Southern Frontier Humor: New Approaches

Morphing Once Again: From Jack to Simon Suggs to Aunt Lucille

[ 154 ] MORPHING ONCE AGAIN From Jack to Simon Suggs to Aunt Lucille WinifrEd Morgan TricKstErs rEsEMBlE sHit in tHat tHEy Elicit Hilarity or gravity, sometimes both. They are both ubiquitous.1 Neither is welcome in polite company. One indication that the characters Jack, found in oral tales developed in the hills and hollows of Appalachia, Johnson Jones Hooper’s Simon Suggs, and Mark Childress’s Aunt Lucille belong to a trickster tradition is that the same generalizations can be made about them. The Jack tales that developed in America over the last several centuries and the wily and usually reprehensible “heroes” of the early nineteenth century are often presumed to be time-bound. In fact, all three characters are American—specifically southern—avatars of the constantly changing trickster. Each is a type of Euro-American trickster that has reemerged during late twentieth and early twenty-first century in the fiction of contemporary southern writers such as John Kennedy Toole, Mark Childress, and Clyde Edgerton. Despite the sometimes vile and horrible things they do, tricksters are generally valued by the cultures that repeat their stories. Tricksters are always two-sided: neither moral nor immoral, they are oblivious to both. Nothing constrains tricksters, neither gender nor death—much less morality or inhibitions. They cannot be pinned down. They tend to be quite sexually active. Sometimes they help; sometimes they hinder. They are slippery, known for their ability to slip out of traps, to fit through small spaces. They are weak characters that use their weakness and wile to outwit the strong. Demi-gods, they can never be totally defeated. They destroy the old and create the new.2 Before tricksters appeared in contemporary southern literature, the tricksters of the Old Southwest entertained nineteenth-century reading audiences of sporting papers. Before tricksters from the Old Southwest appeared, oral Jack tales spread throughout and beyond the Appalachians. froM JacK to siMon suggs to aunt lucillE [ 155 ] Before the Jack tales, still other trickster tales were told around ancient fire pits. Tricksters are both indestructible and universal. For the most part, Euro-American tricksters in contemporary southern literature are con artists with roots in Anglo-American folklore. Jack-Tales Though additionally related to still earlier con men, the con artist or flimflam man of American popular and literary culture can be traced back to oral traditions about Yankee peddlers3 and the backwoods schemers found in the humor of the Old Southwest. These traditions themselves have ties to Appalachian Jack tales4 —best known in the relatively “safe for children” story of “Jack and the Beanstalk,” which remains current in American popular culture. Since children are the primary contemporary audience of most Jack tales, and since these trickster tales have been best preserved among people with close ties to their small Primitive Baptist mountain churches, not surprisingly most of the tales lack the salacious content of other trickster traditions. Nonetheless, according to contributors to William McCarthy’s Jack Tales in Two Worlds (xiv, xxxii, 8, 60), Jack tales have been and sometimes remain ribald, even though the tales are bowdlerized for audiences with women—and especially with children —in attendance. The core of some of the more suggestive Jack tales can be traced back to stories that also appear in Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales. Thus “How Jack Solved the Hardest Riddle,” told by Donald Davis, parallels “The Wife of Bath’s Tale.” In addition, Davis’s “The Time Jack Fooled the Miller” relies on the same trick as appears in Chaucer’s “The Reeve’s Tale.” Apparently, outside the hearing of women and children, many Jack tales take on racy overtones. “Jack and the Beanstalk” and other Jack tales belong to a cycle in English and Irish oral literature that migrated to North America during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The tales have parallels in much of European oral literature.5 Quite often Jack is a blatant trickster6 who pretends to be foolish—and sometimes he is indeed foolish. In America, particularly among the Appalachian hills and hollows where they developed most prominently and where they were influenced by other traditions , the setting of the Jack Tales became Americanized; Jack himself [ 156 ] WinifrEd Morgan became a local boy with qualities the community valued. Though often devious, he is usually a hard worker, generous, and imaginative. Since Jack is always on the lookout for ways to get ahead, he has to leave home and go on...