Week 9. Storybook Research: Taily-Po

Since I'm pretty happy with how the first story turned out, I'm doing my Week 9 Storybook project as a research project, getting ready for Taily-Po, the next story I want to tell, which is perfect for Halloween coming up too.

Taily-Po appears in Uncle Remus Returns (1918, one of the posthumous books, as Harris died in 1908), where it follows Impty-Umpty, another traditional supernatural story (a good one for Halloween too in fact!), and in both stories Harris has woven Brer Rabbit into the story, and in Taily-Po, he has woven in Mammy-Bammy too. That's actually quite strange, and I would give anything to know if he really did hear versions told with the rabbit this way, or if that was his own invention. There are illustrations by both Conde and Frost in the book, which makes me think these stories were perhaps published as magazine articles before being put in the book; I need to check on that.

... yep! Here it is: Metropolitan magazine, v.23 1905-1906 Oct-Mar., pages 451 and following, with more illustrations! The best one is the one in the book which I have in a high quality scan, but these are good to have too; they're at the bottom of this post.

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The story itself is really long, 2500 words with the frametale removed, so one challenge I face is just getting it down to a manageable size! Here are some notes I want to keep in mind:

There are "bad feelings" between Man and Rabbit. No need to go into details there, but the dogs are important: Mr. Man sics his dogs Ramboo, Bamboo, and Lamboo on the rabbit (compare dogs in the story of boy and his dogs). He escapes the dogs and goes to Mammy-Bammy for help. She has a skin hanging on the wall, with the head and tail and feet and everything; she puts it on the floor, then she sprinkles salton the fire and sings:
Rise, skin, rise,
Open your big red eyes —
Sharpen your long, black claws,
and work your big strong jaws!
The use of skins like this shows up in Plantation Witch, Ghosts and Witches, plus see Backus's story about Old Mammy Witch-Wise and what Parsons calls Out of Her Skin and She Takes Off Her Skin. The hide comes to life as the salt burns up in the fire. I like how it rubs against Mammy-Bammy "like a great, big, double-jointed wild-cat" while Rabbit just stays out of the way. The critter feels stiff at first, but he limbered up. Mr. Man is snoring in bed. Then he woke up, thinking he heard something. He manages to grab the critter's tail when he slammed the door, and it came right off, wiggling. He can't even hold it, it's wiggling so bad. He's surprised how it keeps moving. He tries to hold it down with his foot, and then it started hitting him. He got mad, and threw it in the fire. And then it jumped and sizzled! It's throwing ashes and coals out of the fire, and so he heaps more and more live coals on it so that it fried up, or so he thought. He goes back to bed. Then he hears scratching at the door, something gnawing at a crack in the door.
Taily-po! You know and I know
that I wants my Taily-po!
Over and under and through the door,
I'm a-coming for to get my Taily-po!
So he lay there in bed and then called his dogs. He sends the dogs around front. Nothing. Then he hears the voice again.
Your name, I know, is Whaley-Joe,
and before I'm going to really go,
I'm pleased to have my Taily-po;
Give me that and I'll gaily go —
Taily-po! My Taily-po!
The man goes to look for his dogs; no sign of them. The voice keeps coming. He cowers in bed, covered up. The critter gets in the house and is throwing things around in the kitchen looking for its tail. The man had put ashes on the embers on the coals in the fire to not lose the flame. The critter came to the hearth and started pawing in the ashes. It threw live coals around. Finally he grabbed the tail in his mouth and ran out of the house, and now the house is on fire. His neighbors realized there was a fire. Rabbit smelled smoke. And even way off in the swamp Mammy-Bammy smelled it. The last words of the story: "I smells meat a-fryin'!"

So, we've got basically three parts: the altercation with dogs (maybe 200 words?), the visit to Mammy-Bammy (300 words, or more?), and the Taily-Po (400 words).

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I remember being so disappointed by the folktale analysis that Baer provided. She ties it in with ATU366 Golden Arm, and doesn't acknowledge this as a popular folktale in Appalachia. Did the story spread and become popular as a result of Harris's story?

The "Golden Arm" type of story shows up elsewhere in Harris where the dead woman wants her Silver Coins (that's a really cool story too: I want my money!). That story appears in Nights, and Harris comments on it, connecting it to Twain who, he says, heard it from African American storytellers in Florida: "Mr. Samuel L. Clemens (Mark Twain) heard it among the negroes of Florida, Missouri, where it was "The Woman with the Golden Arm" (Twain himself told the story in dialect: Golden Arm, in How To Tell A Story). And about the versions he heard, Harris says: "it is possible that the white version is itself based upon a negro story. At any rate, it was told to the writer by different negroes."

Ashliman gives lots of references; I found Chase's Grandfather Tales versions at Internet Archive; screenshots below. Jacobs EFF has Golden Arm and Strange Visitor and Teeny-Tiny. Tailypo shows up in Botkin's American Folklore. Afanasyev has Lazy Maiden (see below; apparently also in Krzyzanowski). Crane's Italian book has Saddaedda. Grimm has The Shroud. I really need to get a complete edition of Briggs DBF.

Here's Wikipedia on Golden Arm. And there is an article on Taily-Po. Nice detail in other versions of Taily-Po is the way that the dogs disappear not all at once, but one by one. I can use that!

What makes Harris's story distinctive is the way that the Taily-Po is conjured up. I am really curious if there are other versions like that anywhere! Also, unlike the Golden Arm type of story, this is not a tale about our relations to the dead. Instead, this is a monster story, with the motif of the missing body part being ingeniously adapted; no doubt The Golden Arm story is widespread, but what's intriguing to me is the storyteller (presumably African American?) who first decided to cross that body-part motif with a monster legend. And then someone (Harris?) decided to make that monster be a conjured creature in a plot of revenge. Because Rabbit and Mammy-Bammy did Mr. Man in, and his dogs... and they used the Taily-Po creature to do it!

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Illustrations by A. B. Frost:

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In this one, the man eats the tail! Negro Tales from West Virginia by John Harrington Cox, in The Journal of American Folklore, Vol. 47, No. 186 (Oct. - Dec., 1934), pp. 341-2