"Tarzan and the Black Boy"
(April 4, 2005)
Tarzan is the villain of this short story. He causes a lot of grief and anguish for a mother and child, solely for his own gratification. He is acting wrong out of ignorance rather than malice, though, and he does recognize his mistakes and atones for them by an heroic deed, so it all ends fairly well.
This short story appeared in the January 1917 issue of BLUE BOOK, part of a series of twelve dealing with Tarzan's youth and young manhood; the stories were assembled in book form as JUNGLE TALES OF TARZAN. I think some of Edgar Rice Burroughs' most interesting writing can be found here as the Apeman wrestles with the existential problems adolescents have agonized over since the dawn of time. Is there a God, and if so,what is he like? Is this strange feeling what they call 'love'? Do I want to have a family of my own? Tarzan indulges as well in the rather cruel pranks, and excessive eating and drinking normal for puberty years although with slightly different results than most of us experienced.
In "Tarzan and the Black Boy", the young Apeman has already suffered through his ill-fated first romance with Teeka. His attempts to find a mate among the Mangani didn't get too far, as he already knew in his heart he was not really one of them but a different animal altogether. Sadly but firmly, he let Teeka hook up with a Mangani friend called Taug and resigned himself to that wistful loneliness that seemed to be his only choice. Then Tarzan gets another bright idea.
He has found himself to become a frequent babysitter and nursemaid to his friends' little baby, Gazan ("Uncle Tarzan" - who expected that?). Reflecting on seeing other animals with their offspring, the Ape-Teen decides that what he really needs is a child of his own. So he kidnaps a ten-year-old boy from the Mbonga tribe (in full sight of the kid's horrified mother Momaya, no less) and hauls the child off to live with him in the jungle.
Nothing goes as hoped, of course. Little Tibo is as terrified as you might expect, being snatched away from his mom and hustled through the trees by a complete stranger. Even worse, Tibo's tribe is the one Tarzan has been harassing and terrorizing for years, so the boy expects to be killed or tortured or worse. None of this occurs to our hero. He has no idea what an awful deed he is committing (since there is no law in the area, I don't know if you can really call it a "crime"). Making things still worse for the child, Tarzan brings him to the Mangani, expecting he will be accepted as his own balu.
The Great Apes immediately want to kill and possibly eat this Gomangani, and Tarzan is so exasperated at having to protect his adopted son that he takes the boy off aways to show him how to hunt and survive in the jungle, as well as teaching him the Ape language. But although Tibo gradually learns to trust his abductor, he is still miserably unhappy. Burroughs doesn't emphasize the child's suffering, but a few passing comments make it clear. ("Also, he saw that the little fellow often refused food and was growing thinner day by day. At times he surprised the boy sobbing softly to himself.")
Disappointed, Tarzan stubbornly tries to raise the child to be like himself. but gradually it begins to dawn on the Apeman that he has made an awful mistake. At one point, Tarzan comes upon a lioness with her cubs. He's about to torment and annoy her (despite all of Burroughs' editorial praise about his hero's inborn British nobility, the Apeman is often a cruel bully), when he notices the animal is mourning over a lifeless form lying between her front paws. And he has a spiritual awakening. ("... But something held the apeman as he saw the lioness grieving over her dead cub... His heart went out to Sabor as it might not have done a few weeks before.") He makes the mental association between his ape friends and their baby, this forlorn big cat and the boy's mother who must somewhere be as upset over her loss.
Meanwhile, Tibo's mother is desperately trying to get the tribal witch doctor to recover her son but has no luck (he says he needs to be paid two more goats to have strong enough magic). Desperate, she turns to the outcast Bukawai. This lovely charmer is a magician who lives in a remote cave with two surly hyenas as companions; half his face is eaten away by leprosy or syphilis or something, and in general, he's not appealing. But Momaya has no choice.
Before it's all over, the mother and child are happily reunited by chance just as an inconvenient lion licks his lips and charges them. Diving down from the trees with his spear in hand comes Tarzan, acting heroic at last. As the lion give up the ghost,Tibo makes a tearful plea to be allowed to return to his mother and tribe... and the Apeman manfully swallows his pride, and lets him go. ("Tarzan eyed them in silence. The sight of the boy clinging, sobbing, to his mother aroused within his savage breast a melancholy loneliness. There was none thus to cling to Tarzan, who yearned so for the love of someone, of something.")
But unknown to the Apeman, he has just made a cunning enemy in the witchdoctor Bukawai, who has now lost out on his fee. We'll meet this perp again.
I found this story engrossing, showing the young Tarzan essentially teaching himself concepts of right and wrong. He has nothing but his own judgement and some vaguely understood sentences from his real father's books to guide him, so it's a miracle he doesn't turn out worse than he did. Burroughs attributes this to his English heritage. Well, if you say so. The idea that deep in Tarzan's DNA (or "blood") are inherent moral values doesn't seem very plausible today, although in 1917 it was a widely held view. He has a conscience, for example, because of "his own origin and all the forces of humanitarianism and civilization that were his rightful heritage because of that origin."
The blantantly racist elements in the early books are a bit confused and contradictory here. First, I need to point out the tribe we're dealing with are not the Waziri. Those folk were as noble, proud and heroic as anyone could ask; they were the Zulu-like natives whose tribe Tarzan was adopted into, and among whom he happily lived for most of his life. Nope, the Mbonga are a much nastier bunch. For one thing, they're cannibals and don't try to hide it. Also, one of their warriors murdered the ape Kala, Tarzan's foster mother, so our boy has a serious grudge against them. (I know a few older people who even today have negative feelings about the Germans and Japanese because of WW II.) As ugly as Tibo's mom is described as being, she is still a mother. Momaya is so determined to rescue her child that she defies her chief and overcomes her deepest fears to enlist Bukawai's help. When she does find the boy and Tarzan again approaches, she decides she will die before letting her son be taken away.
Despite the fact he has been killing these tribesmen on and off for no good reason except his own mean-spirited amusement (he enjoys the sport "black-baiting", what a joker), Tarzan eventually starts to see them as human beings like himself. ("Of course, this one's skin was black, but what of it? Tarzan had never seen a white man. In so far as he knew, he was the sole respesentative of that strange form of life upon the earth.")
Still, there is one hard-to-defend paragraph tha goes on about the virtue of imagination, "The beast know it not, the blacks only a little, while to one in a hundred thousand of earth's dominant race it is given as a gift from heaven that man may not perish from the earth." So it's not enough to just be white, you have to be from the British aristocracy to really be part of nature's upper elite. Sometimes I wonder why Edgar Rice Burroughs idealized the English royalty and peerage so much but was more restrained in praise for his own countymen. Anglophilia wasn't rare in American writers during the glory years of the British Empire, of course; just read some of H.P. Lovecraft's letters or make notes on how nearly all pulp heroes had names from solid British, Scots and Irish stock. |