Southern Frontier Humor: An Anthology

Hardin E. Taliaferro (1811–1875)

250 Hardin E. Taliaferro (1811–1875) Though a prominent Baptist minister on the Alabama frontier, where he moved in 1835, and senior editor of Southwestern Baptist, a periodical principally intended for Baptist preachers and laymen in the state, Taliaferro (pronounced Tolliver) was born in 1811 on a farm on the Little Fisher River in Surry County, North Carolina, a region bordering the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia. He is best known for a collection of humorous sketches and tales, Fisher’s River (North Carolina) Scenes and Characters, by “Skitt,” “Who was Raised Thar,” published by Harper and Brothers in 1859. His formative years in Surry County served as the chief inspiration for Taliaferro’s humor. In Fisher’s River Taliaferro did what no other antebellum southern humorist had done before: he transcribed some of the tales, sketches, and sermons he remembered hearing local Surry County yarn spinners recount. Like his successor Joel Chandler Harris, the creator of Uncle Remus who would appropriate the animal folktales that he had heard slaves tell and would provide an authorial framework to introduce these humorous fables, Taliaferro also created a frame, using it to describe his local raconteurs such as Davy Lane, Oliver Stanley, Johnson Snow, Larkin Snow, and the Reverend Charles Gentry, the latter an African American slave and Baptist preacher and one of the few black characters featured in Old Southwestern humor. In Gentry, Taliaferro moved an African American character from the margins to the center. Using the frame device, Taliaferro set the stage for their oral accounts and anecdotes, with the first twenty-three chapters of Fisher’s River focusing on scenes in the northwestern section of Surry County. Following the publication of Fisher’s River, Taliaferro, though very busy with his activities as a minister and editor and publisher of a Baptist periodical, continued to write humorous sketches. In the summer of 1860, he wrote George William Bagby, the editor of the Southern Literary Messenger, inquiring about contributing some humorous sketches. Between November 1860 and October 1863, Taliaferro, under the signature of “Skitt,”the same pseudonym he had used in Fisher’s River, wrote nine humorous pieces for the Messenger, most treating subjects and characters similar to those in his book, but with less vernacular Hardin E. Taliaferro 251 voice. The best of the Messenger pieces—“Parson Squint, by Skitt, Who Has Seen Him,”“Tasting Religion,”“Sketch by Skitt: Johnson Snow and Uncle Davy Lane,” and “Deacon Crow”—all treat religious subjects. At the end of the Civil War, Taliaferro distinguished himself in yet another way from other southwestern humorists. In response to requests by some of the newly emancipated slaves, the American Baptist Home Mission of Society of Boston instigated a campaign in the South to establish African American churches and to provide ministerial training for interested black candidates. Taliaferro was one of the few white Baptist ministers in Alabama to volunteer, and between 1869 and 1872, he dutifully assisted in training blacks for the Baptist ministry in towns near Tuskegee. In addition, he promoted and helped to organize the first Baptist State Convention of African American Alabamian Baptists. Taliaferro’s contributions to the humor of the Old South in Fisher’s River, featuring lively folk materials, some of which are tall tales, mock-sermons, and oral anecdotes of real-life storytellers, are largely sympathetic, and an indication that he genuinely liked and appreciated the characters and scenes he treated. In his assessment of Fisher’s River, Cratis D. Williams observed that it “perhaps the most important book portraying the social life and customs of the Southern mountain people to appear before the Civil War.” Texts: “Ride in a Peach Tree,”“The Pigeon Roost,”“The Origin of Whites,” and “Jonah and the Whale,”Fisher’s River (North Carolina) Scenes and Characters, by “Skitt,”“Who was Raised Thar” (New York: Harper Brothers, 1859). Uncle Davy Lane I MUST not forget, in these random sketches, my old friend and neighbor Uncle Davy Lane. Some men make an early and decided impression upon you—features, actions, habits, all the entire man, real and artificial. “Uncle Davy” was that kind of man. I will mention a few things that make me remember him. His looks were peculiar. He was tall, dark, and rough-skinned; lymphatic, dull, and don’t-carelooking in his whole physiognomy. He had lazy looks and movements. Nothing could move him out of his slow, horse-mill gait but snakes, of which “creeturs he was monstrous ‘fraid.” The reader...