“The Stump of a Cigar” by Joseph S. Cotter
Early Twentieth Century African-American Tale of Magical Realism
According to Wikipedia, “magical realism” is a genre of fiction that presents a realistic view of the world but incorporates magical elements that often blur the lines between the real and unreal. That is as good a definition as any for the purpose of this essay, which is not about magical realism per se, but about a tale of 1500 words written by an African-American author in 1912 that bears all the hallmarks of what we today consider to be magical realism.
The story predates by several decades the tales of some of the genre’s most famous celebrities: Jorge Luis Borges (1899–1986), Gabriel García Márquez (1927–2014), Isabel Allende (b. 1942), etc.
Toni Morrison (1931–2019) incorporated magical realism into her works, but her novels are not generally categorized as magical realism. Beloved, for example, tells the story of Sethe, an escaped slave who, in the antebellum years, murders her youngest daughter when she fears she is about to be recaptured. After the Civil War, the spirit of the slain child returns in the form of an incubus-like demon called Beloved that drains Sethe of her vitality before being dramatically exorcized by the women of Sethe’s church, whose prayers cause her to fade into nothingness in the full light of day.
For the most part, Beloved is a historical novel, though not exclusively one. While in places it seems like a ghost story, some scenes (such as the demon vanishing in broad daylight) are more in line with what one might expect from a dark fantasy or macabre fairy tale.
During the pandemic, I considered writing a supernatural novel set in 1890s in Kentucky that would involve spirit photography and table-rapping. I searched online for a contemporary author from Louisville to use as one of the main characters,1 and stumbled on the writings of African-American poet and playwright, Joseph Seamon Cotter (1861–1949), who was born and raised in the Bluegrass State. Cotter’s father was a white Scots-Irishman, and his mother was a freeborn black woman of West African and Cherokee descent.
Some of Cotter’s books are available on Project Gutenberg.org. Among these is a 1912 collection entitled Negro Tales containing fourteen tales, including a traditional fairy tale with giants and dwarfs; two stories (one intended to be comic) that rely heavily on black vernacular and do not hold up well today; and a sophisticated retelling of the antics of the Afro-Caribbean trickster, Br’er Rabbit. But there is one story in the collection that is extremely unusual. It is called “The Stump of a Cigar” and left me stumped for an hour after reading it.
The story is about madness and witchcraft in the South. It is told from the point of view of a cigar stump that began as a seedling in a glass jar in a dry goods shop. A mysterious woman enters the shop one day and purchases it to use as an ingredient in a magic cigar she is making that will enable her to summon her husband, the Devil. The story has the feel of a black-and-white film reel; and, like the restored footage of such a film played in reverse, the characters’ crazy movements grow more eerie and uncanny as the plot reaches its morbid climax.
The number twenty takes on an occult significance: there are ritualistic motions that must be repeated twenty times, including an act done in the company of a young man, whom we are made to believe the woman has seduced, who rows her out onto a glassy lake only to become an unwitting sacrifice to her need. At the end of the story, disaster strikes, and the only witness left to comment — like a Greek chorus — on what has transpired is the stump of the cigar that has been narrating the tale from the start.
I have copied the story in its entirety below. I have fixed two typos from the digital transcription but have not modified the text in any other way. I have broken a few dense paragraphs into two to facilitate reading. After the story, I have appended an anecdote that serves as a chilling coda.
“The Stump of a Cigar” by Joseph S. Cotter
Stump of cigar, as I am, I have a history that is interwoven with that of human beings. When I was in the form of seed I was safely housed in a nice glass jar in a large seed store. For some reason or other I was given the best shelf in the show window.
One day a beautiful young lady came into the store and priced me.
“Why,” said the clerk, “that is—”
“Never mind,” said she, “what it is. I simply want to know the price.”
He told her; she paid it, and bore me off gracefully.
“Ah,” said I to myself, “I shall never again see the young man who comes every day and stops opposite the show-window.” One windy day, as he stood in his usual place, a lady’s hat came rolling along the pavement. What immediately followed this will be told further on.
As I said before, the lady bore me off gracefully. It was night when she entered her well-lighted apartment. “She will examine me,” thought I, “and sniff me. Then how I will worship the tears that fall from her eyes.”
However, I received no such attention as I had anticipated, for the young lady simply placed me in the center of a large table, sounded a bell, and began to talk, as if addressing someone present.
“You were there, weren’t you? You will take me at my word, will you? Let’s see. This is how it will go.” She then walked to the middle of the floor and acted out a little play that will be given further on. As she finished, she turned to a young woman who was standing in the door and said harshly: “What do you want?”
“The bell sounded,” replied the young woman.
“That was not for you,” said she. “That was for the devil.” She threw a glass at the young woman and left the room. Several times during the night I heard her say: “That was not for you. It was for the devil.”
At eight the next morning the servants put breakfast on the table, leaving me still in the middle. At ten minutes past eight my mistress, whom I shall call Ladybug, came into the room and addressed a little speech to me that I did not understand until matters grew much more serious. You could not understand it at this point, so it will not be given now.
Five minutes later the young woman who had been chased out of the room the night before, came in. For the sake of convenience I shall call her Butterfly. I was astonished to see Ladybug embrace Butterfly and kiss her twenty times on the forehead. I thought this a bit of amusing comedy. I afterwards found it stern tragedy.
They sat opposite each other at the table and remained about thirty minutes. They spent the time talking and smiling. They did not eat in the common acceptation of the term.
Ladybug rolled her chicken into nicely rounded balls and tossed them down her throat. Butterfly soaked her chicken and bread in milk and drank the milk.
They finished this unusual task together, and started to leave the room, hand in hand, when Ladybug, glancing at the clock, whispered to Butterfly: “I must go; it is time for me to test his heroism and devotion.”
Coming to where I rested, Ladybug picked me up, pressed me closely to her heart, and left the room, carrying me with her. She went straight to a nearby lake, and entered a little boat, in which sat a lone individual. It was the young man who had stood so often opposite the show-window. Ladybug took a seat in the boat, and in silence the young man rowed across the waters.
Two hours on the lake were we, and no words were spoken. Then rising, still in silence, Ladybug hurled me upon the bosom of the lake. Twenty times I was thrown into the water, and nineteen times rescued by the young man. The twentieth time? It was fate and heroism. Ladybug pressed me closely and began to rock from side to side. This she did twenty times, each time more and more violently. Her great black eyes seemed to burn into his all the while.
She then once again tossed me into the water—and leaped after me. This was the action of the play she rehearsed out in her room that night when first I came. The young man followed Ladybug in her mad plunge, and at length succeeded in bringing her to their craft. Ten minutes later she was stretched out upon the boat, alive but unconscious. The young man was flesh for the fish, and I was in possession of a countryman.
When Ladybug regained consciousness and learned that the young man had been drowned, she said: “My lover is free. Hell cannot hold him. Human blood and water have atoned for his crime.” This is the little speech she addressed to me that first morning. Then it had been put in the future tense.
Twelve months later a beggar gave Butterfly a hand of tobacco for his supper. While he ate she rolled the best leaf into me, placed me between her teeth, and left the room. Soon Ladybug entered, sounded a bell, as was her nightly custom, and waited.
In a few minutes a hideous form entered, smoking me.
“I am the devil,” said the shape.
“I am his mistress,” said Ladybug, and seized the shape by the throat. The beggar, whom Ladybug had not seen, and whom Butterfly had forgotten, was present, and tried to separate them. In so doing he caused me to get entangled in the laces worn by the woman, communicating my fire to the flimsy garments. Now, the hideous form was Butterfly. Soon the clothing of both was ablaze, and they were darting about the room, the beggar trying to help first one and then the other.
Both fell across the piano about the same time, and began to reach out, as if to clamber from the flames. In this way they played, as it were, their own dirge. When the sounds ceased they were dead. A mystery? Yes! No!
On the morning of the wedding-day a groom-to-be sailed out upon the lake. Said he to himself: “Christian people say that he who provides not for his household is worse than an infidel, and that a millstone had better be placed about his neck and be sunk into the sea. What have I for wife and children? Prosperity has passed me by. Friends are not friends. Fate is my executioner.”
Three days after this his body was recovered and buried.
The preacher said to the people: “Suicide is an unpardonable sin. The young man, therefore, who was of noble birth and parentage, who was chaste in life and honorable in business, is in hell.”
Ladybug, the dead man's fiancée, believed the rash-judging preacher. She soon lost her reason. Then came upon her the hallucinations that wrought the other tragedies. She believed that if her lover’s twin brother, the young man of the fatal boat ride, would stand opposite the seed store for twenty days, and then perish as described in the boat ride, her lover would be released from hell and returned to her.
Ladybug, among other hallucinations, believed that the number twenty held potent virtues; hence, the twenty days, twenty kisses, and the like. The lover was twenty years old, hence Ladybug’s counting by twenties. The twin brother out of pity consented to humor her whim, not thinking it would cost him his life.
Ladybug passed the seed store every day to see if he was true to his pact. As she passed the twentieth day, her hat blew off. He started to get it, but she said: “Let it be. Some of my troubles may roll away with it. I will be at the boat to-morrow morning with a charm. Then my lover shall live again. Blood and water shall atone for his crimes.”
She immediately bought me of the clerk. There was no logic in this part of the affair. She simply thought the first thing her eyes fell upon would serve her purpose. To make sure of her lover’s return, she would also practice upon Butterfly, her sister.
Butterfly, too, submitted to humor her whim.
The embraces and twenty kisses were the beginning of this.
Butterfly of her own accord had dressed and acted the devil on the fatal night, in the hope that the appearance of the devil would act as a counter-shock, and restore Ladybug’s reason again. The presence of the beggar was a mere accident. The hand of tobacco out of which I was made was ground from the jar of seed left with the countryman.
As I lay upon the floor that dreadful night and saw Ladybug and Butterfly lying dead across the piano, I said to myself: “Stump of cigar, as I am, I have a history.”
Walter White (1893–1955) was the executive secretary of the NAACP from 1929 to 1955. White was living in New York in May 1918, when newspapers began reporting on a spate of lynchings taking place in southern Georgia. White, who was from Atlanta, headed south to investigate, despite warnings from friends and colleagues that he was putting his own life in danger.
Among the victims was a woman named Mary Turner, who was eight months pregnant at the time. She demanded the police arrest the men who had murdered her husband, Hazel “Hayes” Turner. Instead, the mob hanged her upside down and burned her to death, as a man ripped the fetus from her womb and crushed it beneath his boot.
Peter Carlsen has written an article on White’s exposé of the matter, which includes the following quotation from him about his visit to the place where Mary Turner perished: “I shall never forget the morning when I stood where Mary Turner was killed, her grave marked by an empty quart whisky bottle with the stump of a cigar stuck in its mouth.”2
When I read that, I was reminded of the haunting line that begins and concludes Cotter’s short story, written six years prior to the lynchings of May 1918: “Stump of cigar, as I am, I have a history.”
I never wrote that novel, but I have kept the notes for Book III of The Werewolf of Mariahilf am Inn.
“This Journalist Risked His Life to Reveal the Horrors of Lynching in the South” by Peter Carlson, 2023.
Ooh, thanks for sharing this! I really enjoy odd, quirky stories like this that have the feel of something almost true but with a bit of folklore woven into them, like the morbid tales that get handed down in families and small towns. What a great find!
I am struck by all the threads, both true and imaginary, that make this story whole in the end. And those other threads that led you to present the story here, that we add to our own conscious knowledge, that if we all should step back holding those threads, what a tapestry of life we could / would see...