This is Chase119.
Types
Motifs
Notes
Swanton has two Creek stories: How Rabbit Got the Widow's Daughter; "in both Rabbit takes a cane or blow-gun, makes a hole in back of the chimney and inserts the device. In the first, his song predicts death for the mother who will not let her daughter marry. In the second, Rabbit sings out from his place of concealment near the spring, The girl who remains single will die die die."
Baer observes: "It is a wonder that Harris included this tale in his collection since the sexual symbolism is so thinly disguised."
As for origin, Baer brings in story collected in Ghana in 1960s about a hunter who finds opening in wall of house where he inserts his penis and impergnates a woman on the other side of the wall. Dorson includes this in 1972 "Africa and Folklorist" with comment "The stock hunter-hero is here made into a trickster-lover."
Baer notes that the overtly sexual folktale would "not have found its way into the collection of the late-Victorian civil servants and missionaries to whom, by and large, the tales were told."
She also speculates: "The close similarity of the Uncle Remus and American Indian versions would lead to the conclusion that the southern American Negroes were sufficiently sensitive to what was acceptable in this country that they told the story the same way to anyone outside their own people."
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