Annie Christmas

Annie Christmas or flatboat Annie[1] is a character in the folklore and tall tales of Louisiana, described as a 7 foot tall, supernaturally strong African-American woman keelboat captain. She has been described as a female counterpart of the John Henry character, another supernaturally strong African American folklore character. Like John Henry, the character may have been based on a real person. Stories of Annie Christmas have been included in several collections of folktales from the American South.[2][3][4][5][6]

The stories describe how she defies traditional gender hierarchies and the rules and expectations for female behavior. She drinks exorbitant amounts of liquor and dominates men who challenge her authority. She wears a pearl necklace, and each pearl represents the defeat of someone who has unsuccessfully challenged her. Though unmarried, she has twelve sons who work as her crewmen on the keelboat.[7][8][9] In one tale of her death she was attacked by 100 men who shot and stabbed her.[10][11]

The novel 1993: Free Enterprise: A Novel of Mary Ellen Pleasant by Jamaican Author Michelle Cliff includes a character named Annie Christmas, probably inspired by the folktale character.[12]

References
  1. Keelboat Annie: An African-American Legend. Troll Communications L.L.C., 1 Sep 1997
  2. Benjamin Albert Botkin. 1976.A treasury of Southern folklore: stories, ballads, traditions, and folkways of the people of the South. Edited with an Introd. by B. A. Botkin. With a foreword by Douglas Southall Freeman. Crown.
  3. A treasury of North American folktales. Book-of-the-Month Club, 1998
  4. Virginia Hamilton. 1995. Her Stories: African American Folktales, Fairy Tales, and True Tales. Scholastic Inc., 1995
  5. Bradford, M. R. The Story of Annie Christmas. A Treasury of Mississippi River Folklore, 35-36.
  6. Creany, A. D. (2007). Heroines in North American folklore. ETEN 17, 117.
  7. LaMonda Horton-Stallings. 2007. Mutha' is half a word: intersections of folklore, vernacular, myth, and queerness in black female culture. Ohio State University Press
  8. "Annie Christmas - Tall Tale Heroes". talltalehero.weebly.com. Retrieved 2017-04-13.
  9. J. Suter, Globe Fearon. 1992. World Myths and Legends: Regional American. Pearson Prentice Hall, p. 31
  10. Jay Robert Nash. 1990. Encyclopedia of World Crime: A-C. Chromebooks, 1990
  11. Stephanie Athey. 2003. Sharpened Edge: Women of Color, Resistance, and Writing. Praeger, 2003
  12. Willis, Charlotte. 2007. Rene. Myth and Memory: Reconstructing the feminine in Caribbean-American fiction. Texas Christian University, ProQuest Dissertations Publishing, 2007. 1441422.
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