar baby was also being told by slaves. Powell asserted in his letter to Harris that the tar baby story, like many other Uncle Remus tales, was not in fact invented by African Americans but borrowed from American Indians.

Others noticed the similarities between The Wonderful Tar-Baby Story and the trickster tales that geologist Charles Hartt had collected among the Amazonian population in Brazil. Although Harris maintained that the Amazonians had been taught the story by Africans recently imported as slaves, other scholars, such as James Mooney, held that Hartt’s evidence actually supported the opposite conclusion and that the tar baby story was in consequence not an ancestral inheritance from Africa but instead a cultural compound that could only have been made in the Americas.⁷

Things only became more confusing as collectors continued to find versions of the tar baby in far-flung regions of the world that were assumed to be culturally distinct from one another. The realization that