Author Archives: Andrea Immel

Toni and Slade Morrison Retell Aesop: “Who’s Got Game: Poppy or the Snake?”

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Heinrich Steinhowel’s illustration of The Man and the Snake first published in 1479.

How does the 2004 retelling by Toni Morrison and her son Slade of the mordant Aesopian fable, “The Man and the Snake” depart from its predecessors? Let’s look at the versions of Sir Roger L’Estrange and Samuel Croxall before turning to the Morrisons.

 “The Man and the Snake” (Perry 176) is a warning that it’s a risky business to assume the best of someone unlikely to return a favor. In the 1690s  Sir Roger L’Estrange put it a little differently, but the idea is the same:

A countryman happen’d in a hard winter to spy a snake under a hedge, that was half frozen to death. The man was good natur’d and took it up, and kept it in his bosom till the warmth brought it to life again; and so soon as e’er it was in condition to do mischief, it bit the very man that sav’d the life on’t. Ah thou ungrateful wretch! says he, is that venomous ill nature of  thine to be satisfi’d with nothing less that the ruine of thy preserver. 

Samuel Croxall’s version from 1722 is more violent and dramatic than L’Estrange’s.   Here the man rather foolishly brings the snake home to  warm it up by the fire. As soon as it had thawed out,

It began to erect itself, and fly at his wife and children, filling the whole cottage with dreadful hissings. The Countryman hearing an outcry, and perceiving what the matter was, catched up a mattock, and soon dispatched the ingrate, upbraiding him at the same time in these words: Is this, vile wretch, the reward you make to him that saved your life? Die, as you deserve; but a single death is too good for you.

No remorse is wasted on the snake, who is about to receive its death’s blow.

Toni Morrison and her son Slade depart significantly in some ways from L’Estrange and Croxall in Poppy and the Snake, but in the more subtle aspects not as much. This picture books is the only one of their fable trilogy, Who’s Got Game, to feature Black characters and a setting associated with that community, the Louisiana bayou.   Expanding the fable to fill a 32-page picture book in comic book format gives the co-authors and illustrator more opportunity to flesh out and individualize the story.  A fable revision of this kind is also known as a paraphrase and has a long, long history. 

The biggest change is the addition of a frame story about a grandfather and his grandson Nate.  One night after dinner, Nate confesses to his Poppy that he isn’t paying attention in school because there are so many other things he’d rather be doing.  Couldn’t he stay on after school starts?  Poppy does some thinking, then takes out a pair of boots, and puts them on.  He explains to Nate that these are his remembering boots and “right now they’re helping me remember that paying attention is just a way of taking yourself seriously.”  Nate is confused, so Poppy explains himself by telling the fable of the man and the snake, in which the relationship between the two characters is more complicated than it was in L’Estrange and Croxall.

The snake’s sorry condition is actually Poppy’s fault, because he accidentally ran over it while parking his truck.  He doesn’t discover the reptile until he comes back from fishing.  Although badly hurt, the snake is plenty sassy and demands that Poppy free it, because he was responsible for nearly killing him.  As soon as he recognizes that it is a poisonous snake, Poppy’s guard goes up, but quickly convinces himself that the reptile wouldn’t swear to “never even think of biting” if  it weren’t decent deep down.  The snake still isn’t satisfied.  After it’s freed, it insists that it’s only decent that Poppy take him home for something to eat.  Within twenty-four hours, the goodhearted man agrees to give the snake a safe place to stay until it’s well again. Things work out for a while, but the snake gets impatient with Poppy’s quiet ways.  One evening while they’re playing cards the snake suggests rather nastily that the place needs a radio. When Poppy responds that he likes his own company, the tone of the snake’s rejoinder makes Poppy so uneasy that he makes a quick trip into town for something.  Before turning in, he notices that the sleeping snake has moved closer to his bed. Near dawn, he is awakened by a sharp pain in his arm: the snake has bitten him.  Does it feel guilty for breaking its promise the night it was hurt?  “Hey, man, I’m a snake. You knew that.”

Poppy lived to tell the story because he took the precaution of getting snake serum that evening.  By remembering the snake’s actual words when it was trapped under the truck’s tire–that it wouldn’t “think” of biting him–he figured that was no guarantee it wouldn’t “do” it and saved himself from the consequences of a well intentioned but foolish act of mercy. Instead of telling his grandson how he shut the snake’s fresh mouth forever, he puts his remembering boots on the table.  They are made of snake skin.  The story all wrapped up, the two go off and celebrate by making music with a man who just might be Robert Johnson. The Morrisons end it there, trusting to Nate and their readers to understand the fable’s drift.As a postscript, it’s interesting to compare the Morrisons’s retelling to one by a Black man from the Black community in Kansas City, Missouri that’s posted on the USC Digital Folklore Archives. Unlike the Morrisons, the teller outlined several powerful cautions the fable illustrates: “You should not offer your help, your aid, to someone or something that you know to be dangerous….not to trust the promises of a desperate man, and to be wary of those who might stab you in the back.” The informant recalled that his mother told it frequently to him when he was growing up and one wonders if sometimes the snake had white scaly skin...  The language is modern, but the morals the same as the ones L’Estrange and Croxall articulated and the Morrisons drew indirectly.

Heads, Bodies, Legs: A Handmade Version of the Game from the Early 1800s

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From the collection of the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art.

Heads, Bodies, Legs is a chain game for three, popular with children and adults (especially artists) that requires pencil and paper.   The group is supposed to produce a drawing together without any player seeing what the others have created. The first player takes a sheet of paper and draws a head and neck as detailed or simple as desired.  Player 1 folds down the paper so only a little of the drawing’s bottom can be seen.  Player 2 draws a body from the waist up consulting only his or her imagination, then folds the paper to cover his work.  The legs will be drawn by the last player.  Once the drawing is completed, the three players unfold the sheet to see what the figure looks like—the sillier or stranger, the better. The drawing on the left was made by artists James Guthrie, Edward Arthur Walton, and Joseph Crawhall, who frequently played the game the summer of 1879.

Also known as Picture Consequences, Heads, Bodies, Legs is played at children’s birthday celebrations or family parties.  This familiar game, which has no winners or losers, has been repackaged as a type of moveable book sometimes called a horizontal flap transformation.   The illustrator designs a series of figures to be printed on pages of cardboard, which are divided horizontally into three sections—the head on the upper third, the body on the middle, the legs on the lower.  The reader/player can make new figures by recombining any three sections into a different one.  The pages are frequently comb-bound to facilitate the process of mismatching the heads, bodies, and legs into peculiar people with unlikely physiques and gender-bending clothes, as in this double-page spread from Walter Trier’s 8192 Crazy People in One Book (London: Atrium, {ca. 1949] Cotsen 1605).  Mixing in characters famous in popular culture, caricatures, national, and racial stereotypes is also common. 

Text can added to the sections, as Helen Oxenbury did in 729 Puzzle People  (London: Methuen/Walker Books, c. 1980, Cotsen 26110), which provides a nonsensical scenario for every figure in the same spirit as Exquisite Corpse, a game the Surrealists found delectable.  This one on the left reads “All dressed up I waddle to build up my body.”

Before the twentieth century, what appear to be variant versions of Heads, Bodies, Legs turn up on the antiquarian market. Cotsen acquired a set ca. 1810  of 1 hat, 14 heads, 18 torsos, and 22 limbs drawn on heavy paper with watercolor washes, apparently drawn by one person.  It may have been made to be played as a parlor game, similar to one of a supplement to an old Boy’s  Own Paper around 1880. “Some Social Transformations” has nine figures on the sheet, each to be cut in thirds and the resulting strips mounted on card.  All the strips were to be shuffled, then dealt to the group.  Player one lays down a pair of legs, then player two a body, and player three the head.

The figures that can be created  from this early nineteenth century set’s selections of heads, bodies, and legs are not anywhere as wacky as the modern ones because both sexes were required to cover the legs most of the time!  The gentleman in the black breeches with red slashings is wearing Elizabethan fancy dress, but his companion’s clothing is a mystery to me. Below them is a figure assembled from man wearing in the turban, a torso of another declaiming from a book, and the skirt of a pigeon-toed girl. The same thing holds for Metamorphosesn fuer Kinder= Metamorphoses pour les enfans=Child’s metamorphosis=Metamorfosi per fanciullia, a set manufactured in Germany for distribution across Western Europe between 1815 and 1825 (Cotsen in process).  although we have to concede the possibility that it could have been as titillating even shocking–for people then to see girls in trousers or boys in dresses as it is for us to see a chinless man in a frilly fairy’s tutu and saggy black tights with holes.