Popular Culture Review Vol. 23, No. 2, Summer 2012 | Page 65

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