Reading the Monkey

In this time of pandemic throughout the Great Outside World, Prof. Dina Massachi and the International Wizard of Oz Club have organized a video reading of L. Frank Baum’s The Wonderful Wizard of Oz.

All the videos are on the Oz Club’s YouTube channel, as well as various Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter feeds. Yesterday there was even a report on the project in Philadelphia keyed to local reader Ryan Bunch.

Other readers have included Baum’s granddaughter Gita Morena, novelist Gregory Maguire, biographer Michael Patrick Hearn, historian of feminism Sally Roesch Wagner, and many friends I’ve made through the Oz conventions.

Dina asked me to tackle Chapter 14, “The Winged Monkeys.” In this chapter Dorothy learns the secret of the Golden Cap she took from the Wicked Witch of the West—that it can summon the Winged Monkeys to fulfill her wish. She then hears the story of how those Winged Monkeys became enslaved to the cap.

A large part of the chapter consists of the King of the Winged Monkeys’ story from his grandfather’s day. There are other long flashbacks in the book, such as when the Tin Woodman and the Wizard explain how they ended up in the fixes where Dorothy found them. This flashback is unusual in going so far back to tell a story about characters we never see elsewhere in the book—or elsewhere in Baum’s other books, either.

All the characters in the chapter are matter-of-fact about the Monkeys being compelled to obey the owner of the Golden Cap. The present King of the Winged Monkeys expresses no resentment about the sorceress who enslaved them, or his grandfather who angered her, or the Wicked Witch for ordering them around. Dorothy never considers freeing the monkeys from slavery as she’s inadvertently freed the Munchkins and the Winkies.

Glinda the Good does free the Winged Monkeys at the end of the book, but then in the sequel, The Marvelous Land of Oz, Baum describes them still as enslaved to the cap, so evidently that moment in his story hadn’t meant much to him. I doubt an author today could write so casually about slavery.

Reading Chapter 14 therefore presented a challenge. How to voice the King of the Winged Monkeys in a way that made him more than a docile servant by preserving the sense of mischief he acknowledges. Plus, that story of people we’d never meet again had to be interesting. In my telling, the king’s voice came out like a Bowery Boy.

Here’s the result for Chapter 14. Or you can start from the beginning in the great Kansas prairies.