C. M. Haile’s “Pardon Jones” Letters: Old Southwest Humor from Antebellum Louisiana ed. by Ed Piacentino

Abstract

BOOK REVIEWS C. M. Haile’s “Pardon Jones” Letters: Old Southwest Humor from Antebellum Louisiana. Ed. Ed Piacentino. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State UP, 2009. xiii, 240 pp. $37.50 cloth. MORE THAN A QUARTER-CENTURY AGO A HANDFUL OF SCHOLARS PUBLICLY argued that the most pressing need for Americanists working in nineteenth-century humor was the availability of accurate and dependable texts. Since much of this writing originated in regional as well as national newspapers, the problem was not an easy one for conscientious editors. Even if issues common to ephemeral publication (dialectal variation or typo?) were never quite settled, we eventually saw reliable editions of many of the Southwestern humorists emerging from the studies of M. Thomas Inge, David Rachels, David C. Estes, Raymond C. Craig, Edwin T. Arnold, and others. That record continues with Ed Piacentino’s impressive edition of the letters to “Pic” (George Wilkins Kendall of the New Orleans Picayune) of “Pardon Jones,” the creation of another northeastern migrant to the Old Southwest, C. M. Haile. In what he rightly calls “a recovery project,” the editor has unearthed sixty-seven letters from 1840 to 1848. Scarcely known alongside more familiar journalistic cousins who specialized in the mock letter (.C. F. M. Noland, W. T. Thompson), Haile follows the generic interest of most of his fellow humorists. Along with references to the Millerites, camp meetings, medical quackery, and political controversies, these letters, pulsating with vernacular exaggeration, feature such topics as hunting trips and animal hoaxes, militia fights, political speechifying, practical jokes, domestic squabbles, and self-inflicted misadventures. As Piacentino argues, however, Haile has his own distinctions. He is the only humorist of his day “to set some of his letters in three separate geographical locales: Louisiana, Massachusetts, and Mexico during the Mexican War.” A serious journalist who covered the early trying-out of the Civil War with the Texas problem, Haile used the “sociocultural milieu” of his fictional comic letters to expand the contours of Old Southwest humor. His “amusing scripts of cross-cultural engagement” during the Mexican War make him unique among his fellow humorists, but some students of culture might find more of interest in the second of those specified 312 Mississippi Quarterly three locales. When Haile sends Pardon and Jerushy back home to Massachusetts, he in effect is returning Southwestern humor to the northeast where, it could be argued, it had begun. On Pardon’s home turf, the seven letters from April to September 1841 are among the liveliest of the lot. Most of the notable characters, even those now living in the heart of Cajun country, are New England rustics, providing rich textual space to Pardon’s family and friends in the Bay State. They include Jerushy, who comes to life when she travels north (she names the old Jones homestead “Shady Grove” because “it sounded genteel.”); Capt. Nathan Potter; Simon Spalding (inept cannon master of the artillery company); Parson Miller (surviving his scolding by a brother of the cloth for getting too celebratory at Potter’s wedding, he becomes chaplain to Pardon’s Mexico Volunteers); Bill Fox (the bewhiskered Boston lawyer who threads his way through the letters as Pardon’s bête noir.); and Pardon’s rambunctious brother Bill (who gets thrown in a British prison for being caught in Queen Victoria’s bedroom). Even at home, however acclimated to Southern climate and culture (casual pejoratives for blacks come easily to his pen), Pardon is quick to suggest how his agricultural fellows in Luzyanny could benefit from his and Capt. Potter’s superior experiences in the colder regions, such as raising chickens and growing melons. And allegiance to his old house remains, despite tensions caused by abolitionists: he identifies himself in his letters to Pic from the war front as “Col. of the Bay State Melishy.” Despite their form, whose permutations of excess persist throughout the century and beyond, many mock letters are rich in realistic notation. Leaking into the fictional foreground of persons and places—vernacular speech, farcical situations, jokers and victims, mangled quotations, and tortured literary “offerings”—are data of immediate historical context: domestic, political, cultural. The primary interest, say, in Pete Whetstone’s letters may be the hunting...