In a recent series of posts, we have been exploring the American Folklife Center’s collections of Jack tales. In this post we’ll look at one more tale from a collection that features some of our very earliest folktale recordings: the Alan Lomax, Zora Neale Hurston, and Mary Elizabeth Barnicle expedition collection (AFC 1935/001). As I mentioned in our last post, the music in this collection is very influential, and to some extent it has overshadowed the storytelling, so the fact that this collection is an important source of Jack tales and other narratives has rarely been recognized. It’s also important to mention that although the illustrious folklorist and novelist Zora Neale Hurston traveled with the expedition through Florida, and although she had suggested the trip to the Bahamas in the first place, for personal reasons she withdrew from the expedition before the collectors left for the island nation. Therefore, the recordings and photos were made by University of Texas student Alan Lomax and NYU professor Mary Elizabeth Barnicle.
Within our numerical file for this collection in the Folklife Reading Room, there happens to be a transcription of one Jack tale along with some other tales. We don’t know who made them or when, but we know they have been there since at least 2012, and might therefore have been made by a staff member who is no longer at the Center. Listening to the Jack tale with the transcript in hand, I realized I could understand certain words that the transcriber missed, largely because I was familiar with other versions of the story and the songs within it. Therefore, I’ll present my own transcription in this post, but it’s influenced quite a bit by the one prepared by my unidentified colleague.
The tale in question was labeled by Lomax as “Jack Rescues the Princess Lucy-Ann from the Tiger.” However, the princess’s full name in the tale is “Lilianne Lucianne Julianne She’s Gone,” hence my title, revised for brevity rather than completeness! Hear the tale in the player below, and follow along in in the transcript; then, read on for my analysis of the story. (Note that I transcribe singing in italics, indenting the tiger’s and Jack’s song once and the princess’s response song twice.)
Jack Rescues the Princess from the Tiger
Sung and spoken by Alexander Finderson and Group
Grants, Mangrove Cay, Andros Island, The Bahamas
Collected by Alan Lomax and Mary Elizabeth Barnicle, 1935.
Transcription
Once upon a time and a very good time
Not in my time but in old people’s time
Parakeet shit reason,
old people take it and make seasoning
Don’t believe me ask the captain,
And he’ll tell you straight on.
Well, this was the king had a daughter, name of Lilianne Lucianne Julianne She’s Gone.
Well, anyway, after this girl been sitting herself
“Father,” she said, “Listen.
“Excuse me,” said, “I want you to let me come out and catch the air by sea today please, will you?”
So, her father told her, “Yes, my dear child,” he said,
“if you desire it,” he said,
“you’re always welcome to it.”
And anyway, after the servant come out,
after the servant come out,
well, they went by the sea beach to catch the cool.
Well, at the same time as she went, and she started back to come home,
why, Tiger come and snatched this girl up and away he went with this girl.
Well, this girl was missing from the home about seven years,
seven long years.
And king told them,
he said to put mens out on the land and hunt where this girl is.
Well, they put men out and hunt this girl as far as they can.
Well, anyway, they didn’t come by this girl nowhere.
Well, Jack start talking to himself,
he said he would get his apparatus straight and get out in the woods.
And he will come by this girl if it’s anywhere in the world,
he’ll come find her anyhow.
And Jack get his bag,
picked up all his fixings in his bag,
and he travels.
And, anyhow, Jack travels for over four days.
The day he make it five days he got to a strange tree.
And this hole by this tree looked very suspicious to him.
Anyway, he stay there, [lay in] ambush by this hole and see what come by it.
And anyhow, Jack stood aside and take notice to see what would come by this hole.
So he been there for half an hour from that,
and anyway Jack heard a voice coming from the north,
coming down this way in the road.
Well, anyhow, after the Tiger get about five miles off from the hole he give his signal
Gola wang, wang wang wang wang
gobby, gobby woolla woolla
whapum woola kwapum
gola wang wa
The girl get out
My wife may ah Julianne She’s Gone
The girl come up part way out the hole
Tanky waya, Tanky waya
Tanky waya, Tanky Tiger
Gola wang, wang wang wang wang
gobby, gobby woolla woolla
whapum woola kwapum
gola wang wa
My wife may ah Julianne She’s Gone.
The girl sang
Tanky waya, Tanky waya
Tanky waya, Tanky Tiger
That time the Tiger up and looked at the hole and Tiger says
“I smell the blood of an Englishman!”
He says, uh, he says:
“What is the trouble around here?”
She says, “There’s lots of funks was around me just now,”
says, “I can’t explain where.”
And he says,
I know I can count on you, Miss Lucianne Julianne,
he says, I know you were distraught.
She says, “Oh, yes.”
Anyway, Jack went back to the king, and let him know he come by this girl.
Anyhow, he gave him fifteen thousand soldiers to come get this girl.
And an iron cage. Anyhow, he set him down in the hole.
Anyhow, Jack go over and sang his song this way to her:
Gola wang, wang wang wang wang
gobby, gabby woolla woolla
whapum woola kwapum
gala wang wa
My wife may ah Julianne She’s Gone.
Girl give out
Tanky waya, Tanky waya
Tanky waya, Tanky Tiger
[Disc change]
Now telling, say this girl must be going anyhow.
Tiger stay mad now, to see the way she come here
Gola wang, wang wang wang wang
gabby, gabby woolla woolla
whapum woola kwapum
gola wang wa
My wife may ah Julianne She’s Gone
The girl was way under and not ranging out
Tanky waya, Tanky waya
Tanky waya, Tanky Tiger
That time Tiger make him little bit ahead now.
Jack just sit on the side of them
ready for defend her.
Gola wang, wang wang wang wang
gobby, gobby woolla woolla
whapum woola kwapum
gola wang wa
My wife may ah Julianne She’s Gone
Girl give out:
Tanky waya, Tanky waya
Tanky waya, Tanky Tiger
That time then, Tiger make for the iron cage and Jack take that big bar and he do so:
Bang!
Tiger cock up one leg
Take up bar and he do so again. Bang!
Leg still, down.
He said, “go down the hole” he said, “find that cover and get him…mash him up!”
And he set that corn bag to cover him up and mash him right up to flour.
And she was lifted from the Tiger.
Bunday.
Jack Rescues the Princess from the Tiger: Analysis and Comments
As you heard, the recording quality of this disc was not the best, Finderson’s speech can be hard to understand, and there is a break where the disc was changed, so the collectors probably failed to capture some of the story. Nevertheless, it can be summarized pretty easily. The king’s daughter asks for permission to go to the beach to take the air. On her way back, unattended by servants, she is abducted by a tiger. No one finds her for seven years, until Jack sets out and soon sees a strange tree with a suspicious-looking hole in the ground. Jack waits by the tree and hears a strange song coming from a distance, which includes the words “my wife…Julianne She’s Gone.” The king’s daughter emerges partway from the hole and sings a song back. After the songs are sung several times back and forth, the tiger arrives. He smells “the blood of an Englishman,” and questions the king’s daughter, who says she can’t explain why there are strange smells. The tiger indicates that he trusts her. Meanwhile, Jack returns to the king, reports back, and is given an army and an iron cage. He returns to the hole and sings the tiger’s song. The princess emerges and sings her customary response. Here, the disc change occurs. I believe we miss a few words, and the first words after the break are Jack telling the soldiers they have to get the Princess out. But the tiger returns, singing his song. The princess hides far down in the hole. She responds in her usual way, but Finderson makes her sound muffled. Seeing the iron cage, the tiger attacks. Jack knocks the tiger out and perhaps kills him using the iron cage and a weapon. He then commands the soldiers to cover the tiger and “mash him up,” presumably to ensure he is dead. They then lift the princess out of the hole.
Finderson is obviously a very animated storyteller. When he sings the tiger’s song, I believe Finderson is miming the actions of the wild tiger; the audience becomes very excited, shouting and laughing and singing along. Similarly, I believe he is miming killing the tiger when he shouts “bang!” Finally, I believe when the tiger cocks up one leg after Jack’s first blow, then drops the leg after the second, this is a visual way of representing that the tiger is still partially conscious after the first blow, but fully knocked out by the second. It’s the kind of visual storytelling we might expect nowadays from cartoon animation. I imagine again that Finderson was miming the action, perhaps with an arm.
It’s not entirely clear how Jack kills the tiger at the end; my anonymous colleague thought Jack shot the tiger with a gun, which is possible, but I think I hear “iron bar” rather than “fire” and “do so” rather than “shoots him.” Also puzzling is the presence of an “iron cage,” which one might think would be to trap the tiger but which instead is somehow used to kill him.
To shed light on the tale’s ending, I relied on other versions of the same story from Andros. Elsie Clews Parsons collected two versions in about 1917. Curiously, she includes them in the tale type “Father Found,” which has a similar motif of people recognizing each other through songs. She evidently considered them all to be variants of the same story because they used versions of the “Tanky Waya” song. But as you can see in her book, versions I and II don’t feature the central motif of a woman marrying a tiger, which versions III and IV do. Therefore, I’d consider these to be two different stories sharing a motif, and consider only her versions III and IV to be versions of the same tale told by Finderson.
Looking at Parsons’ texts, in the one closest to ours (III) Jack is given not an “iron cage” but an “iron man,” which somehow kills the tiger. Though this could be some kind of automaton, I think the “iron man” may be a suit of armor for Jack himself, and that the “iron cage” in our version similarly serves to protect Jack while he battles the tiger in close combat–that’s the interpretation I chose for the transcription above.
We can learn even more by comparing this story to tales collected outside the Bahamas. For example, many variants of this basic plot, in which a woman is tricked or forced into marrying a tiger, and is then rescued, are widespread throughout India. Known generically as “The Brother Rescues His Sister from the Tiger,” and specifically often “The Tiger’s Bride,” “The (Brahman) Girl who Married a Tiger,” or “Shall I Show You My Real Face?” it has been collected in at least five different languages throughout India. The resemblances between Indian tales and this Bahamian text are not only in the general plot outline but in some quite specific details. For example, the Tiger being in possession of a “strange tree” is a feature of some Indian “Tiger’s Bride” tales, including some in which the tree grows cowrie-shells instead of fruit. The idea of the Tiger’s wife and cubs being kept in a cave or hole near the tree is also present in Indian versions.
The scene where the Tiger has not yet learned about the wife’s rescuer but suspects something is wrong because he smells unfamiliar humans is also strikingly similar to Indian versions. See the passage below, from the best-known Tamil version, published by A.K. Ramanujan as “Shall I Show You My Real Face?”
When the tiger returned, he sniffed all around and said, “I smell human smells!”
His wife said, “Of course, what do you expect? You married a human girl!”
“I know your smell. This is different,” he said.
Or take these passages, from a version collected in southern India:
At the tenth ghatikâ the tiger returned and growled out, “I smell a man! I smell a woman in my wood.” And his wife for very fear shut herself up in the house.
[…]
By this time the tiger returned, and perceived the presence of human beings by the peculiar smell. He asked his wife whether any one had come to their house. She said, “No.”
Compare these to the following passage from our Bahamian Jack Tale version:
That time the Tiger up and looked at the hole and Tiger says
“I smell the blood of an Englishman!”
He says, uh, he says:
“What is the trouble around here?”
She says, “There’s lots of funks was around me just now,”
says, “I can’t explain where.”
Note that in the Bahamian version the Tiger speaks the line so familiar from English Jack tales involving giants: “I smell the blood of an Englishman.” Otherwise, though, we are clearly reading differently worded variants of the same incident, in which the Tiger smells the rescuer and his wife dissembles to keep him from pursuing the issue.
As we’ve seen, variants of this story with different endings were collected by Parsons in Andros Island in 1917. These provide more evidence of a connection to Indian folklore. In one, for example, the human woman has borne tiger cubs, also a prominent feature of many Indian “Tiger’s Bride” tales.
Some versions of the Indian tale also feature songs. For example, we have a version of “The Tiger’s Bride,” collected in the Santhal Pargana division of the Indian state of Jharkhand. In this story, the woman who was married to a tiger first sings a song of complaint to her husband, then returns to her mother’s house and sings a song to identify herself, which is quite reminiscsent of our story.
Another, closer parallel to the songs in our version exists in a story collected once again by Elsie Clews Parsons–but this time from Gullah speakers in South Carolina. Parsons collected four versions of a story in which Ber Rabbit runs off with Ber Tiger’s wife, variants of numbers 35 and 36 in Folk-Lore of the Sea Islands, South Carolina. Like Jack in our story, Ber Rabbit calls Ber Tiger’s wife by imitating a song Ber Tiger customarily sings as he approaches, so that his wife will come to meet him. In the closest variant to our story, (presented as “variant” only in a footnote on page 51), Ber Tiger (and the deceitful Ber Rabbit) sing “Julia, Julia, Julia, gal,” and Julia answers “Ber Tiger one wife, Ber Tiger one wife.” Note also that the tiger’s wife’s name, mentioned only in the song, is Julia, and the wife’s name in the Bahamas story is given as “Julianne” in the song, another point of remarkable similarity.
The way the songs are used in the South Carolina story, along with the name “Julia,” are obviously quite close to our Bahamas tale. But the South Carolina narrative is overall very different from the typical Bahamas tiger story: the marriage of Ber Tiger to Julia seems to be a normal one rather than an abduction, and Ber Rabbit thus plays the trick of singing the tiger’s song to abduct her rather than rescue her. Other details of the Bahamas story, including the tree, the cave or hole, and the scene in which the tiger smells the princess’s rescuers, all make it seem much more like the Indian “Tiger’s Bride” type than the “Ber Rabbit and Ber Tiger” type. For that reason, I think it’s likely the tale came to the Bahamas, directly or indirectly, from India, after which it was combined with elements of Bre’r Rabbit tales.
The story has, of course, been adapted to the Jack tale format as well. In some Indian versions of the tale, the woman escapes on her own, with the help of sentient rivers and trees. In many, her brothers are the rescuers, but she is very involved in helping them trick her husband and manage her own escape. Because Jack tales feature the cleverness and persistence of Jack himself, the woman’s role in her own rescue is reduced in this Jack tale version of the story. And of course, specific phrases from the Jack tradition, such as “I smell the blood of an Englishman,” have become part of the story. Nevertheless, it feels very much like an adaptation of the common Indian theme.
It’s a minor mystery how a tale widespread in India, starring an animal that only lives in Asia, came to be told in the Bahamas, since there was never a large Indian ethnic population there. Still, it’s not hard to imagine how it could have happened. The Bahamas and India were both ruled by the same colonial power, and there was therefore cultural exchange between them since at least the 18th century. Colonial administrators, staff members, military officers, and common soldiers and sailors moved through different parts of the British Empire, bringing stories along for the journey.
More importantly, by 1917, over half a million people from British-ruled India had migrated to many other British colonies in the Caribbean, replacing slave labor with indentured and free labor. There are large Indian communities in countries with deep ties to the Bahamas, including Guyana, Trinidad and Tobago, and Jamaica. It’s likely this Indian story came to Andros by way of other Caribbean ports of call where Indians settled.
However it happened, in this story we see Asian, African, and European elements blended seamlessly into an exciting whole. It’s nice to know that Jack tales have such deep and far-reaching roots. Jack is clearly a global phenomenon and a citizen of the world.