The Legend of Uncle Juba

Maybe you know who Uncle Juba is, or perhaps not, but when I was little and spent time at my Grandma Jordan’s house in Oxford, NC, my aunts, especially my Aunt Rita and Aunt Cat, made sure that my cousins and I knew who he was. They made Uncle Juba sound so scary, and when they wanted us to be quiet and quit running around the house making noise during soap opera time or when they wanted quiet to rule the roost, they would call upon the spirit of Uncle Juba. “Uncle Juba… Uncle Juba, where are you?”, my aunts would summon in a low, mysterious voice, calling him like mystics to come get these bad little children who didn’t want to listen. “Uncle Juba’s gonna get you”, my Aunt Cat or my Aunt Rita would say, their voices and faces deadpan serious. All of us rambunctious nieces, nephews, and cousins—Jordan, Terry, and Campbell, the whole motley crew—were quickly reduced to mute little couch potatoes, all sitting in a row on the couch and in the chairs. All feet were still, whether they touched the floor or dangled off the edge of the seat, and hands were neatly folded in our laps. We would get restless rather quickly, and would try to amuse ourselves by sneakily, and hopefully silently, getting each other in trouble, trying to make each other laugh or make noise, move or somehow get off of the seat. Then you were in trouble and subject to incur the wrath of a switch, or at least the threat was severely implied. Even when we got old enough to know better, the implicit rules in conjuring up Uncle Juba worked as reminders that we were pushing the envelope of getting into some sort of trouble with swift speed.

I was a little awed and simultaneously tickled when I learned about Uncle Juba’s existence a short distance across the Atlantic waters of the antebellum triangular trade of rum, slaves, and molasses, that he is alive and well in Trinidad, part of the Caribbean culture. I was taking a graduate course at ECU in multicultural literature, and read the book, Crick Crack, Monkey, by Merle Hodge, to complete a book report assignment, when I ran across the story of Uncle Juba. (I wish that I knew how to link the Powerpoint to this post.  It’s a little heady with research, but very interesting.) According to the legend, the grownups warned that Uncle Juba is a bad spirit that will come and take away the bad children, and the children would scare and tease each other, just like we used to do, even down to the hurtful name calling as a part of signifying. I found this a really cool and interesting connection to the collective histories of black people, spread across the globe by English colonization and American slavery. I wonder if my aunts realized how they were perpetuating history in trying to get us to be quiet and behave. LOL

Today, Uncle Juba is still alive and well, living in Carrolltown. I don’t know where my dad got it from, but he mounted an African looking, metal mask to one of the trees in the front yard, and the first time that you notice him, it may be a little startling. “Did I just see a face looking at me, hmmm”, as you are walking by the grotesquely smiling tree spirit, sort of reminiscent of the evil tree in the Wizard of Oz that threw his apples at Dorothy and The Scarecrow. When they were little, the first time Jalen and my nephew, Alex, saw Uncle Juba they burst into tears and ran into the house screaming bloody murder. With that discovery, we milked their fear of Uncle Juba for all it was worth, reminding them when it was dark outside and it was time to come in that if they lingered… The mysterious intonation of “Uncle Juba… Uncle Juba…” began to arise from our lips, and two sets of legs would come flying by us, straight into the house, without fail. All of us grownups in the house, now “in the know”, complicit in the game, would wink at each other and crack up with laughter. We had come full circle, my sister and I, using the same tricks against our children that our aunts used on us to gain our compliance. With the help of my Uncle Ed, my dad’s only brother, one year my sister and I gave Daddee one of those private road signs to be mounted at the end of the driveway, Uncle Juba Lane. The legend of Uncle Juba, at least in my family on the Jordan side, remains alive and well.