The Scarecrow in TREEMONISHA: What Is That Thing Comin' Yonder?

When first listening to the Houston original cast recording of Treemonisha and then again when attending the 2000 Opera Theatre of Saint Louis production, I found the rescue scene particularly funny.  Listeners and audience members hear Remus explain his plan for rescuing Treemonisha from the conjurors.       

I’ll wear this ugly scarecrow
While through the woods I roam
I will scare away the conjurors,
And I’ll bring Treemonisha home.

Back in the forest as Simon counts to three before shoving Treemonisha into the wasp nest, Remus’ approach interrupts the count.  Dramatic irony creates comedy when the conjurors fail to recognize Remus, whom they could surely overpower.  Seeing  the “strange form” approach,“ Cephus cries out, “Look!  What’s that comin’ yonder?”  Panic ensues as the conjurors perhaps believe they face retribution for kidnapping Treemonisha:

SIMON
It looks like the devil.

CHORUS
The devil?

SIMON
Yes, the devil.
(Zodzetrick and Luddud free Treemonisha and look toward the devil.)
and he is comin' right after us.

WOMEN
We must leave here.

SIMON
Run and save yourselves.

Remus has successfully turned the tables on the unknowing conjurors, who prey on others’ superstitions but fall victim to their own.   With this scene, we easily see Joplin accomplish two goals: showing the conjurors as charlatans and simultaneously injecting humor.   

Once more, Joplin’s contemporaries may have seen more.  Although today's audience may laugh at the naiveté of fearing a straw man set out to frighten birds, a closer look at scarecrows and the African figures resembling them may explain the conjurors' desperation. 

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Figurative Scarecrows as Scare Tactics

We needn’t look hard to discover that scarecrows were not intended solely to fright birds, but also to frighten ignorant humans. However, an historic newspaper search for the word scarecrow leads to relevant hits on figurative, rather than literal, scarecrows.  Frequently, Jim Crow Southern Democrats used so-called “scarecrows,” which today we would call scare tactics, to persuade voters to support anti-civil rights legislation.  For example, roughly two years after the Civil War ended, the Fort Scott (KS) Weekly Monitor commented, “During the past three years the Democracy have been engaged in manufacturing a terrible scarecrow, with which they hope to frighten Republicans into their ranks. They have now got it completed, and stood it up in the by-ways, dressed up in most hideous shape.  Its name is ‘negro suffrage’” (Oct. 16, 1867).  Nearly forty years later, following Theodore Roosevelt’s invitation of Booker T. Washington to a White House dinner, the Hutchison [KS] News announced , “The Democrats have apparently started their campaign cry, set up their campaign scarecrow."  In hopes of scaring voters into electing a Democratic ticket, Southerners began campaigning against Roosevelt’s election to a full term by accusing him of “Caesarism” (Apr. 30, 1904).

Blacks similarly addressed the same issue. "Social equality, these democratic demagogues know, is not our contention; that is a mere bugaboo, a scarecrow invented to frighten the uninformed,” wrote the African-American Episcopal Church Review  (8:4 (1892), 407).  After crediting Theodore Roosevelt’s 1904 victory  in part to his having invited Washington to dinner, the Topeka Plaindealer remarked, “The Democrats are now getting aroused over the foolhardihood of the scarecrow and bugaboo of Negro domination” (Nov. 25, 1904).

The Freeman (Indianapolis, IN), Feb. 18, 1905

Booker T. Washington, himself, spoke of the figurative scarecrow:  “The time has come, too, when the strong white leaders of the South should no longer permit the negro to be used as a political ‘scarecrow.’  Too many selfish politicians have used the negro as a political “bogey man” in a way to deceive white people, and even to discourage some of the best black people in the communities”  (BTW Papers, XIII, 20). 

Only a small sample from the period, such quotations hint that physical scarecrows must frightened some people. A clipping from the Pullman [WA] Herald supports this view.

What gave these figurative scarecrows their power? 

Likely answers may be found in New World remnants of traditional African religions.

Pullman [WA] Herald, Nov. 21, 1903

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Wangas

Ellis Williams’ Federal Writers Project interviews with a Mr. Crawford, a Caribbean immigrant living in Harlem, help us understand. Crawford speaks of a scarecrow-like figure used in obeah, a Caribbean folk tradition inherited from Africa and closely akin to hoodoo as practiced in the United States:    

Wanga in a great many instances are not unlike what some people call scarecrows.  They are designed especially as guards to protect fruit trees from the pilferers who roam from orchard to orchard at night stealing. . . . The construction of a wanga is based on an African concept identical with one of the doctrines of Pythagoras, an early Greek philosopher, that is, that the empirical relation of similar forms implies the existence of other and distinct relations.   (Manuscripts from the Federal Writers' Project, 1936-1940. American Memory, Library of Congress)

This interviewee speaks of sympathetic magic, which depends on similarities; what is done to one thing (an object) is believed to affect the other (a human).  As James G. Frazer puts it in The Golden Bough:

If it is wished to kill a person, an image of him is made and then destroyed; and it is believed that through a certain physical sympathy between the person and his image, the man feels the injuries done to the image as if they were done to his own body, and that when it is destroyed he must simultaneously perish.

In the September 16 blog entry, we have seen how harm to a sacred tree could result in harm to someone associated with that tree.  Voodoo dolls provide another familiar example, and according to Google image search results. these fetish dolls are now classified as wangas, although smaller ones.

Like scarecrows, larger wangas were often hung on poles or nailed to trees to frighten thieves and trespassers.  According to Crawford, the FWP interviewee, wangas came in several forms. Most relevant is the “Human Figure” wanga.  Any injury the maker inflicted on this wanga would “be felt by the thief in the corresponding places.”

Even a missing wanga could wield power.  "I once asked a chap who had nothing floating from his garden pole 'where his wanga was,'" Crawford continues.  “‘Ah,' he replied, 'this is the best wanga'--pointing to the naked pole.  'Them little boys stone down everybody wanga, but when they see my pole without any wanga--they frighten.  They don't know where my wanga is.'"  

If the boys could fear a missing wanga, imagine the terror felt by any superstitious people who believed they saw a wanga approaching.

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Mumbo Jumbo

The feared African character known as Mamagyambo (Mandinka language of West Africa), Mahammah Jamboh, or Mumbo Jumbo also may help explain the conjurors’ fear of the costumed Remus.  The Journal of American Folklore tells us, “This mysterious personage always appears in horrid disguise,” wrapped “in a long dress made of tree barks up to nine feet in length and crowned by a wisp of straw” (12:46, July-Sept.1899). 

Nearly two decades earlier, the Osage City [KS] Free Press published a similar description of Mumbo Jumbo, prefacing it with comments about such superstitious beliefs:

Among the most difficult puzzles in this great riddle-box are the customs of the African tribes. Of course, all savage and heathen people do very strange things in connection with their religion and their laws; yet, however odd and ridiculous some of these may seem to us, the people themselves believe them right and proper, because they are so taught by their priests and rulers. . . .

Among these are the trials by Mumbo Jumbo, a character met with in many villages on the west coast of Africa.  Mumbo Jumbo is nothing at all but a man on short stilts, with a sort of cloak wrapped about him, and a great false head fastened above his own head.  All this, of course, makes him look very tall, and a pair of wooden arms, which stick out and below his big head, help to give him the appearance of a man about twice as big as anybody else.
 
Dressed up in a strange way, he stumps about through the village, and the people believe that he has the power to point out any person who has committed a crime. . . .  (Dec. 15, 1881)

Villagers running from Mumbo Jumbos; St. Louis Republic, May 15, 1892

Mumbo Jumbo reappears in Vachel Lindsay's ragtime era poem "The Congo," where Lindsay tells us, "Mumbo-Jumbo, God of the Congo, . . . Mumbo-Jumbo will hoo-doo you."

Although  the "jubilee revival shout" of a camp-meeting and the Christianization of Africa are said to have killed Mumbo Jumbo, leaving him “dead in the Jungle,” never again to hoodoo anyone, the final stanza seems to say that Mumbo Jumbo’s threat  remains, that a remnant of primitive religion lives on: 

Redeemed were the forests, the beasts and the men.
And only the vulture dared again
By the far, lone mountains of the moon
To cry, in the silence, the Congo tune:--
 Mumbo-Jumbo will hoo-doo you.
 Mumbo Jumbo will hoo-doo you,
 Mumbo . . . Jumbo . . . will . . . hoo-doo . . . you.

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Characteristic Fear

A 1907 issue of the New York Sun speaks of superstitious rural blacks who have retained African beliefs despite their Christianity, mixing their traditional beliefs with fear of the Biblical devil:

In parts of the south among some of the negroes the chief religious satisfaction is the devil. Throughout the great agricultural regions the cottonfields of the “low groun’s” and the tobacco patches of the “new  groun’s,” remote from all touch of progress, even the rural delivery man, there are negroes who have moulded to their own temperaments the Christian religion as adopted generations ago at the behest of their masters, grafting thereon relics of African devil worshiping handed down from parent to child by the dim light of many a slave cabin fire. . . .

Righteousness for righteousness sake is beyond his ken.  He must have something tangible, something he can grasp and cling to emotionally, even if fearfully, much as those savage forefathers bowed down in an ecstasy of terror before the grinning image of Mumbo Jumbo, whose either hand dripped woes and disaster, the right to man, the left to woman.

Like children, these negroes delight in being frightened; the shudder of fear is as wine to them, the belief in an ever-present fiend a tonic.  It is a belief among them that “eve’y time yer opens er do’ dar’s de debble er standin’ waitin’ fer yer,” thus bringing the terrible person into intimate association with their daily life.    ("The Devil Real to Them," Feb. 10, 1907)

Joplin consciously decides to dress Remus as a scarecrow and to put words into Remus' mouth, showing Remus' conscious act:  "I will wear this scarecrow suit. . . . I will scare away the conjurors."  Joplin understands many of his uneducated people's superstitions and the fears that accompany those beliefs.  He knows how the conjurors would react to the scarecrow costume, to another wanga or Mumbo Jumbo on the loose, to the terrifying West African supernatural beings that likely have influenced the conjurors' concept of the devil.  Today’s audiences may snicker at the rescue scene as I did, wondering how the conjurors could be fooled into believing that a man dressed as a scarecrow is the devil.  Yet, as a variety of sources from the period  indicate, Joplin’s prospective audiences may have understood.