Annie Christmas orflatboat Annie[1] is a character in the folklore andtall tales of Louisiana, described as a 7 feet (2.1 m) tall, supernaturally strongAfrican-American womankeelboat captain. She has been described as a female counterpart of theJohn 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 theSouthern United States.[2][3][4][5][6]
In his book "The Gangs of New Orleans",Herbert Asbury states that Annie Christmas was originally a white New Orleans woman and white folk hero, who “became a demigod among the Negroes” who presented her as black. He writes that “In the white version of the Annie Christmas saga, she was murdered in a New Orleans gambling-house, but Negro tradition permits no such commonplace end. The Negroes have it that she killed herself for love.”[7]
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.[8][9][10] In one tale of her death she was attacked by 100 men who shot and stabbed her.[11][12]
The novel1993: Free Enterprise: A Novel of Mary Ellen Pleasant by Jamaican AuthorMichelle Cliff includes a character named Annie Christmas, probably inspired by the folktale character.[13]
^Janet P. Johnson (author) and Charles Reasoner (illustrator) (1998).Keelboat Annie: an African-American Legend. Mahwah, NJ: Troll.ISBN978-0816743476.OCLC38472422
^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.
^A treasury of North American folktales. Book-of-the-Month Club, 1998
^Virginia Hamilton. 1995.Her Stories: African American Folktales, Fairy Tales, and True Tales. Scholastic Inc., 1995
^Bradford, M. R. "The Story of Annie Christmas".A Treasury of Mississippi River Folklore, 35–36.
^Creany, A. D. (2007).Heroines in North American folklore. ETEN 17, 117.
^Herbert Asbury. 2004.The Gangs of New Orleans. Random House. London. pp. 82–83.
^LaMonda Horton-Stallings. 2007.Mutha' is half a word: intersections of folklore, vernacular, myth, and queerness in black female culture. Ohio State University Press
^J. Suter, Globe Fearon. 1992.World Myths and Legends: Regional American. Pearson Prentice Hall, p. 31
^Jay Robert Nash. 1990.Encyclopedia of World Crime: A–C. Chromebooks, 1990
^Stephanie Athey. 2003.Sharpened Edge: Women of Color, Resistance, and Writing. Praeger, 2003
^Willis, Charlotte. 2007.Rene. Myth and Memory: Reconstructing the feminine in Caribbean-American fiction. Texas Christian University, ProQuest Dissertations Publishing, 2007. 1441422.
Emile Carter Cook and Barbara Smetz (1974).Annie Christmas: Lady Longshoreman. Society for Visual Education (juvenile picture book with music and narration).OCLC5609896
