The Fannie Hardy Eckstorm Collection of Penobscot Mythology:

The Fannie Hardy Eckstorm Collection

of Penobscot Mythology: A n Ethnopoetic Analysis - Penobscot Ways With Story

JILL F. KEALEY MCRAE

Harvard University

THE SIGNIFICANCE OF THE ECKSTORM COLLECTION

In the Fogler Library, University of Maine, Orono, is the Fannie

Hardy Eckstorm Collection, which contains fifty or so tales from the

region's story-cycle. Ignored since Fannie Hardy Eckstorm's death in

1946, the collection comprises a substantial contribution to the nation's

earliest mythology, inviting our further consideration. The material is

unique, an unexpected gift at this late date — the more so for having all

the characteristics of truly told tales. Those concerned with authentic

Native American stories, in educational settings and elsewhere, Penobscot

among them, stand to benefit from the collection.

In general terms this paper explores the extent to which the Eckstorm

collection, made between 1917 and 1919, adds to our knowledge of

Penobscot narrative form, particularly its structural organization, and to

our understanding of the storyteller's artistry. It is a systematic endeavor

designed to help us understand what the stories are about.1

While some aspects of regional culture can be inferred from the

stories, it is also the case that they corroborate the evidence of existing

anthropological studies. In choosing an ethnopoetic analysis as a means

of exploring a particular story from the collection I have been influenced

by work in anthropology and anthropological linguistics (Boas, Sapir,

Bloomfield), where demonstration by example is valued.

The world of the stories is not created according to the whim of

individual story tellers, but belongs to a body of shared knowledge, which

has significance in terms of several traditions. In order to better

understand the wider connections of the collection, and to help to show

how the stories are kin to orally transmitted narratives in other groups, I

1 For the purposes of this study I have used the following terms interchangeably: myth, legend, narrative, story and tale. I have abbreviated Fannie Hardy Eckstorm's name to FHE.

252 JILL F. KEALEY McRAE

intend analyzing one of the stories from the collection. The analysis that

follows uses the rich qualitative data revealed by the Penobscot Clara

Neptune's The Little Magic Rabbit, to identify the structural organization

of narrative patterns, thus disclosing and inferring something of the

storyteller's fundamental intentions and skills. Poetic analysis of this

kind is a way of illuminating the meaning of a story, including its

significance to the culture, as well as the transformational relationships

within the story, and between it and other regional versions (Hymes

1985:392).

It is worth noting that the relation between the approach (verse

analysis) and a new body of material, such as these narratives, is reciprocal.

Experience from work already done can help explain and interpret new

material; the new material can test and extend the work already done.

The approach has proven helpful for a range of linguistic traditions,

some of them without historical relationship (narratives told by native

speakers of English, for example), enough to give one a sense that there

is a general validity. Of course there are a great many traditions not

studied in this way; no doubt there is more to be learned from the field entire.

DEFINING ETHNOPOETICS: THEORETICAL FRAMEWORK OF VERSE ANALYSIS

These days a convincing exploration of Native American mythology

requires us to ask to what extent current trends are a fruitful way of

understanding texts. Exemplifying a changed climate of critical analysis,

verse analysis has been developed by Dell Hymes, the eminent

Americanist and linguist-anthropologist, as a means of identifying the

structural pattern of indigenous myths. By concentrating on stylistics and

poetics, the process reveals what H y m e s (1982:121) refers to as "an

explicit cultural schema for the organization of experience". Rightly he

has connected these schema with myth, for it is here they are readily

apprehended, though they are not exclusive to this domain. They turn up

readily in folktales in English (Virginia H y m e s 1995), and in narratives

of personal experience (Labov 1972). There may be differences among

genres, and much remains to be learned in this respect, but the underlying

approach seems to be valid for oral narrative generally:

PENOBSCOT M Y T H O L O G Y 253

[Otherwise] one cannot see the proportions and weighting of the material. One cannot see the relationships among the story elements that show there to be an implicit logic of experience and of literary form. (Hymes 1982:122)

Even in translation patterns of stylistic expression are identifiable.

H y m e s makes a distinction between poetry as one understands it in terms

of measurement within a line — metrical verse (stress and syllable),

syllable alone (haiku), alliteration (Old English), tone patterns (Chinese)

— and poetry in terms of relations among lines. This he calls measured

verse. The terms show a kinship, but also a distinction (metrical:

measured).

Ethnopoetics is a term that refers to the task of discovering the

relevant features and relationships of a language and its texts (Hymes

1985:393); this is not to say, however, that all texts are suitable objects

of poetics. B y defining it as "practical structuralism", H y m e s

distinguishes the approach from "structuralism", itself a more a-priori

approach used by others (Levi-Strauss, for example). Practical

structuralism, on the other hand, is more inductive; one builds up a sense

of what to expect, and looks for consistency in a particular text, but the

emphasis is on the way a text works rather than on assessing to what

extent a text is explained by a formal model or formal theory.

The task is not about what exists, but how what exists can be

understood. The model consists of recognizing lines and local groups of

lines, either because they share content or show repetition, or because

they contrast with what comes before and after. Sometimes an initial

marker indicates a level above that of a line, and this is called a verse.

It is possible that every line in a story is a verse, and every verse is a

line. H y m e s distinguishes verse as a structural unit, because sometimes

there are audible or syntactic reasons for seeing more than one line as

going together in a single structural unit. Certain kinds of words

(temporal words, such as statements of the season, for example) are

consistent signs of narrative demarkation. Under the rubric of practical

structuralism, then, the task of analysis is to reveal patterning rather than

impose it, and to discover the patterning that best fits the covariation of

form and meaning in the narratives, the objective being to highlight

meaning by locating these local norms.


DISCOVERING NATIVE AMERICAN POETIC FORM: THE ORIGINS OF ETHNOPOETIC ANALYSIS

In the main due to the efforts of Dell Hymes, Dennis Tedlock, and

others over the past twenty five years, the study of Native American

narrative has had a revival, from both linguistic and literary viewpoints.

The group holds to the view that a poetic structure exists in original

Native American texts. Believing that verse can be defined minimally as

discourse organized in lines (and not a paragraph), the group has

identified oral narratives as having a poetic underpinning. In 1972, for

example, Dennis Tedlock's translations from Zuni were achieved from the

vantage of knowing the original language; Tedlock recorded all the

expressive features of pitch, loudness, rhythm, timbre and pause in the

oral performance of storytellers (an approach that can be described as

performance poetics, to distinguish it from others). His organization into

lines on the basis of pause strongly points to a poetic structure in the

Zuni originals (Tedlock 1972).

O n the other hand, the approach developed by Dell H y m e s does not

focus on the features of live performances, but on patterns that can be

observed in written texts — namely, the ways in which vocabulary,

syntax, and semantics are used to create literary structures. B y analyzing

narratives from some 40 or more languages, Hymes has shown that texts

can be divided into verses, defined not by meter or rhyme, but by other

types of structural features. Hymes's basis for the analysis of measured

verse emphasizes the repetition of initial sentence particles (in English

and, so, then). With this concept of the verse as basis, the approach

makes it easier to recognize other structurally defined units, both smaller,

such as the line (defined typically in terms of its unity as a grammatical

predication), and larger, such as the scene or act (often definable in terms of shifts in locale).

Although exponents of verse analysis are positive in their

identification of Native American narratives as poetic, recognizing their

poetic structure cannot be carried out in a mechanical way. It is true that

initial particles are the primary cue for recognizing verse patterning, but

patterning also exists in cases without them (Hymes 1977:439-440); the

full paragraph is important too, since sometimes particles do not work.

Other researchers have identified line and verse structures marked by other

PENOBSCOT MYTHOLOGY 255

phenomena such as grammatical and semantic parallelism (Tedlock's 1983

work on Mayan verse, for example).

What has already been done on the analyses of narratives shows that

the stories are kin to orally transmitted narratives in many other groups.

For instance, in 1990 Dell Hymes collaborated with Rodney Frey (whose

book on Coeur d'Alene and other Salish materials is about to be

published); Hymes's own contribution was the analyses of Molale,

Klamath, Sahaptin and Kalispel narratives (Hymes 1990). The

ethnopoetics of Y u m a n narratives are soon to be published by Margaret

Langdon. There is Ridie Wilson Ghezzi's work on Ojibwe narratives

(1990); Bright and McLendon's in California; Woodbury's in Alaska with

the Inuit (Ghezzi 1990:2); Judith Berman has worked on 32 Kwakiutl

myths as taken down by Boas (Berman 1982 and 1983), and so on. To

date no work of this kind has been done on the mythology of Maine and

the Maritimes.

THE THEORETICAL BASIS OF ETHNOPOETIC ANALYSIS

Is the approach supported by a theoretical explanation that links the

formal and functional use of language? In his 1991 paper Is poetics

original and functional? Dell Hymes reminds us that functional

explanations of social life do not by themselves suffice or satisfy. This

view, supported by Boas, Sapir, Kroeber and others, says that social life

is also comprised of an irreducible element of historical heritage, and this

heritage is itself arbitrary in relation to present environment and use. In

other words, social life itself can be seen as an interplay of form and

function. While it is true that the organization of linguistic competence

is not innate, but particular to individual lives, achieving linguistic

competence is a function of social circumstance, and as such is variable,

also suggestible. A case in point is the organization of oral narratives.

Hymes notes that a distinct set of relations appears not only in many

Native American languages, but also in Finnish, Persian, Xhosa, Brazilian

Portuguese, and Japanese, and that narrators use these relations to

organize narratives into units and groups of units. The work of Virginia

Hymes (1995) focuses on narratives from Aberdeenshire, Scotland; other

work of hers deals with narratives in Appalachian English and Irish

English; all reveal the same set of relations.


The elements comprising these units are lines and groups of lines

rather than sentences and paragraphs. S o m e of the elements mark verses.

In any one narrative tradition, verses are usually grouped in particular ways

— either in sets of two and four, or three and five (in the Eckstorm

collection, Clara Neptune's stories observe the three and five arrangement).

The apparent universality of these organizational alternatives suggests

an innate response to the task. Principles of style are implicated, of

arousal and expectation, according to one or another kind of relations,

and their repetition, driven by a need for a deeper sense of placement and

proportion (Hymes 1992:48).

What a narrator does may vary with the characteristics of an audience

and the definition of a situation. Some narrators seem to maintain a

single manner when telling a story, no matter what. Many, perhaps most,

do not. What the differences will be need not be a factor of the

difference between a group audience and a single individual. The

specific characteristics of a group or an individual, the past history of the

relationship, etc., make a difference too.

The stories told by Clara Neptune are a case in point. The evidence

regarding Clara Neptune is limited; for instance w e do not know how, or

if, her stories would vary in their telling had she had an audience

comprised of more than one person. The absence of more explicit

information regarding the pragmatic context of Clara Neptune's stories

should not blind us to their merits, however. W e must use what w e have,

keeping an eye out for situational factors within individual texts that might tell us more.

There is considerable evidence for the presence in spoken narratives

of other kinds of information about their organization, however, and in

this respect Clara Neptune's stories reveal consistency, regardless of their

context, or perhaps because of it. Their three:five organizational pattern

is an example of this, as are turns at talk, the recurrent use of certain

kinds of words such as time expressions, initial particles, and specific

parallelisms. One can recover what these kinds of evidence indicate as to organization.

There can be two levels of organization in an oral narrative, one

indicated by vocal features such as pause and intonation, and another

indicated by lexical and syntactic features. The stories of Clara Neptune


make available evidence of this second kind of organization. It may have

been close, very close to the organization indicated by vocal features, but

one cannot be certain.

As I have said, in general terms, m y investigation of Clara Neptune's

The Little Magic Rabbit is designed to help us understand what the story

is about. Insofar as stories are linguistic analogues, they are also cultural,

because they reflect ways of speaking, and of constructing narrative; as

such they are an expression of an individual storyteller's artistry, as well

as a representation of Native American traditions in general, and in the

case of Clara Neptune's stories, of Penobscot tradition too. In this

respect they convey information about Penobscot culture itself. W e can

make this claim without embarrassment; in anthropology it is not

controversial that the language of the Navajo, say, is in some important

respect a manifestation of Navajo culture. It has never been controversial

that the vocabulary and narratives of a community are part of their

culture. Indeed, this is not a claim, but a fact of experience.

Understanding the stories involves us in understanding a way of life;

an important part of that life has been devoted to storytelling, which, had

it been written down at the outset, would be referred to as a literature.

T o explore connections between Penobscot lifeways and stories is to

explore a literature, with consequent rewards and insights. Verse analysis

is an alternative way of encountering the stories, of helping to enlarge

their meaning. As H y m e s (1981) has pointed out the study of these kinds

of texts hitherto has been a piecemeal affair. Without, I hope, generali

zing unfairly, what anthropologists have regarded as cultural artifacts,

linguists have mined as grammatical records, and literary scholars have

consigned to folklorists. Until the early 1980s, little had been attempted

that rightly synthesizes these approaches, that takes what each offers in

order to delve into the stories for evidence of the narrator's verbal art.

Hymes's approach calls for reexamination of regional collections, with

the possibility of fresh insights regarding the structural relations that

comprise narrational artistry. W h e n these stories were first sung or chanted into existence, they had

no need of devices such as verse analysis — that is to say, for a

metalanguage that dissects the form itself. Storyteller and audience were

united by a commonality of understanding, every nuance of word and


gesture an expression of the culture and its age-old traditions. Late

comers to the scene, w e stand outside this tradition, and perforce must

use all at our disposal to uncover underlying relationships that once were

explicit. Verse analysis is but a means of revealing the ligatures of a

storyteller's artistry, standing us closer to the creative force that has

generated each tale. FHE's record of Clara Neptune's stories lights them

in a certain way; were they direct translations from Penobscot, other,

different features might emerge. As I have said, w e must work with what

w e have, however (though not without qualification entirely), checking

wherever possible that the texts are reliable sources, and that the best of

them will reveal style and structure sufficiently to enhance our access to

meaning and organization.

Clara Neptune's stories are a rich endowment, thanks to FHE's

exactitude, for they come to us entire; since editing has not censored

structure, they retain much of their character as verse. What Hymes's

approach provides us is an impetus to attend to the rhythm of a story, in

every detail.

If w e see only the text, without any effort on our part to apprehend

the nature and scope of the creativity that has ordered its form, then w e

miss the very attribute that makes each telling unique. Clara Neptune's

stories spring from her own imagination, no matter how many generations

they were handed down. As Hymes reminds us, it is by savoring this

uniqueness that w e penetrate beyond the surface of the story as merely

a cultural artifact; w e are able to appreciate its depth: "Abstract relations

among categories of plot and content are essential aspects of

understanding myths, but aspects only. Artistry comes into view only if

the text can be seen as a texture within which particular means have been

chosen and deployed. Meaning is deepest where artistry is most evoked'

(Hymes 1981:10; emphasis added).

I a m assisted in the following analysis by Dell Hymes, with w h o m

I worked on The Little Magic Rabbit. I have used this story as a basis

for discussing aspects of narrative style, including an interpretative

exploration of Clara Neptune's craft as a storyteller. By investigating this

particular story, I demonstrate how this approach provides us with a

clearer understanding of a narrative; it is a welcome opportunity to focus

on form, as distinct from social and other implications.


W e should not regard verse analysis as circumscribing the form or

meaning of a narrative. Literary criticism is above all an invitation to

consider afresh, to discover and reformulate our opinions. By exploring

the significance of c o m m o n elements evident in The Little Magic Rabbit

distinct patterns reveal themselves, leading to a broadened appreciation

of Penobscot narrative style in its broader sense.

CLARA NEPTUNE

One of the attractions of the Eckstorm collection is that w e know

more of the storyteller Clara Neptune than is usual within the region.

From among FHE's papers I have assembled the following profile. In a

paper Local Indian place names, read before the Norumbega Club, South

Brewer, Maine, on 21 November 1921, F H E refers to "my old lady", a

phrase that she uses consistently to refer to Clara Neptune. F H E

describes her as "most intelligent" (Eckstorm Collection, box 612.f79).

In the throes of tracing the name of a smallish high pasture separating

Fling Street, Brewer and Buckport railroad track, she discovers by

accident that Clara Neptune was born there, at Kaghedan-binday, meaning

"a little hollow among the cedars". A n earlier paper, read before the

Cosmopolitan Club, Newport, in October 1917, introduces us to Clara

Neptune as storyteller and catalyst, for it was through a chance remark

that F H E gained an insight into the world of Penobscot medeulin

(shamanism). Here is FHE's introduction to Clara Neptune:

Time went on, and m y old friends among the Indians died; the tribe drifted farther and farther from its early customs and traditions; it was too late to learn anything new about our Indians. And than one day a single word proved to be the key which opened the door to the ancient treasure-house, and I went in and was amazed as if I had suddenly walked behind the looking-glass. It was true, all that Leland had written and much more. And it was a strange world of the most amazing possibilities and contradictions, so unlike the mental world we live in that after ten years of getting wonted to it I still feel dizzy when m y Old Lady opens up a new aboriginal vagary.

My Old Lady came one day as usual, with her baskets to sell and her pack of cards for fortune-telling and her stubby black pipe hidden in her bag. She had erysipelas in her hands so that they were all plastered with plantain-leaves and she was discouraged. It was hard for an old woman almost eighty in poor health to earn enough to support herself and her great grandson. And as she ate she confided her sorrows. " M y

260 JILL F. KEALEY M c R A E

gran'son he say sometime, wish we was Old Injun, just go out in woods an' get tobacco and money an' things..."

I had never heard the phrase "old Injun", but I guessed at once what she meant. "M'teolin?" I asked her. "Oh, yah. Medeowlin!" And she ran on into such an account of the old Indian magic that if the famous roc of Marco Polo had swooped down and seized m e in his talons and carried m e off, I could hardly have been more surprised. Yes, Old Governor was a magician; he could do all that was said of him: he could do much more, indeed his magic was wonderful. And so-and-so was also m'teolin; and her sister, and her sister's son, and this one and that one. Suddenly all these old dead and departed Indians w h o m I had heard of since babyhood, w h o m I had known for years myself, who to m y father and his father had just been ordinary people, became lighted up inside like jack-o-lanterns and I saw the strange power which they believed they had and which the others accorded to them. It was their secret, which enabled them to be a race despised and yet walking with dignity among their traducers, because they knew something the white people did not know, they held the power of life and death over their enemies, nothing was impossible to those among them who had acquired what they called "spiritual power"... When m y Old Lady, sitting before m y fire, tells m e seriously about Susan-sis, an old woman she knew, who about 25 years ago hanged her twin children to the rainbow, and everyone knew it was so because they could see them hanging there, it seems weird to m e that anyone residing prosaically and apparently decently in a quiet town like Lincoln should even think of such a thing as hanging her children to the end of a rainbow. The end of the rainbow is proverbially hard to find, else we should all be rich. But someone did think of that, not many years since, and here lies the real problem, Our Yankee failure to listen sympathetically to tales like this is responsible for the loss of an aboriginal literature as fine as abundant as anybody of tradition in the world. W e had in Maine such a wealth of legendary lore as was nowhere surpassed — and we have thrown the most of it away. (Eckstorm Collection, box 612.f80).

Forty years later this account is completed in FHE's account of

Penobscot spirituality in Old John Neptune and other Maine Indian

shamans:

For the rest of her life, nine years, my Old Lady came to see me, not infrequently considering her age and that she lived twelve miles away; and, sure of a dinner, a good talk and a dollar or two in cash, she always brought with her a store of unsorted material for m e to make notes upon, I was a gold-mine to her — but so was she to me. She gave m e place names, animal names, genealogy, gossip and strange, weird stories of giants and dwarfs, fairies and cannibals, elves and talking animals, and above all magic and those who used it. Some of it was her own recollection, more she gathered from other members of


the tribe with whom she talked between her visits. I wrote it all down, in her own words, sometimes in English, sometimes in Indian, until too rapt in her own dramatization of her story, she talked so fast there was no keeping up with her in either language. For that reason many of the stories have holes in the middle of them where I could not follow her; but whatever was saved was in her own words and reflected her own mind. (Eckstorm 1945:29-30).

Clara Neptune gave F H E more than stories and insights into the

world of medeulin; she was an informant for FHE's research on the

Penobscot names for plants and other aspects of natural history.

(Eckstorm Collection, box 612.f85-f88). She provided genealogies of

Penobscot living and dead (Joe Polis, Thoreau's guide, for example), and

the governors. Additionally, from interviews with Lewis Ketchum and

Clara Neptune F H E created a Penobscot dictionary that served her

research into Penobscot placenames.

In 1913 F H E began collecting from Clara Neptune the details of her

life. (Eckstorm Collection, box 617T87). Her birth name was Mitchell,

and her mother Julia was Passamaquoddy. A daughter of Joe Polis's twin,

Clara Neptune's destiny was to be adopted by the childless Dr. Sabatis

Mitchell, whose wife Margaret was a niece of Molly Molasses, renowned

and feared as the consort of the Penobscot governor and shaman John

Neptune. Lewey Mitchell, Passamaquoddy Representative in the Maine

State Legislature, told F H E the Mitchells were 'Quoddy in origin,

belonging to the bear clan (the Bears of Tobique, N e w Brunswick, belong

to the same clan). Clara Neptune's adoptive father was a governor. At

fourteen she married Joe Lewis Orono, and bore him two sons. Her first

husband was a grandson, or more likely, a great-grandson of old Chief

Orono; according the FHE's notes Lewis died 18 October 1864. Later

Clara Neptune married Mitchell Neptune, a son of old Governor John

Neptune. "Soon after her first marriage she was on the vaudeville stage in

N e w York and Philadelphia in little tableaus of Indian life, popular in the

fifties. Once she said to me, 'Boot' he fix it m y hair — Boot' what kill

it Lincoln', that is, she had played on the same stage with J. Wilkes Booth"

(Eckstorm 1945:172). Not until 1922 was F H E able to work out that Clara

Neptune was probably b o m in 1844, making her 78 years old in 1922.

She herself gave different estimates of her age; she remembered FHE's

father, born in 1832, as several years older than herself. The last time F H E

saw Clara Neptune was in June 1921; she died April 30, 1923.


THE LITTLE MAGIC RABBIT

Introduction

W e turn now to the analysis of The Little Magic Rabbit, told by Clara

Neptune, 19 April 1918, the text as recorded by F H E (Eckstorm

Collection, box 616T47). It was part of the Glusgehbeh stories, said

Clara (the Penobscot know the culture-hero Kuloscap as Kloskuhbeh, or

Glusgehbeh).

Although I regard the analysis of The Little Magic Rabbit as

illustrative, the version is tentative (it may change with later revisions) as

well as partial; additionally it is of one story only, so it cannot be seen

as representative. Nonetheless the analysis is revealing, as w e shall

presently see. M y objective in this is to try to reclaim a truthfulness to

form, as well as to enhance narrative coherence; in addition, the analysis

is a way into a narrative that is more difficult to follow when it is

embedded in the prose paragraph. Of course w e cannot know if these

patterns were consciously the work of the storyteller; all w e can notice

is that they occur, and that they might be significant indicators of an

indigenous tradition.

Commentary

As in the acts of a play, the action of the narrative divides itself into

segments, within which are discrete scenes. (In this respect The Little

Magic Rabbit is straightforward; there are Native American narratives in

which it is not entirely clear as to the division of the action, such as

Louis Simpson's Deserted Boy (Hymes 1981:142-184)).

Here are the divisions of The Little Magic Rabbit:

[I] No Children

[II] The Brothers Separate and Are United Again [HI] People Tell the Brothers

[IV] Brother Marries the Governor's Daughter [V] Rabbit Gets Away.

Each sentence from the prose version becomes a verse, with each

phrase (usually indicated by commas) a separate line. One is making the

assumption here that lines represent spoken units — an assumption that

works out in this text — making it likely that the transcriptions do reflect

what was spoken. The arrangement reveals the repetitions that serve to


link one thought with the next, and which are not so apparent in the paragraph.

The Stanzas

A stanza is the poetic equivalent of a paragraph, grouped according

to scenes within scenes; for the most part these divide into groups

comprised of three or five verses, the significance of which w e shall duly

come to. It is by organizing the story into stanzas, that the subtle

structural underpinning is revealed:

(a) For the most part, each act has groups of lines in terms of three and

five. So much is this a feature of the text entire, w e infer that it is

characteristic of Clara Neptune's approach to constructing a narrative. By

comparing this story with others, w e may adduce that it represents a trait,

one that she takes to all stories as an organizing device. Furthermore,

were w e to compare the Neptune stories to other Penobscot collections,

such as Frank Speck's, made at the same time, w e might understand this

device as characteristic of the tribe.

(b) [I] No Children has five verses (lines 1-5); the fifth of which is an

intermediate ending with quoted speech at the finish. (An intermediate

ending signals a scene change). A glance through the text reveals that

quoted speech is used in this way more often than not. (This need not

be the case, but often it is so in other traditions, a feature which supports

the authenticity of these texts).

(c) [I] [iii] is a group of five stanzas (lines 18-^47):

• the man brings the fish home

• the hired girl forgets his warning

• she delivers a baby

• the animals reproduce • the man's wife bears a child.

Comprising the scenes of The Little Magic Rabbit, stanzas tend to be

in groups of five or three.

(d) The language itself often reflects traditional relations, and these are

analogous to syntactic relations which speakers use without being entirely

aware of what they do. The recurrence of three and five however adds

substance to the inference that grouping is significant, for example:


[II] [iii] Y o u open urn, (lines 87-97) open nother,

open nother,

till five of em.'

Find chist. Open chist till five times.

Den small box, leetle box so big.

Open dat till leetle rabbit,

small's dat.

There are three boxes opened, but five altogether; the chest (box) is

opened five times; open is repeated five times.

(e) Clara Neptune often resorts to three pairs, such as lines 2^1 of the

opening stanza:

He got his wife. He got horse. He got hired girl. He got leetle peeg.

Hens — no, no hens. He ain't got no children.

This pattern is repeated throughout the episode (lines 34-47):

When he go out, somethin clyin'.

Hired girl got baby.

When he look his horse,

two horses; when he look his pig,

two pigs;

his dog, two dogs.

When he gone upstairs hear clyin!

His wife got baby.

[S]he told urn 'Hired girl got baby too.'

These patterns are indicative, rather than exhaustive; they serve to

identify the repetitions of events, and comprise the lexical, poetic and

rhythms that unite all elements of the story. They are sufficiently

consistent, however, for us to infer that they constitute devices; certainly

they are evidence of organization that is beyond the level of the sentence,


and that they are essentially poetic in origin and in application. O n the

basis of these examples, and others like them, verse analysis allows us to

argue in principle, and support with evidence, assertions as to the quality

and character of Clara Neptune's artistry.

These aspects of Clara Neptune's storytelling are individual, that is

to say, they comprise her style. In other respects, verse analysis discloses

aspects that are generic, representing, or so w e may assume, a tradition

of storytelling that is distinctly Penobscot. (Here I a m indebted to Ridie

Wilson Ghezzi for her treatment of Mrs Marie Syrette's The Orphans and

Mashos (1993:37-76), which provides a useful framework for discussing

Clara Neptune's approach to storytelling.)

The Initial Markers

What can verse analysis reveal of the interplay between the individual

and traditional elements that comprise the storytelling event? According

to Ridie Wilson Ghezzi, a generic ingredient of Ojibwe texts includes a

widespread use of ninguting, or now presently and miidac, meaning now

then. It is not clear from this one story that Clara Neptune is using

den/then precisely as have her Ojibwe counterparts, but its occurrence

invites further speculation along those lines. Whatever the Penobscot

word may have been, it does happen that in a variety of Native American

traditions that then is adopted as a translation equivalent. Sometimes it

is a transitional marker, indicating a new episode; other times, as I have

noted below, its repetition follows an internal rhythm, linking events. I

do not know if this device is a feature c o m m o n to other Penobscot

storytellers; I note however that Sylvia Stanislaus used it (in her early

nineties at the time, Mrs Stanislaus gave F H E two stories that are in her

collection). These are sufficient grounds for trying to establish whether

den/then might be seen as belonging to a generic Penobscot tradition.

Along with her use of when (also a discourse marker), it is a feature that

dominates Clara Neptune's narratives. To our benefit, F H E retained the

initial markers, and as Ghezzi points out, they indicate certain patterns

and structures: "These markers are frequently the key to the rhetorical

conception of the text itself (Ghezzi 1993:38):

(a) Den begins so many stanzas, as does then or when, that they operate

as markers. As with other stories in the collection, the use of when is


striking, its repetition functioning not only to begin many stanzas, but to

link the succeeding stanzas: "When he go out/ W h e n he look his horse/

when he look his pig" (lines 32, 35, 37). It also accentuates the rhythm

within a stanza: "When he look his horse/ when he look his pig" (lines

35 and 37).

(b) Similarly clusters of then/den urge the narrative forward, for example

at verses 99, 100, 101: "Den he put it on bones/ Den he glad see his

brudder/ Den [t]he[y] start bot' of em." B y identifying markers, verse

analysis discloses repetitions that are so much a feature w e are obliged

to notice them, for while they do not necessarily introduce a unit, they

punctuate the action by moving it forward. Other features are not so

obvious.

Verse analysis reveals that Clara Neptune's use of repetition as a

structural element is both individual in nature (see above) and also

generic, or part of a wider tradition. For example, Clara Neptune repeats

phrases, rhythmically binding the sense of her narrative: "One old m a n

ain't got no children/ H e got his wife./ H e got his horse/ H e got hired

girl. H e got little pig/ Hens — no, no hens. H e ain't got no children"

(lines 1-4). Insofar as repetitions of one sort or another are a feature of

all Native American storytelling, they are also, as w e see here, an

expression of an individual encounter with narrative. Generic repetitions

include events, episodes, phrases, and so on, encompassing elements of

structure and content both. These are one of the formal aspects that can

be said to unite all stories within the Native American tradition.

As with any collection of Penobscot stories, Clara Neptune's are the

conduit of Penobscot culture; that they do so without reference to any

other world but the one they represent is verified, I believe, by their air

of strangeness. It is like encountering the world of the Warlpiri

Aborigines, in Australia's Northern Territory, where first I pursued m y

interest in indigenous narratives (McRae 1992). The stories plunge one

into a dimension at once so inherently alien that it is sometimes

impossible to track the significance of interactions or outcomes; often the

very structure is narrative without apparent denouement.

Just as Warlpiri stories are alive with ancestral beings, so are the

Penobscot tales; in the case of The Little Magic Rabbit, beings of mystery

include the white, black and yellow chepellahqu, the rabbit,


Mahteguayso, as well as a devil who re-materializes the dead brother, and

the fish that generates fertility.

In Wabanaki stories characters commonly metamorphose into

something else, signifying prevalent and invasive powers, either for

higher good or evil. Inhabiting The Little Magic Rabbit, like most of

Clara Neptune's stories, are super-human powers that gravitate to the

earthly plane.

H o w much do w e see of Clara Neptune's artistry as a tale-spinner?

At first glance her stories are skeletal in their severity. Yet there are

aspects that might be called characteristic. A curious habit is that she

begins each story with a statement of familial relationships. This has a

particular resonance for me, because this kind of formality usually begins

Warlpiri stories. M a n y Warlpiri stories deal with the violation of social

taboos — a man, for instance, who speaks to his own mother-in-law, or

who initiates a sexual liaison outside his own skin group (one of the

totemic divisions that are the basis of tribal social interactions such as

marriage). The violation of social taboos is a theme that exercises Clara

Neptune's imagination more than somewhat; it is worth remarking that

these taboos bulk large in her tales, creating the impression that this was

a theme to which she attached importance. For instance, when one of the

brothers exposes the lowly birth of the other (according to Clara Neptune

a hired w o m a n is a euphemism for a concubine) then the event assumes

a pivotal importance. W e sense the brother's humiliation because the

accusation is repeated (lines 51 and 56). Clara Neptune imparts the

shame of the boy's lowly origins, and their impact on him, without

reference to feelings, or motive, yet both are implicit. While it is true

that characters do not speak in the story unless it is to drive the plot

forward (14-17, 20-23, 50-58, 82-91, and so on), it is also the case that

speaking mostly links urgent emotions to narrative action — the

loneliness of the childless man (line 5), the warning of the shaman w h o

gave the fish (lines 21-22), the brother's shame (lines 50-58), the bargain

struck by the devil (lines 81-89), the loss of the Mahteguayso (lines

161-169). Feeling is never far away; Clara Neptune embeds it in her

narrative with a deft hand, such that w e are aware of its importance to the

action. That she does so without naming love, or loss, or joy, without


long descriptive passages, and without appearing to pause in her narrative

testifies to her artistry.

Using verse analysis to explore The Little Magic Rabbit helps us to

an understanding that incorporates generic traditions as well as the skills

of an individual storyteller. I hope I have demonstrated that one without

the other throws the picture out of balance. In addition, as Ridie Wilson

Ghezzi has remarked, "There are differences in the narrative traditions

between tribes, but there are also differences between the creative acts of

individuals within a tribal group" (Ghezzi 1993:47). In this discussion,

m y concern has been to demonstrate the usefulness of verse analysis to

an exploration of Clara Neptune's gifts, of all those elements that

distinguish them.

VERSE ANALYSIS: THE LITTLE MAGIC RABBIT

[Preface] A Kloskuhbeh story, she says.

[I] No Children

[i] Aa One old man ain't got no children. 1

Ab He got his wife. He got horse. He got hired girl. He got leetle peeg. Hens — no, no hens. He ain't got no children.

Ac "Ain't got no children make me lonesome," dis man. 5

[ii] Aa He go all time in woods.

Ba When he come up he see camp smoking.

Bb When he come dere he look dis camp. 10

Be Young ones all round; guess dozen young ones.

Ca He told dat man, "I want see you. You got medicine make young ones?" 15

Cb [--] "Yes, I got med'eine." Cc [—] "You come up see me."

[iii] Aa When he (2) come up dere

dis man (2) got fish, bout long's dat.

PENOBSCOT M Y T H O L O G Y 269

A b "Dat's fish. 20 You carry it home.

Don't you nobody touch dat fish but you an' you wife."

Ac Den he (1) tol' dat hired girl, "Don't you touch it." 25

Ad [S]he dass'n' touch it. Ae What [s]he clean off

[s]he t'row to horse an' dog an' pig.

Ba But hired girl forget. Bb She jus' tas' leetle bit, 30

maybe see if salt enough. Be Den carry upstairs

an' man an' wife eat it.

35 Ca Cb Cc

Da

Db

Dc

Ea

Eb Ec

When he go out, somethin clyin'.

Hired girl got baby.

When he look his horse, two horses;

when he look his pig, two pigs;

his dog, two dogs.

When he gone upstairs hear clyin!

His wife got baby. [S]he told um,

"Hired girl got baby too."

40

45

(So several children were brought up together and the child of the maid servant had the increase of the horse and the dog).

[II] The Brothers Separate and Are United Again

[i] Aa When growin up

they quarrel some. Ab Den dat boy say, 50

"Dat ain't you mudder; Ac you mudder ain't notin but hired girl." }

Ba Come 'n say: "Ain't you my mudder?" Bb [She] says, "Don't mind um." }

Ca When he grow up, 55 brother say again, "You mother hired girl."

Cb Then when askit she say, "It's true." }


[ii] Aa So boy says 'f he don' b'long there

he will go off. 60 Ab He take his horse an' dog

an' go off. }

Ba Den his brudder he's lonesome; don't speak to nobody;

Bb Make up his mind 65 go look for brudder.

Be He take dog an' horse an' go hunt for brudder.

Ca He come low camp. Seem all empty. 70

Cb When he look out jump nice horse.

Cc He look in see nice table all set.

Da "I want somethin eat." 75 Db Hear voice say, "Well, why don' you eat?"}

Ea "I want you." Eb "Then you must lick me." }

So a fight follows, the horse and the dog helping. Clara thinks it is a woman and a devil; she is not sure.

80

[iii] Aa

Ab Ac

Ad Ae

Ba Bb Be

Bd

[Cures Be

Young Man Bests Devil Well, he lick um,

he goin kill um. He holler his horse an' dog. Devil told um,

"Well, ef you let me go, I give you med'eine cure your horse and dog; he cure em."

[-] "What is it?" [--] "See rock.

You open um, open nother, open nother, till five of um."

Find chist. Open chist till five times. Den small box,

leetle box so big. Open dat till leetle rabbit,

small's dat Brother] [--] "Where's dat med'eine?" he ask it Mahteguayso.

85

90

95


Ca [-] Dat rabbit told him where is dat medicine cure his brudder, horse and dog. 100

Cb Den he put it on bones an' cure 'em.

Cc Den he glad see his brudder. }

[III] People Tell the Brothers

[i] Aa Den [t]he[y] start bot' of em. Ab Leetle ways when he start 105

he see people, whole lot of em. }

Ba He tol' one of em, "What's trouble here?"

Bb [T]he[y] says he's goin come [,] Chepellahqu' } 110 (don't know only Injun, old word; same Mahdegneelessis [bat]).

Ca He told his brudder, "Let's stay here,

see what kind enemies dose chepellahqu'." 115

Cb One yellow, one black one,

one white one.

[ii] Aa [T]he[y] stay. Ab 'Cause, if anyone kill one of em 120

he can marry chief queen. }

Ba Bimbey one of em come, big yellow one.

Bb Den he took dat leetle mahteguayso, just 'bout big's dat. } 125

Clara had fumbled the front of her dress, showing how Kloskuhbeh had sought for the little box in his bosom).

Ca

Cb

Da Db

Dc

Rabbit puts out tongue and catch yellow one.

Says [to] people: "I kill um!" "I kill um!"

[Black Bat Killed] Next comes a black one. He took rabbit

and catches um. [To] people say:

"I kill um!" "I kill um!"

[White bat missing]

130

135


[IV] Brother Marries the Governor's Daughter [i] A a [T]hey all gone down [to] governor's. A b [--] "I kill u m dis one!" Ac [--] "I kill u m dis one!" Ad Cause he got daughter! Ae Den, "Let's go down dere," he say his brudder. 140

[At the Governor's Place] Ba [-] "Dose chepellahqu' got tongue?" Bb [--] "I guess so." Be [-] "Look!"

Ca Den he took out tongue of yellow one from bosom. Cb Den he took out tongue of black one. 145 Cc So he marry governor's daughter.

[V] Rabbit Gets Away [i] Aa Pretty soon they're fightin other people, other Injuns. A b Then governor send for son-in-law that has leetle rabbit. Ac He gone quick. 150

Ba He gone so quick he forgot um vest,

little mahteguayso in pocket of it. Bb Den his wife she find vest,

look in pocket, 155 find leetle box

and leetle mahteguayso, jus' so big.

Be She say leetle boy, "See leetle mahteguayso for play with." 160

(The little rabbit hops away and escapes).

Ca Well, jus' he goin begin fight, Cb he look for leetle mahteguayso

and found he left it vest. Cc He went back get it. Cd Ask his wife, "Where m y vest? 1 6 5

W h o got m y leetle box?" Ce She say, "Me!

For our leetle boy. Cause so cunning leetle rabbit."

She explains how the rabbit escaped and the man, who seems to be Glusgehbeh goes to seek it. He sees it at a distance and tries to catch it.


[ii] [Catches Rabbit Again]

Aa Den rabbit he talk back. 170 Ab He say, "You can't get me now

because you lef me." }

Ba Then he coax um. Bb "You lef me;

didn't think 'bout me." } 175

Ca Den he coax um.

Cb "We never lef you 'gin." Cc Then he got um.

[iii] Close

Aa This all of it. 180 Ab Part of it that Kloskuhbeh story. }

Key to Profile of Verse Analysis of The Little Magic Rabbit [I], [II] divisions in narrative, similar to acts in a play [i], [ii] scenes within an act A, B stanzas, usually in a cultural pattern of 5, with either 5 lines,

or 3; spacing and marking makes these clear. a, b, discrete verses within a stanza Ab-1, Ab-2, repetitions within a verse

[cures brother] transitional incidents } stanza comprised of pairs of lines, rather than the usual 5 on

5, or groupings of 3. 3, 10, division of text into separate lines

[--] different people are speaking he (1), different people are referred to

dis man (2)

REF E R E N C E S

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