tar bucket to his milk-house door to ketch de rabbit when he comes in to eat his butter."[1] In a Yoruba tale the trap is referred to simply as a trap which Rabbit merely takes for a man.[2] In a Kaffir tale Hare is caught merely by gum smeared around the spring.[3]
In the Cape Verde Islands Tar Baby is told in the form familiar to us in other African (or American) variants; but it is also told in the island cycle of the Master Thief, more particularly as part of the tale known since Herodotus recorded it as the Treasure of King Rhampsinitus.[4] Into the first of the Cape Verde Islands variants of this tale the Tar Baby episode does not enter, in the second variant the "tar baby" is a tar barrel, in the third, a tar man.
I.
The boy returned to the house of his father. [His father had driven him from home when he had said he wanted to learn to steal.] His father asked him, "Have you learned what you set out to learn?" "Yes, sir." His father said, "To prove it bring me some money." Each night for three nights he steals, he brings home a sack of money from the king's house. His father was well satisfied. The king asked the saib witch-man] what he should do to catch the robber. The saib said, "The only way to catch him is with a barrel of tar with money on top." The fourth night the father said he wanted to go along to help steal. "Don't go," begged his son. "I don't want you to go. They will catch you. I will lose my life on your account." But his father insisted on going. As they were going along they saw the barrel. "That is a rat trap," said the boy. "You stay here quiet," he added, "I'll do all the work." He went on, he left his father behind. His father
- ↑ Parsons, E. C., "Tales from Guilford County, North Carolina," J. Amer. Folk-Lore, xxx. (1917), 171.
- ↑ Lomax, p. 5.
- ↑ Kidd, D., Savage Childhood, p. 242, London, 1906. In this tale the pattern of hitting has disappeared.
- ↑ Herodotus, ii. 121.
