Tamale ManAuthor(s): Margaret HamiltonSource: Western Folklore, Vol. 22, No. 2, Kansas Number (Apr., 1963), pp. 120-121Published by: Western States Folklore SocietyStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1497883 .

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120 WESTERN FOLKLORE The Negro juror answered, "'Cause I can't." "Why can't you?" "'Cause." "Well, 'cause why?" "'Cause I's the man that stole the hides" (J2050).

MARGARET HAUN RASER Jetmore, Kansas

* Tamale Man.-I can recall from my childhood in Topeka an old hot tamale man, with a box and a bell on his bicycle. He had a pleasant sounding, good-humored voice in about a baritone range. While sitting on the front porch on a quiet evening in late summer or early fall, we could hear that vendor resonantly calling his wares up and down the blocks something like this:

Hot ta - mal-es, red hot! Two for five, four for ten,

Wo-men can eat 'em as well as the men. Hot ta-mal-es, red' hot !- Two for a nick-le,

D.C.al tFIFm

four for a dime. You can get a good old hot ta-mal- e an. y old time.

Hot tamales, red hotl Two for five, four for ten, Women can eat 'em as well as the men. Hot tamales, red hot! Two for a nickel, four for a dime. You can get a good old hot tamale any old time. Hot tamales, red hotl Two for five, four for ten, Roosters can eat 'em as well as the hen. Hot tamales, red hot! Two for a nickel, four for a dime. You can get a good old hot tamale any old time.

Past our house on North Dodge, the tamale man sounded loud and clear. The song tapered off until again he came even with our house a block east on Seneca, or a block west on Exposition. Then he'd head out Second Street

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NOTES AND QUERIES 121

and past the old Martinson home. My vegetarian parents never bought tamales, so to me tamales took on the

connotation of "forbidden fruit," a thing of wonder. But once a neighbor gave me a tamale! A surreptitious taste of a strange delicacy, heretofore denied, also "foreign and fascinating."

This remains-my memory of a quiet evening on our front porch after a hot Kansas day: the wisp of warm aroma trailing from the spicy steaming tamales, wafted on the cooling relief of an evening breeze, accompanied by the tinkling of a bell and-of all things-a singing commerciall

MARGARET HAMILTON

Aurora, Colorado

* Membra Disjuncta to Affright Indians.-A recurrent theme in American pioneer narrative concerns the manner in which Indians have been mystified or even terrified by ingenious pioneers who detached artificial members of their body. A Mormon woman frightened menacing Indians by brandish- ing successively a peg leg, a wig, false teeth (K547.2) (Utah Humanities Re- view, I [Jan. 1947], 43); A railroad boss spurred a lazy Indian crew to work hard during his absence by leaving his glass eye to watch over them (Ibid., [April 1947], p. 186; see also Proceedings, Third Annual Meeting, Confer- ence of California Historical Societies [Stockton, California, 1957], p. 72).

We are happy to add the following striking account from Mount Hope, A New England Chronicle, by George Hope ([New York; Viking Press, 1959], pp. 39-40). The overtones of the John the Beloved myth implicit in a judge of Charles I being taken as an angel are also of peculiar interest. The author is describing the war between the Wampanoag Indians led by Philip and the settlers of the Plymouth Colony in 1675.

Luck was not always on Philip's side. Sometimes a providential rain extin- guished the firebrands. The settlers' own muskets, if the range was close enough, accounted for many of the enemy. At the attack on Hadley, says legend, a bearded stranger emerged from Parson Russell's attic, rallied the defenders, and vanished as mysteriously as he had appeared. They thought he was an angel (cf. Q45.1). Long afterward they learned that he was William Goffe, one of the Roundhead judges who had condemned Charles I to the ax in 1649. He was hiding now in the new world from the long-armed vengeance of Charles II.

In one battle Captain Samuel Mosely, commanding sixty English against three hundred Indians, plucked off his periwig and stuffed it in his breeches for greater freedom of action. A chronicler says:

As soon as the Indians saw that, they fell a Howling and Yelling most hideously

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