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“Now let me tell you about my tiger friend that I tricked oh so many times. The very first time I met the Tiger, he was trapped in a deep pit. I looked down at him and laughed as the supposedly powerful Tiger was so pitifully stuck. This angered Tiger and he started to scale the pit with his claws. Now, I got to be honest, I was a little scared but inches away from the top, Tiger began to lose strength in his arms. With my genius brain coming up with a brilliant idea, I told the tiger to pray for more strength. That fool actually let go of the wall and put his hands together to start praying causing him to fall all the way back down to the bottom of the pit. It was so funny that as I ran away, my stomach started hurting from laughing too hard. Luckily, Tiger forgot about that time and a few months later, he invited me to go hunting with him. We both went out hunting for goats and after a couple of hours, Tiger finally caught one by trapping it under his large paws. I didn’t get to catch anything and honestly, I felt a little jealous so once again, I knew I had to trick Tiger. I told him that before he ate his meal, he should say grace. Once again, that idiot of a tiger put his paws together and the goat ran away. All I could do was laugh at his stupidity after falling for the same trick twice.”
Anansi waited for some applause after his story but only silence filled the air until Coyote began to speak.
“Didn’t you make fun of me for tricking an old bear when you literally tricked the same dumb tiger over and over again?” said Coyote.
Till nodded in agreement. “Exactly, you made fun of me for my story when that tiger might be the most gullible creature on earth and you’re even trying to brag about it. Not to mention, you literally put half the audience to sleep.”
“Alright, alright, simmer down there. I’ll give you two a more impressive story if you guys want even though I’m pretty sure I already got both of you beat,” said Anansi.
“Since you guys thought that story was boring, let me tell you all about the times I stole from Death itself. Now, Death always had an abundance of food whether it be yams, grains, and even barbecue at one point. I was never good at hunting and I often come back empty-handed, so I thought to myself, why not just take some food from Death? The first time I found Death’s camp, I didn’t even know who Death was, so I just took the food as it was pretty much presenting itself to me. Death came up and asked me that I should recognize him as he was the all-powerful Death. Of course, I didn’t really care so I just thanked him and left. However, the next time I returned to get more food, Death went crazy and started chasing after me. Now, one would think that Death of all things would be able to catch up, but he wasn’t able to, and I eventually led him to where people lived, losing him in the crowd. Sure, I may have brought death to the people but honestly, not my problem. Now tell me, have either of you two ever escaped Death?”
Till and Coyote looked at Anansi silently as they couldn’t answer. The crowd was in awe as now they knew that Anansi had the caliber to trick and escape Death.
Loki got up out of his seat and finally brokethe silence. “Now, can we all give a big round of applause to all three of our contestants!"
The crowd started to applaud when a large boxand paper appeared out of thin air. “Now, would everyone in the crowd please come pick up a slip of paper and put who you thought had the best trickster story?”
Everyone got out of their seats and began to fill out the pieces of paper. After a couple of minutes had passed, everyone had filled out a piece of paper and placed it in the box. Loki snapped his fingers and a thin piece of paper with the results appeared in his hand.
“Now then, let me announce the winner of this contest. Wow, these results are quite surprising if I do say so myself!” said Loki looking at the piece of paper.
Loki with a slight smirk announced the results. “Let’s see here, we have zero votes for Till, zero votes for Coyote, zero votes for Anansi, and all the votes for me!”
The audience burst out in laughter as all three tricksters had a confused look on their faces. “It was all a joke, we just actually just wanted to kill some time. we thought it would be fun to see you three go against each other but in reality, no one here cared,” said Loki with a malicious smile. “Well, I hope you three enjoy your time together,” said Loki as he and the audience dissipated into thin air, leaving behind the three tricksters with their mouths gaping open in disbelief. Without a word to each other, the three tricksters left the venue thinking about how they would return the favor next year. And so, the annual meeting of tricksters came to an end.
Author’s Note: Anansi is an African trickster with the character being commonplace in stories of West African, African American, and Caribbean culture. These stories were brought over to the Americas from Africa through the slave trade. Anansi himself is folktale character where the word “anansi” means spider in the Akan language from West Africa and is typically depicted as a spider who is very clever and cunning. The original stories that I used in my story all come from the Caribbean and all the stories are quite short with all of them being only one hundred words long. Therefore, I combined multiple stories into one like in the first story Anansi told or I added slightly more detail like in the second story Anansi told. For the first story, I purposefully made it slightly more bland so that Anansi would have a reason to present a second story as one story would have been too little. However, Anansi seems to be quite cocky from what I have read so I made it seem like Anansi felt his story was great and that he had already won. At the end of the story, instead of actually picking a winner, I thought it would be more interesting and more trickster-like to have the rest of the tricksters in the venue as well as Loki trick our three main characters. Since tricksters often end up tricking each other, I thought that this would make a great end to the story.
Image Information: "Greek meeting hall" via Pikist
Image Information: "Anansi" by Biblioteca Juvenil Mayagüez via WikimediaCommons
Bibliography: "Anansi in Death's Camp" ,"Anansi and Tiger in the Pit", and "Anansi and Tiger go Hunting" by Laura Gibbs via Mythology UN-Textbook
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