A LETTER FROM THE FOOL KILLER
Edited by Daniel Watkins Patterson
[A specialist in American literature, Dr. Patterson is Assistant Professor of
English at the University of North Carolina. He is the author of "Turtle Creek
to Busro: Notes on Shaker Ballads, " North Carolina Folklore, III (December
1955).]
O. Henry once opened a story with the words "Down South whenever any
one perpetrates some particularly monumental piece of foolishness everybody
says: 'Send for Jesse Holmes.'" Holmes, he explained, was the Fool Killer,
and a very busy man between the Roanoke and the Rio Grande. "The wisest of
the Southrons," O. Henry claimed, "cannot tell you whence comes the Fool-
Killer's name. "
It took, in fact, several Southern scholars to trace Jesse Holmes to his
birthplace in the editorial office of an obscure county weekly in North Carolina.
Jesse was the literary creation, they found, of Charles Napoleon Bonaparte
Evans, editor of the Milton Chronicle from 1841 to 1883. Evans was a peppery
chap with a keen eye for the folly of his Caswell neighbors, and far-sighted
enough to detect foolishness even when it occurred as far away as Orange
County and Alamance, or Raleigh, or Suffolk and Danville in Virginia. Having
accumulated a list of follies, he would publish them to the world in the form of
a letter to the editor signed "Yours foolishly, Jesse Holmes, The Fool Killer."
Jesse Holmes held his most lasting fame among his victims--my own family
still remembers offering themes twice to Jesse's pen in the 1870's. In towns
neighboring or. Jesse Holmes' preserve, his letters seem to have been known
but not reprinted, although the local newspapers did occasionally cry to him for
help. That O. Henry called his fame widespread in the South is probably ex¬
plained by the fact that C. N. B. Evans had in the 1830's worked in Greensboro,
was well known there, and was, moreover, a cousin of O. Henry's mother.
Outside a small block of Piedmont counties and an adjacent strip of Virginia.
Jesse Holmes seems to have been largely unknown.
The most striking fact in the history of the Fool Killer is that, his local
habitation and name forgotten, he apparently entered folklore and thus became
accessible to other writers besides his creator. O. Henry's story "The Fool
Killer" is not the only one in which he appears. George Ade in his Fables in
Slang included "The Fable of How the Fool-Killer Backed Out of a Contract, "
and Stephen Vincent
ВепЛ
wrote a better -known story, "Johnny Pye and the
Fool Killer. " Helen Eustis created a novel, The Fool Killer, around his char¬
acter. He furnished irony to Carl Sandburg's poem "Ossawatomie" and earned
a charming poem all to himself from the hand of Helen Bevington, who called it
simply "The Fool Killer. "
In contrast, editor Evans' original Fool Killer letters have gone long for¬
gotten. The reasons are plain. Although the Milton Chronicle had a life of
forty years, few issues survive, and only four of these contain letters from
Jesse Holmes. None of the four letters have made their way into anthologies
of American humor. Evans' sketches had two serious flaws: they were topical
and hence appealed chiefly to local readers of the day, and their structure was
ineffective. Evans tended to string together a long series of miscellaneous
anecdotes without establishing characters or scene for many of them. But the
letters have their merits. Evans had an ear for striking speech, and a lively
22
