Classic Trickster: Liza Lou and the Yeller Belly Swamp by Mercer Mayer

Here's a classic literary folktale that is as nearly perfect as a picture book can be.

Mercer Mayer's Liza Lou And The Yeller Belly Swamp (Aladdin Picture Books), in print and going strong after 32 years, still has the power to knock the socks off the story circle crowd and delight the individual reader.

Mayer carefully crafts this tale, with its sassy, smart heroine and its outlandish but gullible bad guys, using the traditional trickster tale format, by masterfully intertwining snippets from world folklore into a piece which, like Robert San Souci's The Talking Eggs, emerges as a delightful bit of Americana.

Liza Lou's mama keeps her hoppin', poling her skiff all over the Yeller Belly Swamp in a variety of errands for family and neighbors, despite the undisputed fact that that swamp is the lair of all kinds of nasty characters--a swamp haunt in an abandoned shed, a swamp witch lurking in the reeds, a gobblygook under the Yeller Belly Swamp Bridge, and worst of all, a mean ole' swamp devil at the bottom of an old well. But Liza Lou is a girl who's full of "fancy thinking" and "bold as brass" to boot, and she's got some tricks in her little calico dress pocket to outsmart these characters everyone.

Mining European and African folklore, Mayer equips Liza Lou with some of literature's best ploys, beginning with a well-known one of that tricky little guy, B'rer Rabbit. Here's Liza Lou meeting up with the swamp witch as she totes Auntie Jane's soiled Sunday-go-to-meeting finery home to boil and scrub up for her by Friday:

"Liza Lou," that swamp witch cackled. "I'm gonna boil you in a big pot of water, and then I'm gonna chew on your bones."

"Oh, Miss Swamp Witch," cried Liza Lou. "Boil me in your big pot of water if you must, and chew on my bones as much as you like. But please, oh please, don't boil this precious little child I've got cradled in my arms."

Now everybody knows that a swamp witch is meaner than a stomped on polecat, but not everybody knows that she is blinder than a cave bat.

Of course, that old swamp witch just has to snatch Liza Lou's bundle and toss it into her big black boiling pot just for pure meanness, but when she complains that she can't smell anything cooking in the pot, Liza Lou uses the old Hansel and Gretel trick and coaxes her closer and closer to the pot until she can push her right in. The old witch skedaddles with a hoot and a holler, and Liza Lou calmly fishes her Auntie's now-clean laundry out of the pot and collects the promised payment--one of Auntie's pecan pies all her own--on Friday.

In similar fashion Liza Lou, drawing on the Red Riding Hood motif, lures the swamp haunt right into the clutches of her iron skillet-wielding granny when she begs him NOT to take her tote full of sweet potatoes to granny's house and cook them up in a pan. Borrowing a trick from the Goats Gruff, when Liza Lou trucks a wagon load of junk across the swamp bridge, she cons the gobblygook underneath who threatens to eat her into gobbling her precious "treasure" instead, causing the bridge and the now grossly overweight bad guy to sink into the mucky goo where they belong.

Borrowing from Ananse's capture of the hornets-who-sting-like-fire in Gail Haley's A Story, a Story, Liza Lou pulls off her best trick when, carrying a jug of molasses over to the Parson's for breakfast, she pretends to be happy that a mean old swamp devil is planning on stealing her soul rather than the precious parson's soul she's keeping safe inside her jug. Now Liza Lou knows that no swamp devil can resist transforming himself into a fly to take a look down inside, and when he does, Liza Lou slaps the cork back into the jug and traps that devil fly, whom the Parson's wife proceeds to swat into oblivion when she pours him out atop her morning hotcakes.

As for Liza Lou, she skipped all the way back home to her mother. And from that day to this, no one has ever seen hide nor hair of devils, gobblygooks, witches, or haunts in the Yeller Belly Swamp.

And no one misses them neither.

Liza Lou And The Yeller Belly Swamp (Aladdin Picture Books), lavishly overflowing with some of Mercer Mayer's finest illustrations, is filled with details of swamp life--Liza Lou's pet 'possum, partially hidden cottonmouth snakes, alligators, and bobcats--a menagerie of critters that listening children will enjoy spotting on every page. Meanwhile, Liza, with her freshly-ironed little print dresses and spirited body language, is as charming and in-control a trickster as ever strutted her way through a story. As one of Liza Lou's little rhymes puts it,

"One, two, three, four,
Five on the double.
If you mess around with me
It's a mess of trouble."

It's also a beautifully designed and lovingly crafted book, a thing of beauty which is indeed a joy forever!

The Great American Trickster: Two Wileys and That Hairy Man

With the arguable exception of Br'er Rabbit, American folk literature's top trickster has got to be the wily Wiley, who with his mama's help, manages to fool that old conjurin' sack man three times in Wiley and the Hairy Man. According to the retellers' notes, this story was collected somewhere in central Alabama by Donnell Van de Voort and published in the "Manuscripts of the Federal Writers' Project of the Works Progress Administration for the State of Alabama." Although Wiley has roots in African folklore, the tale is a fully American "confabulation" in which the plucky boy and his mother use their natural-born sass and wit to rid themselves of a cloven-footed swamp bogeyman.

The tale of Wiley is available currently in two stand-alone versions, both with much to recommend them to the reader or teller. The more recent adaptation, that of Judy Sierra and the Caldecott award-winning artist Brian Pinkney, published in 1996, shows off Pinkney's beautiful oil paintings on scratchboard, featuring jewel-like blues, greens, and golds. Sierra's retelling, which perhaps includes more of the orginally recorded version from the 1930's, is more conversational and meandering, a strong adaptation whose longer text provides ample room for Pinkney's sensuous illustrations to spread out on the large pages.

The older and, to my mind, more satisfying version, however, is the edition retold and illustrated by Molly Garrett Bang, known for her more recent Caldecott book, When Sophie Gets Angry--Really, Really Angry. Amazingly, Bang's powerful version was written as a controlled vocabulary Ready-to-Read edition (Simon & Schuster, 1976), illustrated in her simple but realistic black and sepia drawings. Perhaps the limited language is an asset to the storyteller in this iteration. Although Bang's text is not in dialect, its simplicity and word selection sound authentic to my Alabama-born ear, and in the reading it is easy to fall into a slow Southern cadence which befits the setting. The few but choice words give the text great drama when read aloud, and the suspense leading up to Wiley's and Mama's final tricks will mesmerize any audience:

Then the Hairy Man said,
"I'll dry up your cow.
I'll dry up your spring.
I'll send a million boll weevils out of the ground to eat up your cotton if you don't give me your young 'un.

"Hairy Man," said Wiley's mother, "you wouldn't do all that.
That's mighty mean."

I'm a mighty mean man," said the Hairy Man.

Bang's illustrations are equally strong in evoking the swampy atmosphere. Wiley, in his cutoffs and outgrown shirt, is skinny and long-limbed, and his thin, wiry mother, dressed in a long, skimpy work dress and kerchief, never stops working even as she shares her conjure wisdom with her only son. The Hairy Man himself is a marvelous bogeyman, short and powerfully squat, with a cow's tail and hind feet, and a smugly smiling mouth bristling with long snaggly teeth, his body language full of self-satisfied power until his final comeuppance.

A truly American trickster, the fearful but courageous underdog whose wit sees him through, Wiley is a national treasure, a reminder that size and power and sheer meanness don't always prevail over a hero who knows just how to use what he's got.