Annie Christmas

Also Known As: also Keelboat Annie, Flatboat Annie, Big Annie
Region/Culture: North America
Mythos: African American Folklore, Urban Legends & Contemporary Folklore
Primary Type/Nature: Heroes and Mortals
Mythical Attributes: Strength past any human measure, an endurance that never runs out, and a voice that carries a mile over open water.
Role in Mythos: She is the occupational hero of the Mississippi keelboat and flatboat trade, the one figure in American tall tales who does a longshoreman’s work better than any man on the levee.
Relation to Humans: She works among ordinary people and settles their scores for them, stepping in for anyone being leaned on by someone stronger. The tellings make her a defender of the bullied rather than a distant marvel, which is why the phrase “strong as Annie Christmas” was once a real compliment paid to real feats.

The gangplank took her weight and complained about it. She came up off the New Orleans levee with a barrel of flour under each arm and a third balanced on her head, and the flour dust drifting off the staves hung in the early light over the water like smoke that had forgotten to rise. Nobody offered to help. Men who had watched her do it before had learned that offering was its own kind of insult, and men who had not watched her do it before were busy staring.

This is Annie Christmas at work, which is where the stories like her best. She captained a keelboat called the *Big River’s Daughter* on the stretch of the Mississippi around New Orleans, and a keelboat has no engine and no mercy: it is poled, hauled and dragged upstream by whoever is strong enough to do it. She was strong enough. One account has her towing a loaded keelboat from New Orleans to Natchez at such a pace that the hull skipped across the surface instead of ploughing through it, and arriving without having lost her breath. She could lift a grown man off the boards with one hand. She could raise a whisky barrel from the floor to the bar top on her own, which is a smaller feat than the Natchez run and a much more popular one. For a while along that river, telling someone they were strong as Annie Christmas was the highest compliment available.

The sources cannot agree on how big she actually was. The fullest printed description gives six feet eight inches and more than two hundred and fifty pounds; elsewhere she is simply seven feet, as though the extra four inches were a rounding error nobody minded. By day she wore men’s clothes, and some tellings give her a neat moustache and insist that women in the dance halls could not tell, and did not mind when they found out. In the evenings she changed into satin, gold or green or red depending on who is telling it, and put on a hat with a turkey feather in the band. The feather was not decoration. It announced that she was a champion fighter, and it was accurate.

What she conspicuously did not wear was a *tignon*, the head covering that colonial law had once required of free women of colour in Louisiana and that had long since been turned, out of pure defiance, into an object of fashion. Leaving it off is the quietest detail in her whole legend and one of the sharpest.

Then there is the necklace. She wore pearls, one for every man she had beaten in a fight, and by the time she died it was said to run twenty feet long. Other tellers thought pearls too dainty for her and strung the necklace instead with the ears, noses, eyes or teeth of the men she had taken apart. The most famous of those men was Mike Fink, the swaggering king of the keelboats, and the encounter is always brief in the telling. He came at her the way he came at everyone. He left the story shorter than he entered it, and one more pearl went onto the string.

Twelve children walked with her wherever she went, six on either side, and the accounts split on whether they were all sons or evenly divided between sons and daughters. Her marriages are equally unsettled. Some versions leave her unmarried, some make her a widow, and some give her six husbands, all of whom she is said to have loved to death in the most literal sense available, at which point she stopped marrying out of a sense of public responsibility. A few tellings make her the madam of one of the floating bordellos that worked the port. She was born, the stories say, around 1850 in the delta swamps, and she never aged afterwards, which is a convenient arrangement for a woman who has to stay in her prime across a century of retellings.

She dies differently every time. In one version she is shot in a New Orleans gambling house. In another she is set upon by a hundred men with guns and knives. In another she simply loses a gambler she loved and cannot carry it, and takes her own life. Whichever ending is used, the funeral is the same and it is the best scene she has: her body laid on a barge and sent down the river toward the sea while every boat on the water sounded its whistle, her twelve children standing around the coffin. In some tellings the barge keeps going, past the mouth, and none of them is seen again.

Here is the part the tall tales leave out. Annie Christmas was almost certainly made up, and we know roughly who made her up and when. Two New Orleans newspapermen, Roark Bradford and Lyle Saxon, ran a series of Annie Christmas stories in the *Times-Picayune* and let their readers take them for genuine local tradition, building her deliberately as a female Mike Fink. The folklorist Frank de Caro, who taught at Louisiana State University, described her flatly as a figure probably invented in the 1930s by Saxon and a colleague to give Louisiana its own answer to Paul Bunyan and Joe Magarac. She reached print in Saxon, Edward Dreyer and Robert Tallant’s *Gumbo Ya-Ya* in 1945, and Bradford’s wife Mary Rose contributed “The Story of Annie Christmas” to B. A. Botkin’s *A Treasury of Mississippi River Folklore* in 1955. Herbert Asbury had already worked her into *The French Quarter* in 1936, reporting her as a white riverfront figure whom Black tellers had taken up and retold as one of their own. By 1948 the *Milwaukee Journal* was running a piece on the whole business under the heading “Folklore Made to Order.” Along the way she seems to have picked up pieces of Tugboat Annie, a *Saturday Evening Post* character of the 1920s, and possibly her surname from Lee Christmas, the Louisiana railroad man who became a mercenary in Central America.

Her powers are the powers of the work: lift, haul, endure, outlast, and shout across a mile of river so that everyone on both banks hears it. Her limits are the ones that come with having no tradition underneath her. Every telling can kill her a different way because no community ever settled on how she died, and a figure assembled by two journalists in a newsroom has no elders to object when the next writer changes her. What happened next is the genuinely interesting part: she outgrew the men who forged her. Botkin anthologised her, Virginia Hamilton put her in *Her Stories* in 1995 among African American folktale heroines, Michelle Cliff wrote a character after her, Andrew Lloyd Webber and Jim Steinman gave her a song, and in 2015 the New Orleans practitioner and author Denise Alvarado wrote her up as a Voudou spirit who defends the bullied. A fake folk hero who is still being adopted eighty years on has done something a real one might envy.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who is Annie Christmas?

Annie Christmas is a giant, superhumanly strong Black keelboat captain and stevedore from the tall tales of Louisiana and the lower Mississippi. She is usually given as between six feet eight and seven feet tall, captained a keelboat called the *Big River’s Daughter*, and is remembered for beating any man who challenged her. She is one of the very few women in the American tall-tale tradition.

Was Annie Christmas a real person?

Almost certainly not. The evidence points to the New Orleans writers Roark Bradford and Lyle Saxon inventing her in the 1930s and publishing her stories in the *Times-Picayune* as though they were genuine local folklore, with the intention of giving Louisiana a riverfront answer to Paul Bunyan and Joe Magarac. The folklorist Frank de Caro treated her as an invention, and a 1948 newspaper piece on the episode was headed “Folklore Made to Order.”

What is Annie Christmas’s pearl necklace?

It is a string of pearls with one pearl added for every man she defeated in a fight, said to have reached twenty feet in length by the time she died. Some versions of the story replace the pearls with the ears, noses, eyes or teeth taken from the men she beat. The most famous name on the string is Mike Fink, the legendary king of the keelboats.

How did Annie Christmas die?

The stories do not agree. She is variously shot in a New Orleans gambling house, attacked by a hundred armed men, or dead by her own hand after losing a gambler she loved. Every version ends the same way, with her body sent down the Mississippi on a barge toward the sea, her twelve children beside the coffin and every boat on the river sounding its whistle.