Style and Sex in G. W. Harris's Sheriff Doltin Sequence
Hershel Parker
On academic visits South I used to claim to be a Faulkner critic,
according to my self-servingly stringent definition--anyone who had
published at least three pages in an issue of Mississippi Quarterly
edited by James B. Meriwether then had been argued with in print by
Cleanth Brooks. My record as a George Washington Harris critic may look
still more meager (the editing of a few Harris tales for the Norton
Anthology of American Literature), but I have qualifications for writing
on Harris shared by few. My mother learned to talk in a part of
Mississippi where one of the pronouns is "hit," and my father learned to
talk in the part of Oklahoma where people get frogs in their "froat" in
bad weather. When I was in the eighth grade, I discovered that the
pronunciation charts for vowels in Webster's Third Collegiate Dictionary
were all wrong--the start of my career as a textual scholar. If you
pronounced according to those charts, you couldn't eat aigs for
breakfast or run away on your laigs, much less drive a tin pinny nail
straight. On the other hand, I have some disqualifications. Harris
helped to do in a lot of my Cherokee kinfolks, and I do not enjoy
hearing Sut Lovengood on "Injuns," "niggers," or the "Israelite" who
"vash not Levi Shacobs." (l use "Lovengood" because that was the way the
name appeared in early newspaper printings.)
But anyone with a sense of history must deal with such passages In
Harris as they do with similar passages in Shakespeare, Milton, and
Wordsworth, without roiling in self-righteousness, Moral superiority to
great artists is not one of our more admirable stances. And in the face
of political correctness, I take Harris to be one of the greatest
American artists. In saying this, I assume that men and women become
professors of American and British literature because they love to read
literature and love most of all to read that literature which most
challenges and offers the most intense rewards--usually, the literature
that generations of readers, or at least some fine readers in different
generations, have identified as extraordinary, great, in one way or
another. I assume also that professors of American and British
literature as a matter of course try to surmount their own limitations
of background and experience so as to comprehend attitudes relating to
race, class, gender, genre, and style as they vary over decades and
centuries, determined to understand as fully as possible before judging.
Those assumptions, I acknowledge, are not universally shared among
professors, many of whom in recent years have repudiated the very idea
of literary greatness. Such professors, and those professors who have
transformed some English departments into cultural studies departments,
have not yet shown much interest in reading George Washington Harris
sympathetically, however significant the role he played in forming mass
American culture. Even undoctrinaire readers, those who try to listen
sympathetically to diverse voices of the past, will have to overcome
moral obstacles before enjoying the Sut Lovengood stories, as I do when I
deal with Harris's behavior toward Cherokees in real life and Sut's
attitude toward Injuns in Harris's fiction. I knew, in my youth, one
Indian ancestor born to survivors of the Trail of Tears, and in 1994 I
have a living half-Indian aunt, as old as the century, born in Indian
Territory, whose mother was deprived of her tribal rights by white
chicanery. [2011: She lived in three centuries, it turned out, but not
very long in two of them.] Were I interested in feeling victimized, I
could find grounds for not reading George Washington Harris. But by
politically correct standards, no one in nineteenth-century American
literature can escape whipping--not the sexist Hawthorne, sure that
women should not try to think; not the bigoted Stowe, appalled at the
immigration of Europeans who did not speak English; not anyone. If we
decide to avoid reading and teaching once-popular or once-respected
writers because we are morally superior to them, we quickly run out of
people to read and teach. As we get older, most of us begin to accept
our benighted parents, aunts and uncles, and grandparents (as long as
their behavior stops shy of criminality) rather than shunning them
because their social views are less enlightened than ours at any given
moment. Any best-selling therapy book tells us that if we write off our
families we cut ourselves off from our own histories and go through life
as less than whole human beings. In similar ways, writing off our great
writers diminishes us personally and very quickly diminishes us as
teachers.
Of course even very competent writers can be so driven by bigotry, by
sheer hatred, that any reader would want to avoid them, most of the
time, the way a decent person may avoid any slasher movie, on principle,
however cunning a reviewer says the camera angles are. Some of Harris's
attacks on Lincoln, written in wartime (amid sufferings we cannot
imagine), may be too rabid for us to read now with any aesthetic
pleasure. Yet the pleasures of reading most of Harris are great indeed,
and I deprive myself if I avoid Harris because of things he did to or
said about some of my tribespeople. I reserve my outrage, just now, for
anthologists who think they can enhance my self-esteem as a
quarter-Indian by having me read a white man's homily packaged as if it
were a speech delivered by "Chief Seattle," or a white racist's
best-selling fake autobiography The Education of Little Tree, or a poem
on "The Atlantic Cable" by John Rollin Ridge, an earnest Cherokee
kinsman of mine who was just well-educated enough to write conventional
English verse. I would rather enhance my self-esteem, the Cherokee and
Choctaw parts included, by reading something better, even if it is by a
white man or white woman. As a son of a halfbreed [less than half
Indian, I know in 2011], I resented being excluded from good things when
I was young, and I am not about to exclude myself from them now. Forty
years ago [make that 60 and more, now], when I read Walt Whitman's
announcement that his "Song of Myself" was the meal equally set, I knew
he meant it, and I knew that my invitation was irrevocable, whoever I
was. The Sut Lovengood stories are also a meal set for anyone to come to
on equal terms, even-or especially-e-cultural materialists.
A problem beyond political correctness is that some people cannot easily
decipher the invitation to read the Sut stories: the dialect looms as
an intimidating barrier. Yet there is no need to feel left out. Even if
you were not lucky enough to learn to talk from a mother who learned to
talk in Mississippi (or, still better, Tennessee), all you have to do is
read the stories aloud, learning pronunciation patterns as you go and
pretending you are reading them the way William Faulkner or Eudora Welty
would, on an uninhibited evening in a circle of friends. The effort it
takes to enter into Sut's world is repaid by bounteous rewards,
heaped-up delights. In all of nineteenth-century American literature,
there is no politically correct meal that remotely compares to the
riches of Harris's banquet, and, to tell the truth, even a lot of the
passages we all teach in Mark Twain look a little watery when judged
against the bald-face whiskey of Harris's prose.
Having held forth on political and linguistic hurdles to reading Sut, I
will focus my loving tribute to his creator George Washington Harris on
three Sut Lovengood stories, "Rare Ripe Garden-Seed." "Contempt of
Court--Almost," and "Trapping a Sheriff"--what I call for convenience
the "Sheriff Doltin sequence." I will lead into my discussion by looking
at some of the preliminary biographical-bibliographical problems any
reader of Sut Lovingood. Yarns Spun by a "Nat'ral Born Dum'd Fool"
(1867) confronts, then by talking generally about author and audience in
Harris's tales, a tricky subject, and unusually tricky because of the
state of scholarship.
Despite the work of Franklin J. Meine, J. Cleveland Harris, John J.
Hellin.jr., Donald Day, Ben Harris McClary, M. Thomas lnge, my student
Janet Casey, and others, we do not have all the Sut stories that Harris
published, some of which probably are no longer extant. Some stories
that were printed are known only by references to them in surviving
stories and some stories are known only by quotations from them or
references to them by early admirers. We do not know in any detail the
sequence in which the known Sut stories in Yarns were composed, because
we have to rely on only a little external evidence--the knowledge of
when a handful of stories were printed in newspapers--and some internal
evidence, such as cross-references to earlier stories in later-written
ones (though some of these references could have been planted as Harris
put together the book). We assume that the stories in the newspapers
were written in something like the order of their publication, but we do
not know for sure. Some of us assume that many, if not most, or even
almost all, the stories in the 1867 volume were first printed in
newspapers, but we do not know for sure. (We do not know, for instance,
of any previous publication of the Sheriff Doltin sequence.) We know not
to assume that either the order of the first printings in newspapers or
the order of the stories in the book will necessarily correspond with
the order of composition. "Blown up with Soda" starts off as if it
should follow the starched shirt story more closely than it does in the
book, yet Milton Rickels lists the first surviving text of "Sut
Levengood's Shirt" (Yankee Notions, October 1857) not earlier at all but
later than the first known text of "Sut Lovengood Blown Up" (that of
the Nashville Daily Gazette, 21 July 1857, reprinted from the Savannah
Morning News of some unknown date). Janet Casey, one of the succession
of students I sent down to the Library of Congress to solve such
mysteries, found just what you would hope to find, an earlier printing
of "Sut Lovengood's Shirt," in the Nashville Union and American (1 May
1857), as well as a reprint in the Louisville Democrat (7 May 1857). (I
have been planning for years to make a systematic sweep for unknown Sut
stories, as a gift for Nathalia Wright, and in the meantime have taken
comfort from several reprintings of known stories that Janet Casey, and
also Robin Gaither, have discovered.)
Many other matters that look anomalous to us may yet be explained, such
as possible clues to the time of composition of the Sheriff Doltin
sequence in relation to other stories. The Sheriff Doltin sequence in
the 1867 book follows well after the story of "Bart Davis's Dance,"
which like the Doltin stories is not known prior to book publication.
There is one clue to the date of the Bart Davis story, Sut's allusion to
the famous wartime phrase "all quiet on the Potomac," which does not
particularly help, because it could have been added in 1867 or before
and because there is no such datable reference in the Doltin sequence.
However, in "Contempt of Court--Almost" Harris has Sut use the word
"horspitable" without playing upon it in any way, an odd lapse unless
this story was written before "Bart Davis's Dance," where Sut creates
chaos by persuading Davis that "ole Sock" the "hard-shell preacher" had
insulted him by saying" 'Yu is hosspitabil.'" There is, in short, a lot
we do not know (even whether or not Harris wrote the Sheriff Doltin
stories sequentially).
Ignorance, however, is not going to stop me from making some more
guesses now. I would guess, for starters, that Harris was a remarkably
privileged writer. That may sound like an odd thing to say about a man
who was long frustrated in his efforts to publish a collection of the
Sut stories, who faced censorship in the Spirit of the Times at least
once, who made arrangements for a series of Sut stories to appear in the
New York Atlas only to have the project fizzle out, who died on the way
home after arranging to publish his second book, the manuscript of
which disappeared (left on the train when Harris was carried off
unconscious at Knoxville, as Professor Meriwether thinks possible, or
kept and suppressed by his new second wife and her family, as some of
Harris's children thought). Privileged indeed! But as far as we know
there was a ready market for his stories in the newspapers once Harris
had published "Sut Lovengood's Daddy, Acting Horse" in the Spirit (4
November 1854). In a backhanded way, it is a great privilege not to have
to get paid for your stories but to publish them to the delight of your
friends in Tennessee and strangers around the country. [You could say
something of the same sort about the privilege of blogging in 2011.] I
would guess that the references in the stories to earlier Sut stories
are not at all evidence of self-promotion for Harris or even a
calculated attempt to establish a richly storied background for Sut.
Knowing that his stories were reprinted enthusiastically all around the
country--knowing of printings in some papers we have not yet
searched--knowing of printings in many other papers no longer
extant--Harris made these references as a convivial way of recalling and
celebrating pleasures he and his readers had already shared.
And I would guess that once the "Acting Horse" story was published and
widely reprinted and talked about, Harris did not have to worry about
holding an audience. After a while, in any newspaper story (certainly in
any story first printed in the Yarns), Harris could trust the reader to
have confidence in Sut as a narrator, to know that Sut's
self-deprecation of his ability as a storyteller was a surefire way of
entrapping any unwary auditor around the camp or outside the doggery. In
"Mrs. Yardley's Quilting," for instance, Sut claims to ladle out his
words at random, "like a calf kicking at yaller-jackids" (135), but he
turns that mock apology into a put-down of the man with a wen over his
eye. In "Frustrating a Funeral," Sut says he thinks at random, just as
he talks and does. He knows better, and we had better know better. In
"Eaves-dropping a Lodge of Free-masons" Sut taunts George into trying to
tell the story, but when George starts off in pompous formal style, Sut
breaks in and decides to tell it his way, to "talk hit all off in
English" (I 16). No contemporary reader could have doubted that Sut was
in control in the narration. The modern reader, coming without
preparation to one story or another, may have more trouble. A reader of
the Cohen and Dillingham Humor of the Old Southwest, for instance, might
well be confused about Harris's skill as a storyteller, inasmuch as
that collection includes the first two stories in the Doltin sequence
but not the final one, which resolves the plot lines.
Sure, Sut's way of telling a story may seem random enough to any new
reader. In "Rare Ripe Garden-Seed" Sut bombards the reader, rapid-fire,
with an anecdote about his "fust big skeer" from the sheriff who took
away the bed and chairs when Sut was the baby of the family; a
philosophical digression on the pecking order of the universe (better
than anything in Dreiser); a little essay on sheriffs and their uneasy
consciences; a mention of old John Doltin, a "'spectabil sheriff" (a new
one, we have to figure out, not the one who gave Sut his first scare);
the introduction of Wat Mastin and the splendid evocation of what it is
to be young, healthy, and in bad need of sex; an interruption by an
officious encyclopedia salesman; the obscene but delicately euphemistic
account of the devastating effects marriage has on War's health; and the
rest of the wonderful fabliau about Wat, his wife Mary, her mother Mrs.
McKildrin, and Little Rar Ripe, Mary's baby by Sheriff Doltin; and a
final interruption by the salesman. In "Contempt of Court-Almost" Sut
starts with an essay (better than Poe's) on human perversity, a subject
suggested by the encyclopedia salesman (whom Sut, feigning to confuse
the man's product with his name, refers to as Onsightly Peter), and
leading into the illustrative anecdote of Sut and the dandy (which you
think will have to do with Doltin but does not, and which itself is
interrupted by a little disquisition on mustaches), followed by a
one-sentence shift to Judge Smarty and a new shift to Wirt Staples
(smoothed by Sut's promise to make it relevant to the Doltin story).
Then comes Wirt's magnificent tall talk and Sut's tribute to Wirt as
champion man, fit to be displayed at a fair, then the rampaging scene in
which Wirt comes close to committing contempt of court by slamming the
sheriff with his ham of venison then flinging it at the judge. In the
concluding story, "Trapping a Sheriff," Sut has fun indulging in high
Victorian sentimentality in describing Doltin's wife, then sabotages
that style and moves on to a speculation on "hereafters," especially the
part of hell where sheriffs go. After Sut's conversation with Doltin
(who is nursing his head after Wirt's onslaught), there comes the
conspiracy of Sut, Wirt, and Witt's wife Susan that is broken by an
enthusiastic, digressive tribute to Susan's cooking (capped by the great
bit of deflected sexuality: "I gets dorg hongry every time I sees
Witt's wife, ur even her side-saddil, ur her frocks a-hangin on the
close-line" [262]). Then comes more of the ironic sentimentalizing, a
self-conscious "word-portrait" of Susan pouring coffee (the sort of
portrait the grown-up Huck might have given of Mary Jane Wilks, if Mark
Twain had been as good as Harris), then the story of the trapping of
Doltin and his punishment--pages about as good as the best trickery in
Twelfth Night mixed up with the most rambunctious pages of Tom Jones.
All this may seem to be a run-amok narrative extravaganza. Characters
come in without being part of the present story, other characters come
in looking as if they are part of another story but turn out to belong
to this one, times shift without transition, from Sut's boyhood to the
present, sheriff replaces sheriff, and literary styles change abruptly.
But everything is in the control of one of the greatest characters in
American literature, Sut--always peering (or peeping), absorbing,
philosophizing on human nature and animal nature (making it clear they
are the same), drinking, bullying, eating, inventing outrageous pranks,
rampaging (by proxy), escaping serious punishment, and loving good (or
well), entertaining us in his way, in his own good time, in words that
are Shakespearean in plentitude and precision and felicitous
combinations. The narration is not at all aimless, never like Mark
Twain's Jim Blaine and the story of the old ram, where the point is not
to get to the point. There is a character in Harris like Blaine, but it
is not Sut--it is the late Mrs. Yardley, who in her prime talked in free
association, nonstop. Sut's narration is headlong, pell-mell, but
always controlled, always delighting us.
Sometimes our delight arises directly from our pride in following Sut's
fancy turns, ambushes, leaps, shifts, digressions, and seeming
irrelevancies. We know Sut, and we are up to the challenge. Sometimes
Sut even cheats a little so as to set us up for special surprise, as in
the great fabliau section of "Rare Ripe Garden-Seed," where he makes it
look as if Mrs. McKildrin is going to persuade Wat Mastin, the April
Fool bridegroom, that her daughter Mary conceived promptly after the
wedding and bore his baby before the middle of August, all because of
the "rar ripe garden-seed" Wat had bought from a Yankee peddler. Mrs.
McKildrin serves Wat whiskey after he revives from his faint at the
sight of Little Rar Ripe, and Sut reminds us of the power of alcohol:
"Wun ho'n allers saftens a man, the yeath over" (234). Wat counts the
months, and recounts, and says, "Haint enuf, is hit mammy?" (236), But
she sweetly reminds him how active he had been about the place: "yu
planted hit waseful , , ." (237). And Sut comments on her strategy of
patient waiting: "Widders allers wait, an' alters win" (237). Then Sut
gives us a marvelous turn: obtuse Wat Mastin rises to the occasion at
last with a retentive memory and a quite unexpected capacity for irony
when he throws up to Mary her mother's description of her as a "pow'ful
interprizin gal" (239): she ought to be good for twenty-six or maybe
thirty children as opposed to the thirteen her mother had "the ole way."
After this turn of events we have the delight of Sut's sudden,
unaccounted-for presence, just in time to step on Doltin's note to Mary
and pick it up when no one is looking so he can get Jim Dunkin to read
it to him. You do not want to know why Sut is suddenly there, any more
than you want to know why he is suddenly peeping out of the old doggery
door at Wirt in "Contempt of Court--Almost." He is always around at just
the right time.
In "Contempt of Court--Almost" the reader delighting in Sut's dazzling
turns may well be thrown by two textual errors. In the 1867 edition Sut
says that Wirt Staples "tuck a skeer in what's tu cum" of his "narashun
about the consekinses ave foolin wif uther men's wives" (249), but that
is a slip brought about, probably, by a compositor's memory of Sut's
"furst big skeer"; the word has to be "sheer," the usual spelling of
"share" in Sut's dialect. The first edition also contains a garbled
passage describing how fast the spirits from the new doggery were
working on Wirt: "So when cort sot at nine o'clock, Wirt wer 'bout es
fur ahead es cleaving, ur half pas' that." As a native speaker of this
dialect as well as a textual scholar, I figured out that what Harris
wrote was '''bout es fur ahead es eleving, ur half pas' that" (249). The
word has to be an hour of the day, and in Sut's dialect "seven" comes
out "seving," so eleven should come out "eleving"--a form mysterious
enough to baffle a compositor. What Harris meant was that when court
went into session at nine in the morning, Wirt was as drunk as he would
normally have been at eleven or eleven-thirty.
Quite aside from these unintended pitfalls, Harris set loose in his
narrative a series of questions any good reader will have to hold
suspended. What does all the opening of "Contempt of Court--Almost" have
to do with Wat Mastin? Does the dandy, a new character, fit somehow
into Doltin's punishment? Who is Judge Smarty? Who, for that matter, is
Wirt Staples?--though Sut assures us that Wirt "tuck a sheer in what's
tu cum" about Doltin. In listening to Wirt's tall talk we forget about
Doltin, for it is not the sheriff but Judge Smarty he is insulting so
magnificently. After the heroic challenge has been followed by the wreck
of the watch tinker's shop, Wirt gets a little more liquid kindling
wood from Sut. That is when Doltin comes waddling out of the courthouse
and when Sut says, "Now Wirt were Wat Mastin's cuzzin, an' know'd all
about the rar ripe bisness, an tuck sides wif Wat strong" (253).
Wonderful surprise, wonderful fun to have Wirt quote back to the sheriff
his love note to Mary. It is even better--more coherent and more
satisfying than we thought it would be, for Wirt is on the rampage not
only against Judge Smarty but also against Sheriff Doltin, as well as
the assorted deputies who get laid low by the "buck's hine laig."
Here the reader holds a question in suspension until things turn out
better than anything that could have been expected. Such rewards are
joyous to encounter, but I think Harris gets stronger effects by having
Sut leave us at times in a state of unresolved curiosity, or even
uneasiness, which colors our response as we proceed through the tale.
Sut does not acknowledge that he knows the cause of our uneasiness--a
technique akin to his use of euphemism in order to be more suggestive
than if he were direct; for euphemisms of this sort implicate the reader
in the obscenity. The best example in the Sheriff Doltin sequence is at
the start, the time the former sheriff traumatizes little Sut. Things
were going along fine because Sut was getting fed: "Mam hed me a-standin
atwixt her knees. I kin feel the knobs ove her jints a-rattlin a-pas'
my ribs yet. She didn't hev much petticoats tu speak ove, an' I hed but
one, an' hit were calliker slit frum the nap ove my naik tu the tail,
hilt tugether at the top wif a draw-string, an' at the bottom by the
hem" (227). When the sheriff comes, Sut darts "on all fours onder mam's
petticoatails" (229). Naturally, if you are solemncoly, you do not want
to think about what little Sut might have seen there, especially if you
remember how sharp-eyed he always is and if you recall a later story in
which Sut watches his mother lose most of her clothes while fighting
with Sall Simmons in the creek (after the fight is over; Sut says he
"never seed a frock fit an 'oman as clost as hern did"--so close he
could count her ribs through it). But naturally, if you are scholarly,
you want to know when Sut gets out from under there. He does not. Well,
he must have gotten out sometime, but you are not told when, and you
worry about it, a little, in the back of your mind. If you are just a
little prurient, you are bothered enough about it to be in a heightened
state of awareness when you read about the manifestations of Wat
Mastin's interest in Mary McKildrin (his bellowing and pawing up the
dust around Mrs. Mckildrin, and so on). You might even worry about it
through the whole Sheriff Doltin sequence, for you may be reminded by
contrast when Doltin shows up with all that excessive yardage for Mary.
For sure, you are reminded by the way the ferryman's wife exposes
herself during Doltin's flight in "Trapping a Sheriff." She bounces out
of bed and comes to the door in her "shif-tail." Then at the great
spectacle of Doltin and the tomcats and the lighted, turpentine-soaked
ball of tow, she forgets what she is wearing. As Sut says, she "pulled
up what she tuck tu be her aprun, an' kivered her face, an' shet the
door wif a snap, an' lef hersef on the outside. I holler'd 'Higher---yer
forrid ain't kivered yet.' She run roun the chimley outen sight, still
holdin up her aprun" (272).
Well, most of the narrative threads in the Sheriff Doltin sequence are
tied up well enough. We know the "consekinses ave foolin wif uther men's
wives," for instance. But maybe some of the best questions are left
unresolved. Does Mrs. McKildrin ever return after she flees the accusing
ghost of her husband? Mary comes back after her own flight, but does
Wat keep her--and her and Doltin's Little Rar Ripe? When does Sut get
out from under his mam's petticoats?--a question the more urgent because
we know she was standing, the sheriff having taken away the chairs.
These matters are not only un resolved but unresolvable; Sut is too far
away to ask, working his long laigs, his flask glinting in the sun,
leaving us a little uneasy, and a little in awe. He would not have told
us anyhow, and in the present academic climate it will be a long time
before many professors ask such serious questions about either Sut or
the man who created him, George Washington Harris, a man who could write
about as good as anybody in our country.
I read "Style and Sex in G. W. Harris's Sheriff Doltin Sequence" at the
American Literature Section at the Louisville South Atlantic MLA,
November 1981. The talk was much later printed as “A Tribute to Harris’s
Sheriff Doltin Sequence” in James E. Caron and M. Thomas Inge’s SUT
LOVINGOOD’S NAT’RAL BORN YARNSPINNER: ESSAYS ON GEORGE WASHINGTON HARRIS
(Tuscaloosa and London: The University of Alabama Press, 1996).
