Daddy Do-Funnys Wisdom Jingles

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McEnery Stuart
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Title: Daddy Do-Funny's Wisdom Jingles
Author: Ruth McEnery Stuart
Illustrator: G. H. Clements
Release Date: September 25, 2006 [EBook #19363]
Language: English
Character set encoding: ASCII
0. START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK DADDY
DO-FUNNY'S WISDOM JINGLES ***
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DADDY DO-FUNNY'S
WISDOM JINGLES
BY
RUTH McENERY STUART
ILLUSTRATED BY G. H. CLEMENTS
[Illustration]

NEW YORK
THE CENTURY CO.
1916
Copyright, 1910, 1911, 1912, 1913, by
The Century Co.
_Published, October, 1913_
To the Memory of those faithful brown
slave-men of the plantations
throughout the
South, Daddy's contemporaries all, who during
the
war while their masters were away fighting
in a cause opposed to
their emancipation,
brought their blankets and slept outside their

mistresses' doors, thus keeping night-watch
over otherwise
unprotected women and children--a
faithful guardianship of which
the
annals of those troublous times record no
instance of betrayal.
FOREWORD
In presenting a loyal and venerable ex-slave as an artless exponent of
freedom, freedom of conduct as well as of speech, the author of this
trivial volume is perhaps not composing an individual so truly as
individualizing a composite, if the expression will pass.
The grizzled brown dispenser of homely admonitions is a figure not
unfamiliar to those who have "moved in plantation circles" in the
cotton and sugar country, and touched hands with the kindly dark
survivors of the old regime.
If the man, Daddy Do-funny, was unique as an individual, perhaps in
the very fact of an individuality unembarrassed by the limitations of
convention, of education and of precedent, he becomes in a sense
typical of his people and of his time.
Of course, a man is not called Do-funny for nothing, not even playfully
and in the free vernacular of rusticity at its freest.
One of a small community of superannuated pensioners upon the
bounty of their former owners, Daddy was easily first citizen of
Evergreen annex on Crepe Myrtle plantation, which is to say he was

therein a personage of place and of privilege, coming and going at will,
doing as he pleased, and as, with uplifted eye, he reverently boasted,
"sponsible to nobody but Almighty Gord for manners and behavior."
Even so late as this year of grace, a full half century after
"emancipation," there are still to be found on many of the larger
plantations in the far South a few such members of the order of the
Rocking-chair, whose records of "good and honorable service" reach
back through periods of bondage, even such kindergartners as
septuagenarians in the privileged class, having clear title to nearly a
quarter of a century of slave memories; not to mention the occasional
centenarian with even his semi-occasional uncle or father poking
around, toothless and white-plumed dignitaries, these, sometimes with
leaders, being blind, but ever important in pride of association and
memory.
It is something even if one is bent double and may never again behold
the light of day, to be able to reach back into a dim and forgotten past
and to say, "I remember," especially when the memory recalls days of
brilliance and of importance.
But Daddy's place among the gentle Knights and Ladies of the
Rocking-chair was far and away above such as these whose thoughts,
alert though they were and loyal, travelled forever backward to the
sweet but worn fields of memory where every pleasure is a recognition
and fashions do not change--a restful retreat for dreamers whose days
of activity are done.
But Daddy's mind worked forward and upward and although he did not
know the alphabet excepting by rote, a common ante-bellum plantation
accomplishment, and while professing high contempt for what he
called "cold shelf-knowledge," his reputation for wisdom, wisdom as
gleaned in observation and experience and "ripened by insight," was
supreme, while his way of casually tossing it off in bits in playful
epigram finally gave the word its plural form so that the expression
"Do-Funny Wisdoms" came into familiar use.
As an example of his rambling talk, much of which seems at least

semivagarious on transcription, I recall one of his meandering
dissertations on the value of experience as superior to observation.
Several of the old people, his neighbors, had joined the listening
children who surrounded him under the fig-tree, and perhaps he
unconsciously deferred to them in his accent of their common
possession in length of days, although he gave no sign of heed to any
audience, when he