The Singing Tortoise

Candice McCarty

Professor Morgan Peters

English 200-08

December 15, 2011

The Singing Tortoise is a tale written in A Treasury of African American Folklore by Harold Courlander. The story in itself is not very long in length, but teaches several qualities that humans possess. Most of these qualities roughly being the more unsatisfactory ones but yet some are pleasant in content. The story tells in itself the many different qualities that humans possess through the actions that the people in the story project. Whether or not this is how the story was meant to be portrayed is one thing but this is how I take into account the story and what is says to me.

            The story begins with a tortoise and its journey to a garden where he meets a flock of birds. These birds invite him to come along and stay to drink with them, and when the tortoise passes on the offer for fear of the farmer Pierre Jean, they offer him their wing feathers so that in case the farmer caught them he too could fly away. To me this symbolizes the quality of human’s generosity. If you think about it, people can be very generous when it comes to helping out someone who is in need, even if that may be for a stranger, not everyone is so cold. As the story progresses the farmer does indeed find them and immediately the birds take back their feathers and fly away leaving the tortoise helpless. This to me symbolizes human’s characteristic of being cruel and selfish. Yes you may find that some people are very generous and kind, but then there are others who can be nasty, and uncompassionate. In a matter of a few sentences, the author speaks of both sides of a human character at complete opposite spectrums.

            The farmer when he finds the tortoise and attempts to “beat him” shows the side of humans that in modern times you see much more often, aggression. He shows no immediate hesitation but heads straight to aggression with the helpless tortoise, which most people today do as well. He then upon finding out that the tortoise is in fact a singing one, he attempts to exploit his talents for money, showing another not so pleasant side of human: greed. He takes what he has and tries to make more off it, just like the majority of people these days, like find a penny and try to make a dollar off of it. The tortoise does in fact win the battle on this one by outsmarting the farmer’s wife. I am not fully sure if this is saying that humans in fact can be easily outsmarted or if it is making that reference strictly towards woman, that part is unclear to me, but depending on what time this was written or spoken in villages, that may be the case.

            The story ends with the tortoise escaping but coming back to safe the farmer who is about to be killed from the lack of tortoise he promised could sing. This shows compassion although only on the tortoise side, which again I am not sure of the tortoise himself represents humans or not but if he does, than yes he shows compassion that some humans possess. There is also a reference here to a president of the village who is not so kind of a ruler. Again the origin of adding this to the story might be to project that rulers are not always kind to their subjects, but again who really knows what anything means in this story.

            The fact that this all boils down to is that humans are a very deep, and complex species and very unpredictable in nature. One minute the generous man helping you cross the street could pickpocket you as you get onto the sidewalk. We are a ruthless, greedy, kindhearted, generous species all with our ups and downs, good and bad sides, but would we be an interesting species if we weren’t so complex? That is the question we must ask ourselves.