Creole Slang

Here is a list of Creole slang words to possibly use in Wiley.

'Cooyon' (Foolish, silly)
'Craze-i or Craze-ah' or 'Toekey' (Crazy)
'I'll be a monkey's uncle!' (An exclamation to something you never thought would happen)
'So dirty they could stand up in the corner by themselves' (Used like: "His socks were so dirty they could stand up in the corner by themselves")

Another long list, including proper pronunciation: http://www.experienceneworleans.com/glossary.html

Hound Dogs and Swamps--Continued

Icile has been doing some research on Hound Dogs so that we can think about how we want to portray Wiley's closest furry, four legged friend.

The state dog of Louisana is the Catahoula Leopard Dog.

The Louisiana Catahoula Leopard Dog is independent, protective and territorial. Loving with its family and all people it knows well but can be reserved with strangers This breed needs a dominant owner who shows strong leadership.

The Louisiana Catahoula Leopard Dog is believed to have originated from Nordic Wolfhound being introduced some three to five hundred years before the Spanish arrived, however, no one will really know for sure. The state of Louisiana is cited as the point of origin, particularly the area of Catahoula. In 1979, the breed was designated the state dog of Louisiana. The Catahoula was named after a Parish in northeastern Louisiana and after the mottled spots on its coat. At one time this breed was used to round up feral pigs and cattle—livestock that had escaped, and was living in woods and swamps. It involved team effort that is highly coordinated and organized, fast paced, dangerous and a marvel to watch. The ideal dog team usually numbers three, and they must work together. Otherwise, one pig can kill all three in a matter of minutes. Each dog has to be aware of what the pig and the other two dogs are doing and react accordingly. Hunters sometimes used the Catahoula to trail and tree raccoons, but this dominant breed is more at home acting the thug with obstinate boars. This dog is used particularly on the difficult task of driving and rounding hogs and unruly cattle.

The Redbone Coonhound is a breed of dog, which is widely used for hunting bear, raccoon, and cougar. Their agility allows them to be used for hunting from swamplands to mountains and some can be used as water dogs. The AKC standard says, "The Redbone mingles handsome looks and an even temperament with a confident air and fine hunting talents." [1] This breed has been registered with the UKC since 1904 and the AKC since 2009. This is the type of hound featured in the novel Where the Red Fern Grows.

Read more about Redbone Coohounds Here.

Lastly, here are some cool swamp photos that Icile found: 

 

Creole/Zydeco music

Creole music is a kind of music that originated in Louisiana and has a primarily folk sound to it.
Creole music, along with Cajun music, were later developed into Zydeco music or what is known as swamp pop. Cajun and Creole music had a large influence on later country music. The instruments often used were fiddle, according, steel guitars, and some form of percussion.

Here is an example of creole music on youtube
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3kFo5aYJI2U

Here are some clips of zydeco music
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2xfOyt3VZv0

Candace has been researching dances from the deep south, particularly those from the Alabama/Mississippi Creole region. She found a fantastic -- and fascinating -- site (www. streetswing.com/histmain.com) that has a section dedicated to Dance History Archives. As a starting point, the two-step is the dance most often used with Zydeco music. But other related dances include the cake walk, ring shout, juba, bamboula, and chica. You can look these dances up on the site to find in-depth information about how the dances originated. Videos of these historic dances are not readily available, but here is a demonstration of the Pat 'n Juba.

Creole Folk Art Part Three: Baskets

Creole Folk Art Part Two: Clothes

Creole Folk Art Part One: Animals

The Dozens

     Here's a couple paragraphs about a game we could use in 'Wiley': (source, www.louisianafolklife.org)

     "The Dozens" are an elaborate insult contest. Rather than insulting an opponent directly, a contestant derides members of the opponent's family, usually his mother. The dozens has its origins in the slave trade of New Orleans where deformed slaves--generally slaves punished with dismemberment for disobedience--were grouped in lots of a "cheap dozen" for sale to slave owners. For an slave to be sold as part of the "dozens" was the lowest blow possible.
     In an effort to toughen their hearts against the continual verbal assault inflicted on them as part of the "dozens," they practiced insulting each other indirectly by attacking the most sacred "mother" of the other. The person who loses his "cool" and comes to blows loses the contest. The person who outwits and out-insults the other while keeping a "cool" head is the winner

      I think as far as the script goes, we haven't really established what Wiley thinks of his Pappy, and if we had him play the dozens in the beginning, we could find out. Wiley asks Mammy about the things the things everyone else says about Pappy (sleeps while the weeds grow higher then the cotton, etc.), and we could integrate those lines into a game of dozens that Wiley plays with a friend.
     If Wiley really loves his Pappy, then he could get upset little by little as his opponent says all the things that Wiley asks his Mammy about, and if his opponent says something about his Pappy not being able to stand up to the Hairy Man, he could explode and lose the game.

     Just an idea!

Where is the World is the Tombigbee Swamp?

<sup>The name "Tombigbee" comes from the Native American Choctaw language and means "box maker" or "coffin maker." 

The Tombigbee Swamp is somewhere along the 200 mile Tombigbee River that runs through Alabama and Mississippi.</sup>

^{Alabama and Mississippi are considered to be in the "deep south" of the United States (they are in the red section in the map below with the abbreviations AL and MS).}

⁽

 

The Hairy Man and Big Foot

from the blog "A Central Coast Paleontologist" by Doug Shore
http://accpaleo.wordpress.com/about/

America’s fascination with Bigfoot began in 1958 when a bulldozer operator found strange footprints on his construction site in Bluff Creek, California. One Ray Wallace later claimed to have faked the tracks and skeptics claim that this proves Bigfoot is not real. But what about stuff that predates the Bigfoot craze? There are reports from the late 19th/ early 20th centuries (including one by Theodore Roosevelt, an avid outdoors-man ), but again, science disregards eyewitness testimony. So this is where the archaeological record comes in. If we found precolumbian art that depicts tall hairy humanoids, would that lend support to the existence of large, bipedal apes living in North America? Let’s find out.

The first artifact in our investigation is the “Hairy Man” pictographs (their Yokut name isMayak datat, which translates as “hairy man”. They have another name for the creature: Shoonshoonootr, one of the few natives words to literally translate as “big foot”). This set of rock art in east central California seemingly depicts three of these hairy giants. They are believed by some to represent a male, female, and juvenile Bigfoot. It’s easy to see why: The male is drawn with a tall body with long arms attached to a broad chest. The female has short arms but is nonetheless tall. The baby is proportioned like the female with short arms and a tall body.  This creature is counted among animals when humans had not yet been created.

Could the “Hairy Man” in fact be based on a real animal, a creature who looks like a hairy human? Of course, mythical animals need no basis in reality (though sometimes that is the case. Centaurs, half human half horse, are thought to have originated when a people encountered another people who rode on horseback, believing the horse and rider to be one creature (that’s certainly the impression the Aztecs had when they first saw Spanish cavalry). Also, it is thought that the myth of the Cyclops, a one-eyed giant, was inspired by ancient discoveries of mammoth skulls). Just because real animals are featured doesn’t mean that this “Hairy Man” is something in our world as cultures the world over often gave everyday animals supernatural powers. But the similarities of these human-like creatures across the vastness of Native American culture certainly can’t be a coincidence. Whether they describe an upright primate or are the product of cultural exchange or racial memory will require more study.

Swamp Houses

Molly Bang on How the Story of Wiley was Recorded

Written By Molly Bang, who adapted "Wiley and the Hairyman" into a picture book in 2009.

About the Story
"Wiley and the Hairy Man" is an African-American folktale written down only in 1932. Here is the background of how it came to be recorded.

The 1920’s was a time of hope for the world: World War I was over, and people thought of it as “the war to end all wars.” Manufacturing boomed as cars and assembly-line machinery of all sorts poured from factories and were bought by the public, especially in the United States. Because of the improvement in farm machinery, farmers could grow much larger crops. They bought more land, more machines and planted more acres. Stock prices rose higher and higher as businesses grew and people’s faith in business grew. Banks lent money to businesses, farmers and individuals so they could buy supplies, stocks, houses and materials. People began to live more and more on credit, borrowing to pay for everything they bought.

In October 1929, the stock market crashed. Prices fell by 40%, setting off the Great Depression around the world. The price of farm goods fell because there was now way too much food and no one to sell it to. In 1930 a bushel of wheat sold for the lowest actual price in 400 years. Banks began to fail because too many customers were unable to repay their loans. People who had their saving in banks panicked and ran to withdraw their money, but the money wasn’t there. The banks had lent it all out. Banks around the world went bankrupt and their customers lost all their savings. Between 1929 and 1932, five thousand banks closed, and the average value of 50 industrial stocks on the New York Stock Exchange fell from 252 to 61. Thousands of businesses closed because they did not have the money to operate, and millions of people lost their jobs.

In 1932, Franklin Delano Roosevelt was elected president. He decided that the only way out of the Depression was for the government to invent jobs. The money to pay for the jobs came from government savings bonds, which were to be repaid with interest after a number of years. Some came from taxes and some was borrowed from abroad. Jobs were invented to build dams to provide electricity, as in the Tennessee Valley, or to build schools, roads, canals, bridges and government buildings. Under this program, called the New Deal, the US economy began to recover.

One of the very smallest of the government projects created under the New Deal was the Federal Writers' Project. This project paid people in each of the 49 states to go out and collect local history, songs, games, legends, riddles and folktales. "Wiley and the Hairy Man" was one of the many folktales recorded then, as part of the collection from the state of Alabama. It was written down by Donnell van De Voort, a white man, who had heard it as a child from the family gardener. I read it in A Treasury of American Folklore, a book edited by the head of the Federal Writers Project, William Botkin.

To illustrate it, I took a bus down to Montgomery, Alabama, where I stayed for two weeks. I rented a motorcycle, and every day I would ride out onto the back roads with my sketchbook and talk to people on the farms, telling them the story of Wiley and asking them what sorts of things I should include in the pictures so they would show life on an Alabama farm in the 1920’s. Everyone I met was friendly and helpful. All the pictures I drew are from real life—though many are of people who posed for me once I got back home to Massachusetts. The pictures are in pencil and black and white paint on grey paper, which was cut out and pasted onto a white background sheet.

As monsters do...

Hairy Man Legend

The Legend of the Hairy Man (Texas)

By Gwen King, Local Historian.  Children whisper tales of a strange hermit, the Hairy Man, who haunts the winding road along the Brushy Creek. Many legends persist about the Hairy Man. Some believe he was an infant accidentally left behind by settlers heading west in the 1800s. Raised by wild animals in the fern bluffs, the Hairy Man viewed the creek as his own. He resented the intrusion of strangers into his territory and would jump out of the trees to frighten people away. Or, hanging from the leafy canopy above the road, he would drag his feet across the top of passing carriages. On one occasion, the Hairy Man attacked a horse-drawn wagon, spooking the horses. The old hermit was supposedly run over by the wagon and killed, and now his spirit lingers along the creek and road. On a silent, moonlit night, perhaps you will see his eerie silhouette on the bluffs along Brushy Creek.

The faint, other-worldly moan that echoes through the night. Is it the sound of the wind as it pushes through the treetops or the lonely cry of a coyote or perhaps....something more sinister?

There is also an animation of this version of the folktale: WATCH.

Check out a short story version of Wiley here.

I love the Hairyman's face and teeth in these collaged illustrations. And Wiley and Mammy's expressions.