“A Boarhog for a Husband” is a folk tale recorded by Roger Abrahams from a source on the Caribbean island of St. Vincent in the 1960s that subsequently has been published in a number of folklore collections. This tale of an animal masquerading as a man to marry a king’s daughter may seem to the American reader both familiar and at the same time very strange indeed. The tale may illustrate the mixing of different storytelling traditions that occurred when African slaves and their descendants told and retold the tales that they had carried with them to the New World from their homelands.
The tale begins with the familiar phrase “Once upon a time” and provides the reader or listener with the essential background information in the space of just a few sentences: the king (called “Massa King” in the tale) and the queen are unable at first to find a suitable husband for their unnamed, beautiful daughter. Finally the daughter blindly falls deeply in love with one suitor, a handsome young man who, we later learn, is not a man at all: “When she fell in love, it was deep and wide—she just lost her head altogether. What she didn’t know was that she’d actually chosen a boarhog who had changed himself into a human to go courting.” The ruse succeeds at first, and after the daughter and the boarhog marry, they move to a distant house and begin to farm a large plot of land that was provided by Massa King.
The only member of the family able to suspect the suitor of masquerading from the start is Old Witch Boy, the king’s own son who is treated more as a reviled servant or slave than as royal blood: he is “always dirty and smelly,” he is forced to do “all the nasty stuff around the palace,” and he is made to sleep under a bed rather than in it. After Massa King harshly dismisses Old Witch Boy’s initial cautioning, the son continues to pursue the matter. He secretly observes the boarhog and learns the brief song (the seemingly nonsensical lyrics are given at several points in the story) that brings about the boarhog’s transformation from human to beast and from beast to human:
Scalambay, scalambay
Scoops, scops, scalambay
See my lover coming there
Scoops, scops, scalambay.
Old Witch Boy then repeats his suspicions to Massa King only to be harshly dismissed a second time. With his third attempt, he finally convinces Massa King of the danger, and the king follows Old Witch Boy to the distant house armed with a gun. The son begins to sing the song, forcing the boarhog’s transformation from human to beast before the very eyes of Massa King. The king kills the boarhog with a single shot, explaining the whole matter to his still clueless, but now grieving daughter. He then orders that the boarhog’s corpse be butchered and distributed as food to any onlookers. In the final sentence of the published version of the tale, the narrator asserts having been present as witness to the retold events and ends the tale in a surprising manner: “And I was right there on the spot, and took one of the testicles and it gave me food for nearly a week!”
In their brief introduction to “A Boarhog for a Husband,” David Leeming and Jake Page make sense of the tale by relating it to the tradition of European fairy tales: “While monster stories per se are rare in African American mythology, there are fairytale-like legends of beasts disguised as humans. A well-known tale of the sort is this ‘Beauty-and-the-Beast’-style tale told in the Bahamas and also in the American South” (Leeming and Page 1999, 90). Indeed, the tale conforms to some conventions of the European folk or fairy tale, including the formulaic opening with an unspecified setting (“Once upon a time—it was a very good time—Massa King had an only daughter”) and the occurrence of the number three (Old Witch Boy warns Massa King three times that his daughter’s husband is not what he appears to be). Max Lüthi argues that such organization and conventions are quite familiar in European oral tradition; they aid both the narrator’s memory in the telling of the tale and the listener’s reception of the tale.
Other elements of “A Boarhog for a Husband” do not follow the conventions of European oral tradition, however. In the final sentence of the tale, for example, the narrator suddenly claims to have been present at the boarhog’s execution, and the tale ends on a humorous or even bawdy note. Abrahams argues that both this interruption by the narrator (2011, 30–31) and what he calls the tale’s “uproarious” ending (2011, 19) place it within a distinctly African and African American storytelling tradition of the trickster tale. Abrahams further identifies the tale’s “pattern of seduction and rescue” (2011, 17) as remarkably similar to what is found in one of the earliest recorded African American tales, as written down by Matthew Gregory Lewis in the early 1800s: the story of a girl named Sarah Winyan who is enticed by a large black dog named Tiger and who is ultimately rescued by her brothers.
James B. Kelley
See also Beauty and the Beast Folklore; European Sources; Trickster Rabbit
Further Reading
Abrahams, Roger. 1983. The Man-of-Words in the West Indies: Performance and the Emergence of Creole Culture. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press.
Abrahams, Roger. 2011. African American Folktales: Stories from Black Traditions in the New World. New York: Knopf Doubleday.
Leeming, David, and Jake Page. 1999. Myths, Legends, and Folktales of America: An Anthology. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Lüthi, Max. 1984. The Fairytale as Art Form and Portrait of Man. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.