You may be surprised to hear who one of my favorite hero-tale tellers is: Donald Davis. Donald, best known now for his original family and personal stories, grew up hearing Jack tales from his grandmother. Most of them were long quest stories that could be strung together. Donald says that depending on how much time he and his grandmother had, she might tell one adventure, or string three or four together.
I’ve never heard Donald tell a Jack tale on a festival stage, but once when we were featuring him at SMCC I asked him to tell some in my mythology class. He agreed and for over an hour we heard tale after tale about Jack.
My favorite was “The Time Jack Learned About Old and New.” In the story, a little old lady transforms herself into the king. Jack’s two older brothers, who meet her before he does, don’t accept the offer of the “king” to help them. But when “he” offers to help Jack, Jack quickly accepts the offer.
Later, when the old woman transforms back to herself, she gives Jack an important message. In hero’s journey terms, it’s one of the boons she gives Jack. Here’s what she says: “But you, Jack, you’re different. You’re the only one around here who knows that when something needs to be done, it doesn’t matter who does it!” She also gives him a “Death’s-eye glass” with which he can determine whether a sick person will live or die, but it seems to me that the gift of self knowledge is an equally important boon.
Hearing this story, with transformation at its core, told in the context of a mythology class really reinforced for me the timeless importance of Jack. Jack is a mythic hero in the everyman mold. Donald speaks to this in the introduction to his book Southern Jack Tales.
“Upon reflection, I am aware that the stories about Jack which I heard came at a time when the first members of my ancestral families were beginning, through reading and education, to have contact with a world beyond their own. I am convinced that Jack was so important to them as the center of all story that every tale they told was about Jack, regardless of where it had come from. I can easily hear storytellers of my childhood tell the story of the Good Samaritan about Tom and Will and Jack rather than about the priest, the Levite, and the Samaritan. I can also hear the Prodigal Son told about Jack leaving home while the older brothers stay home (p. 28).”
Donald’s ancestors not only adapted stories from the bible, they also transformed stories from Welsh, Scottish, and Irish mythology. At one of the early Mesa Storytelling Festivals, I was telling a short story at the beginning of one of Donald’s hour-long sessions. I told my version of the birth of Taliesin, in which the goddess Ceridwen chases her apprentice Gwion through transformation after transformation. Finally, Gwion turns himself into a grain of wheat. Ceridwen turns herself into a chicken and swallows him up. Nine months later, Ceridwen gives birth to a baby boy, sews him in a crane skin, and drops him in the river. He is eventually rescued, named Taliesin, and becomes the greatest bard who ever lived.
After I told the story, Donald came up to the microphone and told the audience that his grandmother had told the same story. In her version, Gwion and the new baby were both called Jack, and Ceridwen was simply a witch. Just like in the mythic story of Taliesin, Jack and the witch each made multiple transformations that led to Jack being born again as her baby. Instead of being placed in the river, the witch placed Jack in the ocean and eventually he washed up in America. That was Donald’s grandmother’s explanation of how Jack got to America! And in truth, Jack has been just as important to storytelling as Taliesin was – some might say even more important.
Or maybe they really are just the same person come down to us through the ages in story form.
You can read “The First Time Jack Came to America” and “The Time Jack Learned About Old and New” in Southern Jack Tales. The picture at the beginning of the post is the cover of the book.
Do you have a favorite teller of hero tales? Or, do you remember a particularly satisfying experience of hearing a hero tale? Tell us about it!
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