Tales with a Texas Twist Read online

  Tales with a Texas Twist

  Original Stories and Enduring Folklore from the Lone Star State

  Donna Ingham, Texas Tale Teller

  Illustrations by Paul G. Hoffman

  Guilford, Connecticut

  Helena, Montana

  An imprint of The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc.

  GlobePequot.com

  Distributed by NATIONAL BOOK NETWORK

  Copyright © 2018 by Donna Ingham

  Illustrations © 2018 by Paul G. Hoffman

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote passages in a review.

  British Library Cataloguing in Publication Information Available

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  ISBN 978-1-4930-3243-3 (paperback)

  ISBN 978-1-4930-3244-0 (e-book)

  The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992.

  Printed in the United States of America

  To Jerry and Christopher Ingham, my husband and son, who are first and always my best friends and best listeners.

  Acknowledgments

  This book might never have been without the encouragement and support of executive editor Mary Norris at Globe Pequot, who discovered the stories first and then the storyteller—definitely the right order of things—and then prodded me to submit a manuscript. From there a wonderful collaboration with illustrator Paul Hoffman and editors Sarah Mazer, Courtney Oppel, and Alex Bordelon resulted in this finished product. I gratefully acknowledge their artistry and guidance.

  Like all writers and storytellers I stand on the shoulders of those who have gone before, so I thank them all—especially pioneering Texas folklorists like J. Frank Dobie and others in the Texas Folklore Society, and my contemporaries in the storytelling community who are keeping the art of storytelling alive. I invite them to take these tales and pass the stories on in their own voices.

  Contents

  Acknowledgments

  Lone Star Storytelling

  The Myth of Cora Persephone

  Cupid Was a Mama’s Boy

  The Coming of the Bluebonnet

  The Ghost at Hornsby’s Bend

  The Legend of El Muerto

  The Lobo-Girl of Devil’s River

  The Ghost Light on Bailey’s Prairie

  The Babe of the Alamo

  The Yellow Rose of Texas

  The White Comanche of the Plains

  Sam Bass, the Texas Robin Hood

  The Story Behind the Story

  Old Blue

  Mollie Bailey Was a Spy

  Arizona Bill

  Diamond Bill

  Bigfoot Wallace and the Hickory Nuts

  The Life and Times of Pecos Bill

  The Meandering Melon

  One Turkey-Power

  See You Later, Alligator

  The Texan and the Blue Lambs

  The Texan and the Grass Hut

  The Three Bubbas

  Teeny Tangerine Twirling Rope

  Pedro y El Diablo

  The Old Woman and the Robbers

  Pretty Polly and Mr. Fox

  Br’er Rabbit’s ShareCropping

  Br’er Rabbit, Br’er Coon, and the Frogs

  Bibliography

  About the Author

  Lone Star Storytelling

  Texas is a big state, although it’s no longer the biggest. (Alaska has those bragging rights.) Still, Texas measures 801 crow-flying miles from the northwest corner of the Panhandle to the extreme southern tip on the Rio Grande, and 773 miles from the extreme eastward bend in the Sabine River to the extreme western bulge of the Rio Grande. According to the Texas Almanac, the state encompasses 267,277 square miles divided into 254 counties. Its size inspired some long-ago traveler to write, “The sun has riz and the sun has set, and here I is in Texas yet.”

  The folklore of Texas has a sense of bigness about it, too, and helps define what is unique about the Lone Star State in its myths and legends and other traditional folktales. The term myths, as used in this collection, refers to those stories that serve to explain a natural phenomenon or something about the customs of man. Myths usually include some supernatural element, some involvement of the god or gods within a culture. The Greeks and Romans established the pattern, at least in western civilization, and those ancient classical myths are still taught and told in Texas. They are likely to be told, however, in a distinctly Texas voice, as you will see in the Texanized versions of the Persephone myth and the myth of Cupid and Psyche in this collection.

  It is the Native People in Texas who have most eloquently preserved their own mythology in stories handed down for generations through the oral tradition. Many of those stories were ultimately collected by folklorists and published. They have thus become part of the larger body of work we call Texas folklore.

  One of the loveliest and most pervasive of these is a Comanche account of the origins of the bluebonnet, Texas’s state flower. Because many of the Native People are—with good reason— somewhat custodial about their stories, this oft-collected and oft-told tale is the only Native American one included in this volume.

  Although ghost stories certainly have elements of the supernatural, they also usually have some historical truth. For our purposes, that may have to be the distinction between myth and legend. Both are tales coming from the lore of a people, but legends have more historical truth and less of the supernatural in them. The stories of Josiah Wilbarger, a pioneer who survived his own scalping; of Vidal, a rustler who became the Texas headless horseman; of the Dent child who may well have been raised by wolves; and of Brit Bailey, a frontiersman who wanted to be buried with his jug of whiskey, are more nearly legends than myths given that all have historical bases and all are told as true.

  At the heart of most legends is someone whose deeds or exploits have gained recognition. That recognition may well come during the person’s own lifetime, but to reach truly legendary status, these deeds must be judged worth talking about by later generations. The stories of Angelina Dickinson, a survivor of the Battle of the Alamo; Emily West, a survivor of the Battle of San Jacinto; and Cynthia Ann Parker, a Comanche captive, play out against a backdrop of conflict in the early days of Texas.

  Outlaws such as Sam Bass and cattlemen such as Charles Goodnight and Oliver Loving still capture the imaginations of storytellers and their listeners, as do the adventures of Goodnight’s famous lead steer, Old Blue. Mollie Bailey’s covert operations for the Confederacy during the Civil War and the power of Arizona Bill’s stories likewise are worth preserving and passing on.

  Then there are those Texas tall tales about legendary characters and critters who are made larger-than-life for the amusement of both teller and listener. Yarns about Diamond Bill, a rattlesnake that fought in the Civil War; Bigfoot Wallace, a man whose outsized body matched his personality; and Pecos Bill, a cowboy who never went long without an adventure, remain extremely popular in Texas folklore. Add to those traditional tales the outright lies still being written and told to perpetuate the tall tale tradition, and you have a rich heritage of whoppers from which to choose.

  Several Texas cities now have an annual liars’ contest to encourage contemporary tall tale tellers. Included in this
collection are three of my winning stories from annual competitions in Austin, Houston, and George West, site of the state liars’ contest. They build on old tall tale motifs of giant fruits and vegetables and of remarkable human and animal antics.

  Rounding out the selections in this volume are several stories that play off traditional jokes and folktales and folk beliefs, many of which originated in Europe, came down through the Appalachians, and finally made their way into Texas. Along the way they were Americanized and now Texanized. That’s the way folklore evolves, of course—in the telling. Other stories have come into Texas from the south by way of Latin America, and still others had their beginnings with African slaves. All show the diversity and richness of Texas culture and folklore.

  Although I have included a bibliography at the end of this volume, it’s important to say a word or two here about some particularly significant folklorists and historians who laid the foundations for all Texas tale-tellers who followed. Chief among them is J. Frank Dobie. Born in the brush country of Live Oak County in 1888, this native Texan discovered early his love of stories and began collecting tales from the Southwest in general and Texas in particular. He became the editor of the Publications of the Texas Folklore Society in 1921, and he taught a popular class on the life and literature of the Southwest at the University of Texas in Austin from 1930 until he quit teaching in 1947. Dobie died in 1964. His collected stories fill more than twenty volumes and serve as a basis for virtually every variant of a Texas folktale told or written since.

  Dobie’s good friends Walter Prescott Webb, a historian, and Roy Bedichek, a naturalist, also contributed to the foundations of Texas lore and storytelling. Later historians, such as T. R. Fehrenbach, and biographers, such as J. Evetts Haley, continued to research and record details of the events and the lives that make up the story of Texas. To these and many others, we are indebted.

  Storytelling is both an art form and a means of passing on significant elements of a culture—the history, the traditions, the humor, the pathos. It is a way of entertaining and being entertained. In this collection you are invited to move through a storyteller’s guide to Texas, both geographically and culturally, and discover both the unique and the universal. You will also learn something of the storyteller’s journey, in a metaphorical sense, that may prompt you to begin your own quest for stories about who and where you are.

  So let us begin.

  The Myth of Cora Persephone

  I first started telling stories in the classroom when I was teaching college English, in the early 1970s. The United States space program was at its height, both literally and figuratively, and I thought it important that my students know for whom the Mercury and Apollo missions and the Titan rockets and so forth had been named. So I started teaching classical mythology. The Greeks and the Romans, it appeared, had a story to explain just about everything: where flowers came from, how we got love in the world, how the seasons came to be. The problem was that—good as those stories were—when my students read them out of the book, they were still just so much Greek as far as the students were concerned. Then we began to tell those stories and Texanize them a little bit. That’s when they really started to make sense. Out of those early classroom creations came these first Texanized myths.

  Take that story about the abduction and rescue of Persephone, for example. You may remember that Persephone was a sweet young thing. And timid. Why, you couldn’t melt that girl down and pour her into a fight. She was that timid.

  And she came from a real dysfunctional family, she did. Her mama was Demeter, the goddess of grain—corn, mostly—and her daddy was Zeus, the head god. But now here’s the thing, see: It turns out that Demeter was Zeus’s older sister, and we haven’t even gotten to the real story yet.

  Persephone’s other name was Cora. Some people called her Cora, and some people called her Persephone, but I’m pretty sure her mama always called her Cora Persephone because I think they lived on the south side of Mount Olympus, where everybody used double names, especially for emphasis: “Cora Persephone, you get yourself in here now! Supper’s ready.”

  Well, one day little Cora Persephone is out picking flowers with some friends of hers in the Vale of Enna when she sees this particularly large and beautiful flower. So she tries to pick it; only it won’t be picked. So then she tries to pull it; only it won’t be pulled. Now, she may be timid all right, but Cora Persephone is persistent, too. And she starts to tug and yank on that flower, and about that time—boom! A great big hole just opens up right there in the ground, and up comes Hades in his black chariot drawn by black horses. Hades gathers Cora Persephone up and plunks her down beside him in that chariot, and before the hole can close up again, back they go to his dark kingdom in the Underworld.

  To be fair, I do have to say this about Hades: his intentions are honorable, and he marries the girl. But it’s not exactly what you’d call a marriage made in heaven, if you know what I mean—nothing you’d want to brag about on the society pages of the Mount Olympus News. I mean, it can’t be very pleasant down there in the Underworld, what with all those dead people and all.

  Oh, and did I mention that Hades is Zeus’s brother? So, of course, he is Demeter’s brother, too. That means, my friends, that little Cora Persephone is married to her double uncle, and there you have a very early example of one of those family trees that does not fork.

  Meanwhile, Demeter has noticed that Cora Persephone is late getting home. So she goes to hollering: “Cora Persephone, you get yourself home now! Supper’s ready.” But Cora Persephone doesn’t come. Pretty soon Demeter starts to worry and then, thinking the worst, she starts to grieve. While she’s doing all this hollering and worrying and grieving, no crops are growing because, remember now, she is the goddess of grain—corn, mostly. So a big plague comes upon the land, and people are starving and dying, and she doesn’t even seem to care.

  Demeter is persistent, too, though. She keeps looking for her lost daughter, and finally, disguising herself as an old woman, she roams farther and farther away from home in her search. One day she makes her way to Attica and runs into some sweet little princesses, and they think she’s a homeless person or something. So they take her home with them and make it so she’s the nursemaid for their little brother, the prince.

  Demeter thinks because they’ve been so nice to her that she’ll do something nice in return. She decides to make their little brother immortal. She can do that, you know; she is a goddess, after all. First, she has to burn away his mortality, and she does that by sticking him in the fire every night. The little prince doesn’t seem to mind, but one evening the queen, the prince’s mama, walks in while Demeter is doing that. Well, of course, the queen screams. Any mother would seeing someone putting her baby in the fireplace like that.

  Startled, Demeter yanks the little prince out of the fire and then starts fussing at the queen and telling her, just for that, the queen’s going to have to build Demeter a temple and that the little prince won’t be immortal, as it turns out, because she didn’t get finished with him. And the queen was just doing the natural thing after all.

  After that one stop-over, Demeter continues to wander and search. She learns at last from a couple of river and woodland nymphs that it’s Hades who has her daughter down there in the Underworld, so she goes right straight to Zeus and says he’d better do something about getting her daughter back or the whole world can just go starve itself as far as she’s concerned. Zeus knows she means it, too.

  So Zeus tells Hermes, or Mercury—you know he’s the one with the little wings on his helmet and on his ankles; he works for the FTD florists now—to go tell Hades he’s going to have to let Cora Persephone go to keep the world from starving. And Hermes does. And Hades knows that Zeus means business and that he’s going to have to let Cora Persephone go.

  But before she leaves, Hades has her eat of the seeds of the pomegranate. Seeing as pomegranates are not ex
actly a cash crop in Texas, I better explain that the Greeks believed if you ate of the seeds, you had to go back to wherever you were when you ate them. That meant Cora Persephone couldn’t leave the Underworld forever, and she and Hades had to work out some kind of compromise.

  Here’s what they came up with: Cora Persephone would spend one-third of the year with her husband down in the Underworld and two-thirds of the year with her mama aboveground. That’s how we got the seasons, don’t you see? That time of the year Cora Persephone is with Hades is our late fall and winter, when the land lies fallow and no crops grow. When she comes back aboveground, during our spring and summer and early fall, that’s when the seeds sprout and grow and produce flowers and fruit.

  It is on that pleasant picture, then, that we will close her story because, to tell you the truth, that’s about as happy an ending as Cora Persephone is ever going to get.

  Cupid Was a Mama’s Boy

  I was probably most influenced in my retelling of classical material by the likes of Andy Griffith, who, prior to becoming the sheriff of Mayberry and a lawyer named Matlock on television, was a comedian/storyteller who called himself Deacon Andy Griffith. In addition to telling us “What It Was Was Football,” he recast Shakespeare’s Hamlet and Romeo and Juliet, for example, as understood by a hillbilly. I used the same approach in my Texanized interpretation of the following story from mythology.

  Cupid was a mama’s boy. He was. If you’ve read any of the stories about him, you’ll remember he was always doing the bidding of his mama, Venus, who just happened to be, of course, the goddess of love.

  These days we see Cupid as a fat little naked boy-child with a toy bow and arrow who’s full of mischief, flying around shooting people and making them fall in love with one another. But he wasn’t always that way. No sir. When some Roman fellow—Lucius Apuleius, his name was—wrote about Cupid back in century ought-two A.D., he made him a perfectly handsome young man. But he was still a mama’s boy.