Views from the Dark Side of American History

4. Alligatormen and Cardsharpers: Deadly Southwestern Humor

88 4 Alligatormen and Cardsharpers deadly southwestern humor one crisp fall day in 1982, I was sitting in my basement office in Dickinson Hall at Princeton University when Tony Grafton, a then-young medievalist, stuck his head in my door and asked, “Do you know any good stories?” I asked in return whether he meant dirty ones or otherwise , but he just repeated the question. For some reason, Mark Twain immediately popped into my mind, and I told Grafton that Twain knew a good yarn or two that I could relate. Grafton then told me that the department was setting up a lecture series on “narrativity,” a fancy renaming of a traditional form of history writing then making a comeback in response to the chronologically amorphous quality of much social history . Lawrence Stone, the gifted English historian who was the director of the Shelby Cullom Davis Center for Historical Studies at Princeton, and the Italian academic Carlo Ginsburg, then at the very cutting edge of cultural history, were to be the other lecturers. I decided to take up Grafton’s offer to fill out the series. That was flattering company, and besides, as a visiting fellow at the Davis Center, I had few duties beyond giving one paper and attending the notoriously brutal weekly seminars of the center. My primary task that year was to work on Inside War—and I was close to Washington, D.C., and the National Archives, where I spent most of several months doing research in the military records of Missouri. But preparing my lecture provided a welcome diversion. The sources necessary for research, including several obscure nineteenth-century travel books and equally obscure folklore journals, were all at hand at the magnificent Firestone Library that Portions of this chapter were first published in Huntington Library Quarterly 49 (Autumn 1986): 307–23. Alligatormen and Cardsharpers | 89 housed a huge and underappreciated collection of western Americana donated by grateful alumnus and historian Phillip Ashton Rollins. It turned out that Jeanne Stone, Lawrence’s interesting and welcoming wife, was an exacting seamstress; after hearing about my lecture she kindly suggested sewing me a western riverboatman’s shirt for the occasion and found a pattern for it. The blue jeans I already owned, and I added a nice red bandana to the outfit. After my introduction by a bemused and not entirely approving professor Grafton, I strode to the podium and let out an enormous “WHOO-OOP!” followed by the wild keelboatman rap that begins the following paper, rendered in a poor imitation of Missouri dialect that was just good enough to fool this audience. At that “WHOO-OOP!” Marta Petrusewicz, a young Polish historian, then a visiting professor at Princeton, who had been turned around to chat with someone behind her as I was introduced, yelled and jumped up in fright, bruising her thighs on the fixed desks of the lecture hall and whooping in pain. This was a most gratifyingly macabre addition to the reading of my text. Twain read out loud proved to be beautiful and very, very funny. Warming up the audience by getting them laughing made the brutal mocking of poor people I analyzed in my lecture all the more emotionally charged: I first enticed my listeners into sharing the contempt, and then led them to understand the condescending and downright nasty implications of this genre of humor that they had just been enjoying. After leaving Princeton, I began to rewrite what had been a very oral presentation into an essay suitable for publication. During the next few years, two or three history and American studies journals turned it down; rather than feeling discouraged, I kept rewriting, thickening the analysis, and condensing an already fairly dense argument. I recall almost losing the sense of lives that had been lived and stories that had been told so intent was I on “working through” the theory and the argument. Rarely have I recrafted an essay to this degree—the “beauty” of composition became my uppermost concern, and I hoped I wasn’t subverting the raw power of the stories I was recounting. During my subsequent sabbatical, in 1984–85, I holed up at the Huntington Library in southern California to write the first draft of Inside War. While there, Guilland Sutherland, a young British woman who was 90 | Views from the Dark Side of American History editing The Huntington Library...