Golden Arm. The basic plot is that someone steals something valuable (like a golden artificial limb, the "golden arm") from a corpse, and the dead person comes back to demand its return. There is a famous version told by Mark Twain. Themes: don't be greedy; respect the dead. Sometimes the thief is a family member, sometimes a robber. The limb (arm, leg, etc.) might be gold or silver. Or it might be some other object of value buried with the dead. Twain described it as a "negro ghost story" which is more evidence for how widespread it was among African American storytellers; he heard back in the 1840s when he was young.
The article mentioned Twain going on a reading tour with George Washington Cable, and that name rang a bell, but I couldn't remember, so I click on that.
George Washington Cable. Oh, right: from Louisiana! He wrote about Creole culture and traditions. He ended up moving to Massachusetts because he was promoting racial equality and protesting Jim Crow. He was born in 1844, and his parents were slaveholders. He served in the Confederate Army. His first novel was about a mixed-race Creole family. Essays like The Freedman's Case in Equity promoted anger among white Southerners. This article also mentions his friendship with Twain.
From there I went to an article about Cable's first novel:
The Grandissimes: A Story of Creole Life. This book sounds really intense! It culminates with a lynching that was inspired by a real-life escaped slave's story, so that is the article I went to next:
Bras-Coupé, which is an alias of Squire, the name of a slave in Louisiana. He was an entertainer, and he used the freedom to travel as a way to escape, but he as caught, and they cut off his right arm (how totally eerie that I started with a Golden Arm story; anyway, hence the name: Bras-Coupe, Arm-Cut-Off). He ran away again, and joined a gang of escaped slaves. Legends grew up around him: he was immune to bullets! Eventually he was killed by a former ally, who collected a $2000 reward.
There is lots more online about this remarkable historical figure... who I had never heard of before, and who I would not have learned about without this Wikipedia Trail! Bryan Wagner wrote a book about him... and I know Wagner from his tar-baby book! Small world! And hell's bells: he's a professor at Berkeley. Office in Wheeler Hall. SMALL WORLD indeed!
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