White Honor,Black Humour, and the Making of a Southern style

7/29/2019 White Honor,Black Humour, and the Making of a Southern style

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White Honor, Black Humor, and the Making of a Southern Style

Johanna Nicol Shields

Southern Cultures, Volume 1, Number 4, Summer 1995, pp. 420-430 (Article)

Published by The University of North Carolina Press

DOI: 10.1353/scu.1995.0033

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Frontispiece from Widow Rugby's Husband, by Captain Simon Suggs.


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White Honor, Black Humor, andthe Making ofa Southern StyleJohanna Nicol Shields

Nothing about the South is harder to fathom than how European and AfricanAmerican traditions mixed in the lives ofnineteenth-century people. Although

some black and white southerners have flatly denied cross-cultural influences,even those who want to find connections must dig deeply forevidence.1 In whatfollows, I suggest we mine a neglected sourcesouthwestern humorbecause I

believe that slaves helped to inspire it when, by acting out the tricksterstyle fromtheir African heritage, they subverted white honor. Humorists copied, exagger-ated, and published these curious exchanges between powerand wit, taintingthem with racism while capturing them in form. Understanding the dynamicsofthis influence requires reading blatantly offensive stories like the one printedhere; but with that forewarning I offer an example ofhow an African American

spirit lives beneath the dialogue in antebellum humor. Here, by sketching awould-be trickster at work and making an attempt to copy his voice, onehumorist blends traditions born on two different continents into a southern style.

The man who wrote this story was one ofthe most talented ofthe popularhumorists: Johnson Hooper, a newspapereditorliving in the backwoods ofeast-ern Alabama, who tapped a national market in 1845 with his first book, Adven-tures ofCaptain Simon Suggs.2 A trickster par excellence, Suggs lives by his wits,exploiting the "soft spots" ofhis victims to bring them ruin. Almost all ofSuggs'sscams involve free people, at whose follies we can laugh, but here, in a story from

Hooper's second collection, The Widow Rugby's Husband, halfofthe joke is aboutTony, a slave.3 We cannot laugh at him, as Hooper's readers did. Generally speak-ing, people laugh at things that are incongruous, at situations that fail to meettheirbasic expectationsthose expectations that they articulate and those thatare unspoken. Ifwe apply modern sensibilities and moral expectations to thisold story, we will neverunderstand why Hooper's readers laughed. To do that,we have to suspend judgment and try to think as Hooper hoped his readerswould thinkabout the small drama between Captain Stickand Tony.


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Capt. Stickand Toney

Old Capt. Stick was aremarkably precise old

gentleman, and a consci-entiously just man. Hewas, too, very method-ical in his habits, one of

which was to keep anaccount in writing oftheconduct of his servants,

from day to day. It wassort of account-current,

and he settled by it ev-ery Saturday afternoon.

No one dreaded these

hebdomadal balancings,more than Toney, the

boy of all-work, for theCaptain was generallyobliged to write a re-ceipt, for a consider- Reprinted from Harper's New Monthly Magazine, 1855.

able amount, across hisshoulders.

One settling afternoon, the Captain, accompanied by Tony, was seen "tod-dling" down to the old stable, with his little account book in one hand, and asmall rope in the other. Afterthey had reached the "BarofJustice," and Tony had

been properly "strung up," the Captain proceeded to state his account as follows:

Tony, Dr.Sabbath, to not halfblacking my boots, &c, five stripes.

Tuesday, to staying fourhours at mill longer than necessary, ten stripes.Wednesday, to not locking down the hall door at night, five stripes.Friday, to letting the horse go without water, five stripes.Total, twenty-five stripes.Tony, Cr.Monday, by first-rate day's workin the garden, ten stripes.Balance due, fifteen stripes.

The balance being thus struck, the Captain drew his cow-hide andremarked"Now Tony, you black scamp, what say you, you lazy villain, why I

shouldn't give you fifteen lashes across yourback, as hard as I can draw?"


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Shields: White Honor, BlackHumor423

"Stop old Mass," said Tony; "dar's de work in de garden, sirdat ought totek off some."

"You blackdog," said the Captain, "hav'nt 1 given you the proper credit of

ten stripes, forthat? Come, come!""Please old massa," said Tony, rolling his eyes about in agony of fright

"dar'syou forgotdar's de scourin' ob de floorold missus say e nebberbeenscouras good before."

"Soho, you saucy rascal," quoth Captain Stick; "you're bringing in more

offsets, are you? Well now, there!"here the Captain made an entry upon hisbook"you have credit offive stripes, and the balance must be paid."

"Gora mity, massa, don't hit yetdar's sumpen elseoh, Lord! pleasedon'tyes, sirgot urn nowketchin' de white boy and fetchin' urn to ole mis-

sus, what trow rock at de young duck.""That's a fact," said the Captain"the outrageous young vagabondthat'sa fact, and I'll give you credit often stripes foritI wish you had brought him tomenow we'll settle the balance."

"Bress de Lord, ole massa," said Tony, "dot's all" Tony grinned extravagantly.The Captain adjusted his tortoise-shell spectacles with great exactness, held

the bookclose to his eyes; and ascertained that the fact was as stated by Tony. Hewas not a little irritated:

"You swear offthe account, you infernal rascalyou swear offthe account,

do you?""All de credit is fair, old massa," answered Tony."Yes, but"said the disappointed Captain"butbut"still the Captain

was sorely puzzled how to give Tony a few licks any how"but"an idea poppedinto his head"where's my costsyou incorrigible, abominable scoundrel? Youwant to swindle me, do you, out ofmy costs, you black, deceitful rascal?" "And,"added Capt. Stick, chuckling as well at his own ingenuity as the perfect justice ofthe sentence, "I enter judgement against you for coststen stripes"and forth-with administered the stripes and satisfied the judgement.

"Ki nigger!" said Tony, "ki nigger! what dis judgmen for coss, ole massatalk 'bout. Done git off'bout notblackin' de bootgit off'bout stayin' long timeat de milland ebry ting elsebut dis judgmen for coss gim me de debbilBress God, niggermust keep out ob de ole stable, or I'll tell you what, dat judgmen'forcoss make e back feel mighty warm, fortrue!"

Johnson /. Hooper's The Widow Rugby's Husband, A Night atthe Ugly Man's and OtherTales ofAlabama (1851).

Because Hooper's greatest talent as a humorist lay in his skill at capturing the

spoken word, the voices he mocked let us imagine historical conversations. Thedialogue in most early American fiction was flat, containing nothing but polite


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speech, but Hooper's prose was lively, copying common speech whether it wascrude or not. As a result his writing was considered too rough forwomen and

beyond the pale ofpolite literature. We presume that most of his readers were

men, and we know that there were many ofthem. Between 1845 and the CivilWar, more than a dozen and a half different printings of his two books wereissued by northern presses, and hundreds of his stories appeared in magazinesand newspapers. Since Hooper's work turned up all over the United States, wecan read his stories forevidence ofa mentality extending beyond the tiny placewhere he lived. If we attend to the dialogue he used to make this little talefunnyby nineteenth-century standardswe can try to reconstruct his inten-tions and his readers' responses.

Origins ofTricksters

Trickster stories like Hooper's are an important part ofthe legacy ofantebellumsouthern humorthat modern scholars first began to appreciate early in the twen-tieth century, when law and custom drew a color line between black and white

southerners. Like the public at large, most writers assumed that African Americanfolkways were barbarized imitations ofAnglo American forms. Today, however,scholars have identified the African origins of numerous patterns in slave cul-ture, patterns that expressed deeply rooted folk traditions. Thus we can finally

begin some genuine analysis ofcross-cultural influences. We now know a good bitabout two kinds ofsouthern trickster stories before the Civil War. Both ofthemdrew from experience and tradition; but one form was African American, pri-marily oral and African in origin, while the otherwas Anglo American, oftenwritten and European in origin. In folkcultures throughout the world, tricksterstake many formshuman, animal, and fantasticbut everywhere, they live bytheirwits, fooling strongeropponents through cunning words. Up against supe-rior force, tricksters are sometimes beaten, and the stories encourage resistancewhile warning ofits danger. Tricksters return time and again, however, to chal-

lenge the powerful around them.African trickster tales served important purposes in the Old South. Toldaloud, they comforted slaves, who gradually modified them to fit Americanscenes. Slaves also applied the trickster's style to cope with lackofphysical power,laughing in theirsleeves as they outsmarted "Old Massa." But theirvictories weretemporary, with uncertain outcomes. Did this tactic contribute to the spirit that

brought slavery down, ordid laughterpostpone resistance by reducing the ten-sion that fed it? Those important questions have no easy answer, and scholarsdiffer about the results of the trickster form while agreeing that it became an

enduring pattern in African American culture.4Trickster stories appeared in European literature from its beginnings, and


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they, too, were transported to the New World, where they found a home in folkstories and popularliterature. In southern writing the most prominent tricksters(such as Hooper's Suggs and George Washington Harris's Sut Lovingood) were

adult white men speaking one oranothervernacular form ofAmerican English.5Most scholars believe that black characters in antebellum humor were variations

on the Sambo stereotype, whose efforts to be smart were made to appear trans-parently stupid. Finding no significant relationship between the African and Euro-pean American traditions, recent scholars have emphasized that white writers

trotted blackcharacters into a scene only to put them down.6 Ifslaves tried to betricky, they were mocked for their inability to convert brieftriumphs into a last-ing revolution. Without disputing that basic point, I believe the humorists'response to the African American tricksterstyle was sometimes more complex.

The Tricksterand the Southern Code

My interpretation relies upon the influence of southern honor, an ethical codethat tookdifferent forms among various classes of people but everywhere had acommon ingredient.7 To create a pecking order, men battled in contests thatranged from formal duels and courtroom trials to horse racing, bare-knuckled

boxing, and joke telling. African Americans were outside of the pecking order,for the unwritten code classified them as too lowly to compete. In general,

proslavery doctrine supported this rule by insisting that childlike darkies werepassive and ignorant, not active and smart, and it played upon widespread racismto argue that slavery was both benevolent and reasonable.

Tricksters spoiled the whole picture. To begin with, they drew masters intocontests that were not supposed to occur at all. If tricksters failed, theireffortscould be treated as evidence forthe Sambo stereotype, or, they could not always

be outwitted. As winners, they created an impossible predicament for masterswho were outwitted and knew it. Were they to punish slaves forlaughing? Howcould a tricksterbe put down without a contest that was forbidden by honor, on

the one hand, orirrational powerthat was at odds with proslavery ideals, on theother?

This story gives us Johnson Hooper's version of the problem. Ifwe lookmerely at the narrative structure, it is simple enough. Captain Stick, the master,devises a system ofrewards and punishments to discipline his slave, Tony, who

beats the system by counting the credits and debits fora week's performance bet-terthan his masterdoes. But the master wants to punish Tony anyway, so he dis-regards his own system, makes up new rules on the spot, and whips Tony, puttinghim back in place by force. This story is complicated, however, when we con-

siderdialogue as well as narrative. Hooperuses three voicesthose ofthe narra-tor, Stick, and Tonyto tell his story. Although both Stickand Tony are stereo-


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types, he gives them depth by creating conflict through their dialogue as eachtries to outwit the other.

Tony and Stickupset the readers' expectations quite differently. Using racist

stereotypes, Stick's voice describes Tony as a lazy and deceitful Sambo. While thenarratorsays little to describe Tony, he does echo some ofthe stereotyping Stickuses, but he says nothing to affirm Stick's implications that the slave is malevo-lent. Moreover, Tony's voice is strong enough to raise doubts about Stick's judg-ment. Consider the way Tony works through the situation, using verbal repetitionto buy time: "Gor a mity, massa, don't hit yetdar's sumpen elseoh Lord!Please don't yes, sir got urn now." In contrast, when he thinks he has outwit-ted Stick, ("Bress de Lord, ole massa," said Tony, "dot's all" and "All de credit isfair, old massa,") he is terse. By the nature ofthe last credit Tony offerscatching

the white boy's cruelty to a duckwe can inferthat he understands Stick's cruelnature, which Stick's own words affirm: "I wish you had brought him to me."Stick's intelligence is as limited as his morality. He begins with a calculating

attempt to discipline Tony, but the narrator carefully focuses our attention onthe fact that Stick can barely figure Tony's credits from his own account book,when Tony has already done the necessary calculations in his head. When thestory ends, Stickhas assumed traits he said were Tony's, and the slave's characterhas become ambiguous. By ending with Tony's reflections, Hooperabandons thestability ofa narrative frameworkand leaves the readerto balance the conflicting

voices.8 Since Hooper refuses to draw an explicit moral ending other than theone Tony providesthat he must stay out ofthe stablewe can only inferwhatreaders might have seen as the meaning to this storythat is to say, what madethem laugh.

Hooperdoes give us two explicit texts to set against the words ofStickandTony: the code oflaw and the rules ofaccounting. As written standards both ofthese are inaccessible to Tony, who figures out accounting fairly well only to bedefeated by his inability to understand legal terms; his ignorance about "judg-ment for coss" enables Stick to whip him. In this respect Tony is demeaned

because he is illiterate, a result typical ofracist humor. But Tony is too smart totrust Stick. Tony's words contain no hint ofthe math he is using in his head, andthey indicate that the fact ofwhipping is more important to him than the relativenumerical relationships Stick wants him to accept. Furthermore, he lures Stickinto awarding him more credit without telling a lie.9 In the last analysis Stick

botches the methods ofaccounting and butchers the principles oflawas thenarrator's phrase "perfect justice ofthe sentence" tells us. In light of these twostandards, Stick and Tony are both supposed to be funny. Yet even though he

bends the rules, Stickwins the contest.

There are, moreover, two implicit texts against which Hooper's southernreaders saw this story: the code ofhonor and the proslavery ideology. By these


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codes Tony ends up in the proper place, but Stick does not, and both of thesecodes require that we see Stick as an equal target of Hooper's humor. Sticknotonly violates honor by competing with an inferior, he almost loses. Then he

whips Tony for no good reason, proving only that might makes right, a positionthat destroys all rational orbenevolent explanations for his status as a master.As a free white man Stickhas no excuse forhis shortcomings, and Hooper's cruelhumor holds him accountable. Nineteenth-century readers laughed on seeingStickput Tony down; however, they probably laughed louder at Stickbecause he

is demeaned with much greaterclevernessnot by Tony but by the author(theonly real winner in this story, when all was said and done).

Hooper unmasks Stick's sham, but in using Tony to make this point, theauthorallows a blackcharacterto be more than a little subversive. Why? In light

ofhis racism and proslavery views, Hooper has two good reasons forletting Tonyresist Stickin a limited way. First, Hooper draws Stick as a thinly disguised, evilYankee, who is as cruel, calculating, and rigid as his name suggests. Stick thusdeserves the shame the writer inflicts with Tony's near victory.10 Through Stick,Hoopersatirizes capitalism's extremes, playing upon readers' anxieties about theworld they were building and warning them that its impersonal methods wouldnot work with slaves.11 Second, Hooper partly sketches Tony as a "good" slave,willing in the end to accept his place with self-deprecating humorin spite ofhismaster's irrationality. Both this supposed docility and Tony's ignorance affirmed

to Hooper's southern readers that a benevolent form of slavery fit the AfricanAmerican character. In these respects, Hooper remains comfortably within theconfines ofproslavery ideals.

No ideology covers all situations, however. The confrontation betweencapitalism and slavery produced all sorts of anomalies, and one is reflected here.12Something new was created when the ancient trickster met the modern extor-tionist, and the satiric genre let Hooper create the context forthe competitionwithout defining the result. In the process he gave Tony a degree ofspunk, wit,and determination not characteristic ofa Sambo. Perhaps in allowing Tony's voice

to comfort Stick, Hooperunwittingly explored the clash of cultures more deeplythan he intended. Hooperwas trying, however, to make sense out ofa kind ofcontest he had surely seen before, one in which the wits of blackand white menwere unevenly matched, but not in the way white folks thought they should be.

Hooper's ambivalence about the contest becomes more evident ifwe con-siderresponses Tony could have made in this situation. Tony does not lash out atStick, who would enthusiastically beat him senselessquite believable becauseHooper emphasizes the master's cruelty. Tony rolls his eyes in "an agony offright," and he uses pleas to delay Stickwhile he works to gain credit, but these

hardly seem odd in light ofStick's eagerness to administer stripes.13 Tony doesnot fall apart and lose his bearings, nordoes he whine at the inevitable outcome.


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Instead, he ruefully accepts what he cannot change. He has entered a contestagainst the odds, armed only with his wit. But note the expectation Hooperbuiltinto this ending: even ifTony accepts the shame ofthis loss, he will certainly be

returned to the stable, and he will try and outwit Stick.Blinded to many realities by his racism, Hooper nevertheless heard AfricanAmerican voices daily. With typical honesty, he gave this blackcharactera gen-uine enough voice to shame his white master in the eyes ofmany white readersand to undercut the stereotype a nineteenth-century audience expected to find.Too much ofa racist to push his insights, Hooper simply gives Tony the last word,leaving his readers to askwhich character is the betterman, orwhich the worse.

By borrowing the voice ofan African American slave and imposing uponhim a garbled version ofthe trickster style, Hooper wrote black humor, in the

modern sense ofthe word. Wherever the trickster appeared in European andAfrican traditions, his tricks were provoked by the strength of his oppressor. Theoppressed people ofthe South were blacklike Tony, not white like Simon Suggs.

Nevera man to gloss overbrutal facts, Johnson Hooper knew that slavery restedfinally on white power that might not be benevolent. Believing that abuses of

power deserved punishment, he delivered it through satire. If, in the process, herecorded the spirit ofthe African trickster through the veil ofrace, he did notdeny the slave's humanity nordeprive an oppressed man of his wit and will.

The distance between comedy and tragedy narrows as we see the black

humor in "Capt. Stickand Toney" from differing perspectives. And so does thedistance between African and European American tricksters. We cannot general-ize much on the basis of one example, but as the body of scholarship aboutAfrican American culture grows, we should reexamine blackcharacters in south-ern humor, perhaps even rethink theirsignificance forwhite tricksters like Suggs.Here, as in Adventures ofCaptain Simon Suggs, Hooperreveals the hypocrisy peopleuse to hide theirvicious instincts. Like all ofhis stories, this one calls forlaughterthrough tears. To convey a tragic view ofhuman nature, a view shared by whiteand black southerners, Hooper mixes two trickster traditions into a distinctive

southern style.

Notes

I am indebted to my colleagues at the University of Alabama at Huntsville liberal arts collo-quium forhelping me see the multiple meanings in this story, and I am grateful to Anne Wyatt-Brown, David Estes, David Moltke-Hansen, and Lee E. Williams II for critical suggestions.

1. A recent collection ofessays by scholars who have explored the boundaries ofthisproblem is found in Ted Ownby, ed., Black and White Cultural Interaction in the AntebellumSouth (University Press of Mississippi, 1993). Because I have elsewhere (see below) provided

detailed documentation about Hooper's life, career, and his views on slavery, these notes referonly to particularly significant sources.


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2.Two paperbound editions are available: Adventures ofCaptain Simon Suggs, ed. M. E.Bradford, Southern Classics Series (Nashville: I. S. Sanders & Co., 1993); Adventures ofCaptainSimon Suggs, Library of Alabama Classics (University of Alabama Press, 1993) introduction byJohanna Nicol Shields. Nancy Snell Griffith compiled the most comprehensive recent biblio-

graphy of Hooper's works in Humorofthe Old Southwest: An Annotated Bibliography ofPrimaryand Secondary Sources (Greenwood Press, 1989).

3.This second collection originally appeared in a slightly different form as A Ridewith Old Kit Kunckerand OtherSketches and Scenes ofAlabama (Tuscaloosa, Alabama: M. D. J.Slade, 1849) and then two years lateras The Widow Rugby's Husband; A Night at the Ugly Man'sand OtherTales ofAlabama (Philadelphia: A. Hart, 1851), which was reissued in 1853 and pub-lished later in a combined format with the Suggs stories (Philadelphia: T. B. Peterson, 1858).Although unlikely, the shift in the spelling ofToney/Tony could have been deliberate ratherthan a printing error. It is therefore retained from the original.

4.Scholars from diverse disciplines explored the trickster tradition, including

Lawrence Levine, Black Culture and Black Consciousness: Afro-American Folk Thought fromSlavery to Freedom (Oxford University Press, 1977) and John W. Roberts, From Trickster toBadman: The BlackFolkHero in Slavery and Freedom (University ofPennsylvania Press, 1989). Inaddition, two works focus on the interaction between slave tricksters and their masters:

Bertram Wyatt-Brown, "The Mask of Obedience: Male Slave Psychology in the Old South,"American Historical Review 93 (December 1988): 1228-1252; and William W. Freehling, "TheDomestic Charade, II: Cuffee's Act," in The Road to Disunion: Secessionists at Bay, 1776-1854,(Oxford University Press, 1990), 77-97.

5.Many literary studies have related the American tricksters to the Europeantradition. Warwick Wadlington, The Confidence Game in American Literature (PrincetonUniversity Press, 1975) has an excellent chapter that places tricksters in Europe, America, and

elsewhere in theoretical perspective.6.The point is emphasized in regard to minstrelsy and humor in Joseph Boskin,

Sambo: The Rise and Demise ofan American Jester (Oxford University Press, 1986). In herrecent book Was Huck Black? Mark Twain and African American Voices (Oxford UniversityPress, 1993), Shelley Fisher Fishkin distances Twain from the southwestern humorists andHuckfrom Suggs and Sut on this score but she exaggerates the point. I have treated Hooper'sgeneral views towards African Americans and slavery in "A Sadder Simon Suggs: Freedomand Slavery in the Humor of Johnson Hooper," Journal ofSouthern History 56 (November1990): 641-664.

7.The definitive study is Bertram Wyatt-Brown, Southern Honor: Ethics and Behaviorinthe Old South (Oxford University Press, 1982). I am generalizing freely from that influential work,and my interpretation departs from Wyatt-Brown's discussions of black-white interaction.

8.It seems worth noting that Hooper uses a similar tactic in Adventures ofCaptainSimon Suggs, where he sometimes allows Suggs to close a story by reflecting upon a just-completed scam. Although the implications of Suggs's and Tony's soliloquies are different

because one wins and the other loses, the anarchic effects are similar.

9.Stick, who believes Tony to be deceitful, leads readers to expect that the slave willlie. Tricksters often (but not always) lied, which gave them a dubious moral status. Hooperhated lies, and his truth-telling frequently got him in trouble with polite society, a pointdeveloped at some length in my biographical introduction to Adventures ofCaptain SimonSuggs, vii-lxix. It needs repeating here because Stick, not Tony, is deceitful.

10. In an odd way he foreshadows Simon Legree, among the several provocativeparallels I see between Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin and Hooper's stories.


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11.It should be stressed that Hooper, like most other southern Whigs, thoughtcapitalism was just fine for white people.

12.No historians have explored these anomalies more carefully than Eugene andElizabeth Fox-Genovese. Particularly relevant are his Roll, Jordan, Roll! The World the Slaves

Made (Pantheon Books, 1974) and The Slaveholders' Dilemma: Freedom and Progress in SouthernConservative Thought, 1820-1860 (University of South Carolina Press, 1992). Hooper's

paternalism had limited relevance to white society, and it rested on largely secular bases, acharacteristic that separates it from mainstream proslavery ideology.

13.In his far-reaching study The Flash ofthe Spirit African and Afro-American Art andPhilosophy (Random House, 1983), Robert Farris Thompson notes the supernatural signifi-cance of "wide and protuberant" eyes as indicators of occult power. It seems reasonable tosuggest that "rolling" eyes had hidden purposes based on African beliefs, in spite of the factthat whites invariably interpreted the expression as one offear.

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