I was born in a tall, white hospital in downtown Mobile, Alabama. My twenty-six year old mother was rushed to the hospital by my twenty-six year old father in the same fashion many first-time mothers are. Only my mother was not a first-time mother; she already had two rambunctious boys, both under the age of four. As she lay there under fluorescent lighting, the nurse informed her that the doctor was missing in action. He had gone to the wrong hospital. They reassured her that he would be back within the hour. She did not doubt them, and the doctor came quick… but I came quicker. So I was born. I was born without a doctor. I was born to my mother with my father on one side and the nurse on the other.
At the age of thirteen, my parents finally consented to buy me contacts. I had just started junior high and I was thrilled. I was sure contacts would bring me all kinds of luxuries: more room for eye makeup, a first kiss, maybe even a new reputation. I walked into the store to pick up my contacts the day they arrived. My parents let me go in by myself. I wore black pedal pushers and a blue sweater and I knew that my life was going to change.
When I started wearing contacts, I started wearing blue eye shadow. I started wearing pink eye shadow. I started wearing purple eye shadow. I even started wearing glitter on my eyelids. I did not listen to my mother when she warned me that too much glitter was too much glitter. I did not listen to her when she told me that a fleck of glitter could slide off my eyelid, cutting my cornea, turning me permanently blind. I did not care. I was a new person. I was a slave to fashion.
When I sixteen, I went to a party with a boy I had toyed with since the age of fifteen. When I turned my back, a girl with nappy blonde hair tried to seduce him. She asked him to dance; she tilted back her head and laughed at his lame jokes. Before I knew it, the fear that she would replace my spot on his lap overwhelmed me so much that I quit talking. I didn’t talk to him for the rest of the night until our long drive home. A few weeks later, I still held a grudge about the girl with blonde hair. For his eighteenth birthday, we went to see a movie and I punished him. He bought me a blue Icee and I let it melt in the armrest between us. He told me I should eat it before it turned into liquid. I shoved my hands in my pockets and turned my head to the screen.
Finally, I turned old enough to go to college. I told my parents I could not and would not go anywhere in Utah. I went to the University of Missouri instead. I lied to my parents and told them that there were only co-ed dorms so that I could live with men. I went to classes bright and early, left my dorm at eleven thirty at night, and showered at three in the morning. I started wearing my glasses again because I wanted to look different than the other freshmen. I wanted to be studious, but I wanted to be wild. I wanted to be everything. I wanted to live my life at my own schedule.
I did not stay in Missouri. By my twentieth birthday, I moved myself into a Salt Lake City apartment where I had no friends or family. I started working at a shoe boutique and I traded my ripped skinny jeans and colorful wristbands in for five-inch stilettos and dresses. I tamed my wild hair and laughed when I was supposed to. I made friends and stayed out until two standing ankle deep in snow. I took art classes and drew with charcoal until four in the morning. I ate cereal for dinner and argued with my roommate. I parked on the street and wrecked my car. The next week I hit a motorcycle whose headlights were not on. I gave him forty bucks and never heard from him again. Then I moved to Provo and started school at Brigham Young University.
I turned twenty-two the twelfth of September and my mother still laughs that I have not changed since the first day of my life. I like what I like and I make my own decisions and I show up when I want to and do what I want when I want to. Sometimes I love to be a hermit, but other times there is not stopping me. I’m passionate about faith, about photography, about history, about writing, about literature, about laughing, about music, and about finding the inner spark within everything. I love people and I love stories—all kinds of stories because each one makes me understand something new each and every time. I like to paint my fingernails and I like to feel free and quote song lyrics.
Call me an idealist. Call me a dreamer. Call me funny. Call me a romantic. Call me hazy eyed. I’ll call myself Elisabeth… or Lissa.
The story of Tailypo goes something like this: An old man is starving. He goes hunting with his beloved dogs. They don’t find anything. On their retreat home, they come across an odd looking animal with a long, furry tail. He tries to kill the animal, but misses the middle of its body. Instead, he severs the animal’s tail from the rest of his body. Overjoyed by the prospect of having a meal, the man runs home to stew the tail. He eats it, and stuffed to the brim, begins to fall asleep.
But sleep doesn’t hold him for long. Outside of his house, he hears barking and whining from his dogs. He thinks he hears a voice say “Tailypo, Tailypo, all I want is my Tailypo!” The old man does not like this voice. He yells at his dogs to be quiet. They don’t obey. He hears scratching at the door. All the sudden everything is quiet. Baffled, the man goes to check on his bloodhounds. They are gone. The man goes back inside, stunned. His dogs have never run off before, and he does not know what to make of it.
Should he look for them? It’s dark outside, and the man does not want to get lost. As he debates what to do, he hears scratching from within his home. What could be scratching? He looks across the room and sees an odd looking animal, the same odd looking animal from before. The animal looks at him. “Tailypo, Tailypo, I’ve come to get my tailypo!” The old man is terrified. A battle ensues. In the morning, all that’s left of the old man’s house is the chimney. But when you go out to the old man’s property late at night, you can still hear a voice saying, “Tailypo, Tailypo, now I’ve got my Tailypo!”
More on Halloween Traditions:
Now I’ve Got My Tailypo: A Tale of a Southern Tail
Aims and Purpose
My research of the story Tailypo will be fun.
These are the questions that will be addressed in my research:
Community Involvement and Benefits
My research will mainly take place with my family and friends I have that are from the South or that have lived in the South at one time. They will share with me the version of this story they grew up with, and how it resonated with them. Some people that will be interviewed are Anna Bogart, Katy Quinnelly, and Whitney Upton. I will share the information I have gathered in the form of a research report, to be turned in to Jill Rudy at the end of November.
My research will benefit the participants because they will be able to see how others viewed this story, and whether or not it was interpreted in the same way. They will be able to access my research in the Brigham Young Harold B. Lee Library or if desired, I will print them off a copy of my research and mail it to them.
Background and Importance of Project
I started researching Tailypo before I ever knew what research was. I may have heard the story before, but as I sat with my feet tucked under myself in Jinkle Eslava’s kindergarten classroom in Mobile, Alabama, I was fascinated. I loved the eerie feeling of the story, and I knew that it would give me goose bumps in the night. It scared me more than the story of Bloody Mary that my cousin had told me as we walked to our car from Mardi Gras parades, and it scared me more than the prospect of my older brother’s stealing my Little Mermaid Barbie. I was hooked, and I often sat with my mom asking her why the dogs ran away into the night when the Tailypo came and why the Tailypo got his tailypo back and why did the Tailypo call himself a tailypo. My mother did not know all the answers, which made the story even more rad. It was impenetrable and I loved it.
Sadly, it seems that many American Folklorists have not picked up on this tale. There are numerous scholarly sources regarding the story, but they do not just focus on Tailypo. They focus on “Appalachian Folklore” as a whole. Appalachian Folklore is cool, but Tailypo is better. By researching numerous aspects of the Tailypo story, I will be able to capture the feeling I felt as a young child, reading Tailypo while sitting outside in the warm autumn breeze.
This story is important to American folklore because it is important to thousands of young children living under the middle of the country. It is important because it is told with a deep southern accent, and it’s important because it is rad. Everyone in the United States should feel the wonder of being a child in the South, and if they cannot do it by laying in the sun, eating honeysuckle that grows on chain link fences or seeing drops of humidity in the sky, then they can do it by reading Tailypo. The main characters of Tailypo show a lot of gumption—and the South is all about gumption.
Main Proposal Body and Methods or Procedures
I will read books about Southern folklore for my project, and I will also draw from my own personal experiences growing up in Alabama. I will contact most of my research participants over the phone or through email since those participating in the research do not live near to me. I will record these conversations if they are over the phone and save them if they are conducted through the internet. Following the collection, I will then write down what was said on a collecting sheet. I will either have them mail me a consent form or ask if I can have permission to write their signature (which is legal).
When interviewing my research participants, I will ask them when they first learned of Tailypo, how old they were when they first heard it, and what kind of emotions it evoked to them. I will also ask why this story is applicable to southern culture, and why it matters. I want to know why it grabbed their attention, so that I can grab my own reader’s attention.
Preparing the oral presentation will be easy. I will tell the story to the class, and then present aspects of what I learned in my research. It will be way fun to present this story because, so far, none of my friends have ever heard it before. It is a great story and everyone will love it. While drafting my paper, I will rely on my notes, and then sit down and write the paper in one sitting. A few days later I will write it again, and maybe again after that, depending on how well I feel the paper flows. I will then finalize my draft, revising the most recent version of my draft.
Anticipated Academic Outcome
In all honesty, I probably won’t do anything more with this research than donate a copy to the archives and keep one for myself. It will be interesting to have once I have my own children, and it will be fun for them to have once they are old enough to care about folk tales. I don’t plan on submitting it to a conference, because I have never done anything of the sort and would not know how to do so. I will either keep my preliminary self for my own personal library, or donate them with my final project to the archives.
Qualifications
I am qualified to do this research because I grew up with this story and have passed it on to some of my roommates and some of my friends. I also have family members and old friends I can pull information from about this story, meaning that my research will be well rounded and interesting. It will also be different than anything anyone else is researching in our class.
Risk
I do not know anyone who would be vulnerable to this story, and I do not believe researching this content will put anyone at emotional risk.
Fit with Brigham Young University Aims
This project will uplift any Southerner’s spirit, will be intellectually enlarging to Yankees and westerners, and will lead to reflection whenever such a Southern story is told, leading to lifelong learning.
Annotated Scholarly Sources
Alexandra T. Fabius, Alex, wrote her American Folklore project on the study of American pets. Alex claims that animals act as humans. Their owners assign them human traits and take a lot of pride and joy in their accomplishments. Americans have come to love this about their dogs, and this is the exact reason why celebrity dogs like Lassie and Benji are important. This is important to my story because there is only one man in the story—the others are animals.
Citation: FA 1 2268: Fabius, T. Alexandra, “Folklore Collection and Study on Smart Pets:
America’s Obsession with Lassie,” 2000
In her project “The World of Folklore,” Megan Boden discusses various aspects of Folklore throughout the world. Though she also addresses myths, she heavily focuses on multiple types of urban legends. Reading these legends, the audience can feel a new appreciation for the sheer vast amount of territory urban legends cover. For many faithful story lovers, legends give us a sense of identity, and it is fun to remember the stories you knew as a child as you read them from a published text as an adult. This applies to my story because though for years I completely forgot about Tailypo, I remembered it in vivid detail as soon as it came back into the forefront of my memory. These legends, told so often, reflect certain cultures and can bring back memories for those who read them.
Citation: FA 1 2685: Boden, Megan, “The World of Folklore,” 2000
In Judy Teaford’s article, she discusses the importance of Tailypo’s appearance in picture books. Though it had been early passed down, she makes the claim that when Tailypo was put into a picture book it became more widespread, and that the picture booked helped with spread new versions of the tale rather than extinguish them.
Citation: Teaford, July. “The Unexamined Shadow? Not in Appalachian Picture Books!”
The Mardi Gras, Gumbo and Zydeco article give a window into Louisiana and Southern culture. It tells what kinds of values are attributed to the south, which helps with the understanding of Taliypo. This is essential to my research project. I want to be able to create a feeling around Tailypo – the feeling most Southern child feels when they first hear this eerie tale.
Citation: Mardi Gras, Gumbo, and Zydeco: Readings in Louisiana Culture. Edited by Marcia
