Category Archives: Legends

Narratives about belief.

“A Mule Named Hiney”

Nationality: American
Age: 45
Occupation: Engineer
Residence: Newport Beach, CA
Performance Date: April 10th, 2013
Primary Language: English

Informant Data: The informant is a Caucasian male in his mid-40’s. He works as a telecommunication engineer, and self-identifies with the Christian faith. He is a wonderful story-teller, and gets great joy from performing such for close friends.

Item: The folk-tale “A Mule Named Hiney” that follows. The following quotations are direct transcriptions of my dialogue with the informant, while the additional information provided is paraphrased.

“Once there was a grandfather and his grandson, who lived at the top of a steep mountain. There was a village far below in the valley at the bottom of the mountain, and it was a day’s long walk to and from. The grandfather and grandson had an old mule by the name of “Hiney”, and they decided it was time to take ole Hiney down to the village to sell him.

So the next morning, they woke up early and began the day’s journey down the mountain. As they headed down towards the valley, they passed by the homes of all the people who lived along the mountain road. They passed one house where there was a man outside, sipping his morning coffee. He called to the travelers “Why are you both walking that mule when one could be riding it?”

The grandfather then decided to put his grandson up on ole Hiney’s back, and continued toward town. Next, they passed a home with a woman out front gardening. She called to them “What a mean little boy, riding on the mule and making your grandfather walk!” This caused the traveler’s to pause and switch positions so the grandfather was up on ole Hiney.

The two continued on, and then came across a stable, with the owner outside brushing a horse. The owner called to them “You know, by the time you get to town, that mule is going to be so worn out that you won’t be able to trade him for anything!”

Having heard this, the grandfather and grandson decided to hoist ole Hiney onto their own backs to carry the mule for the rest of the journey. They walked on and came to a wobbly footbridge, with the village in sight across it. As they crossed, the grandfather slipped and lost his balance, accidently throwing ole Hiney over side, plunging to his death.

The moral of this story is simply: If you try to please everyone, you will lose your Hiney.”

Contextual Data: The informant first heard this folktale in his college years at Westmont College in Santa Barbara. He informs me that for the last line “you can always say, you know, “ass” instead of “Hiney”, but I this way is more charming, more kid-friendly.”  Additionally, having the metaphor of the tale come to light negates the sad death of the mule, as though he was a narrative tool and not a true character. The informant tells me this story “makes light of a very true fact of life: you simply cannot please everyone.” And the elements of the story that illustrate this metaphor can be easily extrapolated to everyday life; the rather nosey neighbors could be one’s real life neighbors, but also maybe co-workers or classmates and friends. The informant tells me that the default moral of the story is “to be confident in yourself and comfortable in the face of criticism.” While that is quite a simply-put difficult feat, folk-tales that remind us of this aspiration can only have a positive effect on the audience. Each criticism that the two received on their journey to town, were valid remarks. The changing variable was simply perspective, perhaps one of the most difficult concepts to realize of human nature. Each individual’s perspective was built from a lifetime of experiences, interactions and beliefs, evidenced most visibly in the stable owner’s remark. Having been around livestock and horses, his concern was for the mule, a stark contrast to the previous commenters. While maintaining an understanding of multiple perspectives can often be advantageous, this narrative emphasizes the importance of self-confidence and assurance in one’s own perspective.

Rat Chihuahua

Nationality: American
Age: 31
Occupation: PHD Student
Residence: Los Angeles, CA
Performance Date: April 2013
Primary Language: English

“Somebody goes to Mexico on vacation, right, and they buy the cheapest Chihuahua in the world, and they’re so excited, they’re like ‘wow this is a pure bred Chihuahua let me buy it’ and they’re gonna buy it and bring it home to whatever Suburban town they’re from. And they have the thing and they’re like it looks weird but whatever, and then one day, grim turn, they find that it’s like attacking their child in the night and they take it to the vet and he’s like ‘this is a shaved rat’ and it’s a terrifying huge city rat brought into your home and now you have rabies and like whatever else the rat has.”

Informant Analysis: “It was always somebody’s cousin or somebody’s second cousin or something went to Mexico. We just accepted it completely because we were little kids who, when we imagined Mexico, it’s just a place that isn’t here and of course a scary thing like that could come from there. And I thought it was true until I read this book “scary stories to read in the dark” and the story was there and I was like oh, that’s it, it’s just a story.”

Analysis: This urban legend serves as a way to somehow relate to or understand a place that otherwise seems exotic to the informant. The legend uses something familiar–a chihuahua–and makes it something scary as a result of being bought in Mexico. The legend not only makes Mexico seem like a dangerous or untrustworthy place based on the transaction, but it also makes the family who was fooled by the trick seem a bit stupid for having believed that a rat was a dog. The informant also points to the fact that the story was somehow always personal because it “actually” happened to a relative or a relative of a relative, and this “five degrees of separation” idea is the case with many urban legends, so they can seem more plausible or realistic when in fact somebody random probably just made them up. That could be why the informant believed the story for so long past childhood.

 

AIDS Needles

Nationality: American
Age: 31
Occupation: PHD Student
Residence: Los Angeles, CA
Performance Date: April 2013
Primary Language: English

“Whenever I went swimming, if I stepped on something in the water, I thought it was an HIV infected needle. And all of my logic would be like ‘no, it doesn’t exist in the air that long, it’s really hard to do that…all this stuff. But all my friends would talk about it, how these needles were everywhere and they were gonna get us if we weren’t careful”

Informant Analysis: “The AIDS needles thing scared the crap out of me, and the idea still kind of does, which is insane, because like, I’m old enough now to know that one, that is impossible, that’s not how transmission occurs, and two, even if you get infected somehow, it is nothing like a death sentence the way it was back then. But I’m still enough of a child of the 80’s that it resonates with me”

Analysis: The fact that this urban legend had such an effect on the informant is a good indication of the culture in which he grew up. When he was growing up, AIDS was much more publicized and controversial, so this particular belief would have had more of a foothold in society, especially among kids. Even though he understands it better now, and knows it can’t be real, it still resonates with him. These kinds of “threatening” Urban legends and superstitions, when told and reinforced in childhood, seem to have a particular hold on those they are told to, even as adults. The element of this particular legend that makes it seem real is the reality of the disease, something that overshadowed much of the informant’s childhood politically and socially. Growing up now, we know about AIDS, but we aren’t seeing it on the news everyday and we are not being given as much misinformation as they were speculating about at the time. This urban legend seems to have taken advantage of the uncertainty surrounding the disease at the time, so people would more readily believe and fear the elusive “needles.”

Abiyoyo (Annotated)

Nationality: American
Age: 19
Occupation: Student
Residence: Santa Barbara, CA
Performance Date: April 2013
Primary Language: English

“Once upon a time, there’s a little village and it’s in a valley with hills all around it…I’m not sure if I can remember the exact version from school…and just on the other side of the hills, was this giant named Abiyoyo (I’m supposed to say it in a scary voice)…and he would come and he would eat all the farm animals, and he would terrorize the villagers, and then he’d go back to his home, somewhere beyond the hills. And in this little town, there was a father and a son who nobody really liked, because they were just annoying. The son was always singing and dancing and bothering people when they were working, and the father was a magician who would make things disappear, and sometimes he would make things disappear when people needed them. So anyways, one day Abiyoyo is coming for some lunch, and for lunch he has sheep and cows and other things in the village. And, all of the villagers are running away as usual, and the father and the son decide that this is the last time that Abiyoyo is coming to town. So the son goes out to the field where Abiyoyo is eating some sheep, which is very sad, and the son starts singing and dancing, and he sings a song about the monster, Abiyoyo, and this makes Abiyoyo really happy, because he’s been alone his whole life, and he doesn’t think that anybody would ever be nice to him. He just thought people would run away whenever they came near him. But this little boy was singing to him. And so Abiyoyo started singing along and he had a really scary loud voice, but he was singing and dancing, and eventually he was dancing long enough that he had to lie down, and the second he lay down, the father brought out his magic wand, and made Abiyoyo disappear. All the villagers came running back, because the monster was gone, and all the villagers were safe, and they didn’t have to worry about all their farm animals being eaten, and they didn’t have to worry about Abiyoyo coming over the hills and terrorizing their village. And it was all thanks to the father and the son who nobody had ever liked, and now they were the village heroes.”

The informant heard this legend when she was in elementary school in Boston. She remembers the story being very scary as a child, but also a sweet tale of outsiders (the father and son) “proving themselves” and finally becoming part of the community. Primarily considered a South African lullaby, The Abiyoyo story is most well known as told and performed by Pete Seeger, a famous folk singer who introduces the story with a song:

“Abiyoyo, Abiyoyo

Abiyoyo, Abiyoyo,

Abiyoyo, Abi yo yo yo yo yo yo yo

Abi yo yo yo yo yo yo yo yo”

See Seeger’s Performance Here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HlDGHEk68XI

Seeger has an illustrated story book titled Abiyoyo as well. The story relies on the Abiyoyo song, which the young boy sings to the giant to coax him, and Pete Seeger weaves this into the story in his performances. The story is often used in school classrooms like it was the in the informant’s as part of “Africa Units” in Social Studies, but beyond learning about Africa, the story seems to fit neatly into the Children’s folklore category because it features a child hero, the young boy who coaxes the giant. Though him and his father are initially misfits, they are eventually accepted for their heroism.

 

Hidden Razor Blades

Nationality: American
Age: 31
Occupation: PHD Student
Residence: Los Angeles, CA
Performance Date: April 2013
Primary Language: English

“The idea was that Satanists, or people like them, were slipping needles into apples, or like, razorblades into apples, and poisoning candy, and whenever I got a pixie stick, my parents would make me pour it out, like if I got one for Halloween they would make me pour it out, saying ‘no, they could have put drugs in that, you can’t have that.’ And then if, ah, like, one year, and this was the only year they did it but the urgent treatment center was doing an X-ray where you could bring your kids’ candy in and they would X-ray it and be like ‘okay, no needles here ma’am, no razorblades in your apples’ My parents still believe this, even now.”

This urban legend affected many of the informant’s Halloweens, as his parents would “screen” his candy before he could have it. It also becomes part of the Halloween ritual in a way, because the “checkpoint” has to happen before the informant can have the candy. This urban legend was so widespread that the Urgent Care Center in his area actually allowed people to use an X-ray machine! This translation from legend to real life fear shows how pervasive urban legends can be. This fear also reveals who people were most afraid of at the time (the informant grew up in the eighties). Satanists were apparently the biggest threat, those who seemed most evil and likely to do something like this to innocent kids. Though the informant left this belief behind, it seems that his parents have not.