84 HUGH HODGES

the white slaveholder or dominant oppressing class, as for their
capacities as warrior figures."17 He then extends the analogy to include
reggae artists, particularly Bob Marley, whom he sees as underdogs
using rhythmic and linguistic subversion to fight the forces of
oppression. In fact much of the 'reggae aesthetic' Dawes develops in
Natural Mysticism depends on this connection between Jamaican folk
heroes and the trickster Anancy. The connection is a difficult one,
however. In folk stories, Anancy is not by any means always the
underdog Dawes describes. The story Walter Jekyll collects as "William
Tell," for example, recounts unironically how Anancy, by the strength
of his arm and his singing, cuts down a tree that no man could fell.18
His relative strength is again important in the story of "Annancy and
Candlefly." Stronger and faster than Candlefly, Anancy engrosses all of
the food they set out to collect together, and, because Anancy is so
much stronger, Candlefly is forced to leave without saying a word.9 In
some stories, Anancy's 'trick' amounts to little more than coming up
with a flimsy pretext for laying into someone with an axe. And Anancy
is not always the sharpest-witted character in the stories. Toad is
sometimes a match for him, as are Monkey and Fire.2" In a few stories
Anancy is not even the trickster. In the story "Anancy and Common-
Sense" told by Louise Bennett, the story's trick is an accidental result
of Anancy's display of temper.
 The fact that Anancy is not always the story's successful trickster
suggests that the trickster and the trick are in some important ways
separate and independent, not just in Pentecostal rite, but also in the
original stories themselves. This makes possible two very different
readings of Anancy stories.
 The reading that valorizes the trickster reads Anancy's world as
amoral, in the sense that it's a world in which all moral systems have
failed and been discredited. In this reading Anancy stories are a perfect
allegory of racist society. As Rex Nettleford observes, Anancy has "a
special significance in a society which has its roots in a system of



 17 Kwame Dawes, Natural Mysticism (Leeds: Peepal Tree, 1999) 12
 1 Jekyll, "William Tell" Song and Story 29
 19 Jekyll, "Annancy and Candlefly" Song and Story 87.
 21 See, for example, Jekyll, "How Monkey Manage Annancy." Song and Story 20-22;
Jekyll, "Toad and Donkey," Song and Story 42; Louise Bennett, "Anancy and Monkey,"
Anancy Stories and Dialect Verse (Kingston: Pioneer, 1973) 4; and Louise Bennett
"Anancy An' Fire" Anancy 12-13.