Old Granny Tucker is a witch or ogre-like figure found primarily in Southern folklore. In one well-known story, Granny Tucker lures a young girl to her house and attempts to kill her. The narrative begins with the girl, sometimes described as a distant relative of Granny Tucker, begging her mother to let her visit the old woman. Her mother, who claims to be the only person to have ever escaped from Granny Tucker’s clutches, is at first very reticent to grant her daughter permission to go. After the girl’s extensive pleading, however, the mother agrees but only on the condition that the girl whistle if she gets into trouble. The mother also decides to leave the family dogs out for the night just in case. When the girl visits Old Granny, “a bent old woman with white hair and wicked black eyes,” she is sent out to play with Granny Tucker’s daughter, who cruelly beats her during their games. When night comes, Old Granny covers her own daughter’s bed with a dark sheet and the girl’s with a white one and waits for them to drift off. The girl is cleverer than Granny Tucker, however, and knows that she is in danger. Claiming that she cannot sleep without music, she asks if she can play the fiddle Granny has over her mantle. The old woman agrees, and the girl promptly plays a lullaby, putting the witch to sleep. The girl then swaps the sheets on the beds and stuffs her own bed with old rags before quietly fleeing the house. She soon hears the yowls of Granny Tucker as she learns that she has murdered her own wicked daughter with an axe due to the change in bedclothes. The girl scrambles up a tree, but the witch arrives shortly after with her bloody axe and begins hacking at the trunk. Finally, the girl remembers her mother’s request and lets out a loud whistle. Then the dogs arrive and manage to kill Old Granny Tucker, saving the girl.
Fundamentally, the tale of Granny Tucker includes a number of familiar folklore motifs. A version of the story featuring cannibalistic giants rather than a witch appears in The Thousand and One Nights, with Sinbad the Sailor barely escaping a bloody fate just as the girl had. More pointedly, several of the Baughman motif types (found in parentheses in the following summary) very nearly describe the actions in the Granny Tucker narrative: a girl is lured into a witch’s house (G412), then flees her monstrous pursuer and hides in a tree (D672), after which her attacker attempts to chop the tree down to claim her victim (R251), only to be killed by the girl’s dogs when she whistles for them (B524.1.2). Several other Southern folktales share motifs with Old Granny Tucker’s story. In “Wiley and the Hairy Man,” for example, the young boy is saved several times, including by whistling for his dogs while hiding in a tree. The witch figure in the Wiley story is an ogre-like man, who like the witch is reputed to know magic. A Louisiana folktale called “Petit Poucet” utilizes the switched identities motif (K1611) in a manner similar to the Granny Tucker story, this time with a forest-dwelling devil in place of the witch and nightcaps instead of bedcovers. Once again, the child hides up a tree after his deceit is discovered and is rescued by his dogs.
Zora Neale Hurston recorded a very similar story from an informant from the West Indies during her work in the Gulf States. In Hurston’s rendition, a brother and sister both are attacked by a group of witches and hide up a tree, summoning their dogs with the chant “Hail Counter! Hail Jack! Hail Counter! Hail Jack!” The dogs kill the witches and the children escape. Hurston’s version demonstrates the narrative’s flexibility in a number of ways, most notably in the shift from a single child and witch to multiples of each. An Appalachian version of Hansel and Gretel called “Babes in the Woods” shares a few similarities with both Hurston’s tale and other versions of the Granny Tucker tale.
Interestingly, the name “Granny Tucker” has also been applied to slightly less malevolent witches in folklore. A Florida folktale features a witch named Granny Tucker who specializes in helping women conceive children, particularly if they want a child of a specific gender. After procuring Old Granny’s services, however, one woman fails to meet the conditions of payment. Old Granny curses her infant girl to perish under a horse’s hooves. After avoiding horses for many years, the child’s parents believe they may have outwitted Granny Tucker. However, one day they receive the awful news that their little daughter had tripped in a deep hoof print while running up the road. She had fallen and cracked her head on a rock, dying instantly. In this last case, Old Granny did not deliberately set out to harm the child or her parents but only levels the curse after failing to receive payment. This story follows other well-trodden paths of fairy-tale narrative, such as the story of “Briar Rose” in the Grimms’ collection or “The Sleeping Beauty” in Perrault (Aarne-Thompson Tale Type 410).
In some ways, Old Granny Tucker is an American version of Baba Yaga—a frightening witch with tremendous power and frequently bloodthirsty leanings. The recurring theme of her malevolence, however, always stems from being slighted by her community. In one tale she is ignored by everyone, including her family (albeit with good reason), and in the other she is cheated out of payment. While no story views her with any true sympathy, Granny Tucker’s story makes the point that it is best to stay on a witch’s good side rather than incurring her wrath.
Cory Thomas Hutcheson
See also Babes in the Woods; Boo Hag; Hairy Woman; Hurston, Zora Neale; Old Betty Booker; Scary Stories
Further Reading
Ancelet, Barry Jean. 1994. Cajun and Creole Folktales: The French Oral Tradition of South Louisiana. New York: Garland.
Dawood, N. J., trans. 1973. Tales from the Thousand and One Nights. New York: Penguin.
Hurston, Zora Neale. 2001. Every Tongue Got to Confess: Negro Folk-tales from the Gulf States. New York: Harper Collins.
Schlosser, S. E. 2004. Spooky South: Tales of Hauntings, Strange Happenings, & Other Local Lore. Guilford, CT: Globe Pequot Press.