Tarzan and Sookie Sittin’ in a Tree
This year Tarzan turns one hundred, delivered in the pages of All-Story
magazine in October 1912. If the Oxford American “southern magazine of good
writing” can claim William Shakespeare for the American South,1Tarzan should
be a no-brainer. Tarzan o f the Apes begins on a ship from England, takes place
mostly in Africa, and interludes in Paris on the way to a Wisconsin dairy farm (I
know—right?), but its heart belongs to Dixie. As everyone knows, the true heart
of manly pulp fiction lives in its heroine, in this case Jane, a blonde-haired blue
eyed Baltimore beauty who regards her “dear South” as home.
The first film version was shot in the wilds of Louisiana, the apes of
Tarzan’s clan played by men recruited from the New Orleans YMCA, inspiring
Governor Bobby Jindal to declare April 13, 2012, as Tarzan Day.2 The actor
who played Tarzan in that 1918 film, Elmo Lincoln, had previously enjoyed a
role in Birth o f a Nation and in an earlier career once served as an Arkansas state
trooper. Coincidence?
That Americans often assume Tarzan’s creator British simply because
of Tarzan’s true identity as the Earl of Greystoke speaks volumes. Edgar Rice
Burroughs hailed from Chicago, but his books’ yearning for aristocracy is
indisputably Southern. Tarzan’s story is a fantasy marriage of inherited and
natural aristocracies, where a blueblood child is also the ultimate self-made
American man.
Tarzan chiefly expresses his superiority through his subordination of
the locals, both savage ape-creatures and savage ape-like natives. Take that, Jack
Johnson! Take that, Marcus Garvey! In ape-creature speech, Tarzan means
white-skin. The nearby African village Burroughs’ calls a “plantation,” and
when Tarzan kills the natives he does so one by one, dropping a lasso from the
branch on which he lurks, yanking the innocent up, tying the rope off, and
letting him swing—and cutting of him a figure all too familiar in the postbellum South. Later, his mentor the Frenchman Paul D’Amot stops him from
shooting a black man they happen upon, but Tarzan doesn’t understand his new
friend’s moral fussiness.
When by Providence’s hand Jane lands on the African coast at the
exact spot where Tarzan’s parents landed twenty years before, her party includes
Esmeralda, an Aunt Jemimah comic-relief nanny who panics about, screaming
her fears of “gorilephants” while failing to stuff her bulk into a cabinet (in the
beach cottage Tarzan’s human father erected), and passing out at the drop of a
dime. Jane is soon enough taken by an ape-creature “toward a fate a thousand
times worse than death,” in another thinly camouflaged reference, this time to
the irrational collective Southern fear of the rapacious black man unable to
control his hunger for fleshy whiteness. That 1918 movie did not bother with the
camouflage: a black man, not an ape-creature, carries her off (even while the
trailer reflexes the black-as-primate formulation by forgetting the film’s