Brave Mr. Buckingham (1935)
Image Source: Wikimedia Commons
Dorothy Kunhardt is best known for authoring Pat The Bunny, whose cute “touch and feel” composition is the antithesis of a horror story. However, the lauded children’s book author actually wrote one such tale of terror in 1935.
Brave Mr. Buckingham tells the story of a Native American man named Mr. Buckingham, who at first glance appears to have some serious risk-taking addiction. He likes to put his foot next to a buzzsaw because it gives him “a nice tickling feeling” and subsequently loses the foot. Later a fish eats his other foot. Then he goes on to violently lose his arms when they are sheered off by the gardener upon being struck by a passing truck.
Buckingham shrugs each time this happens, simply stating, “That didn’t hurt!”
So maybe he has congenital insensitivity to pain — or maybe he’s just living up to the masculine expectation of stoicism. It’s never made entirely clear in the book: in fact, the only thing the book does make clear is that losing one’s limbs without crying out in pain apparently makes you brave.
Eventually, Buckingham is only a head donning a traditional Native American headdress. The story (sort of?) has a happy ending, though:
“And that was the very last terrible accident that brave Mr. Buckingham ever had. After that he lived happily, happily ever after, and whenever he was hungry, his dear little granddaughter would help Mr. Buckingham to eat a big plateful of beautiful red strawberries, because strawberries were brave Mr. Buckingham’s favorite thing. And brave Mr. Buckingham was so used to saying, “That didn’t hurt,” that as soon as he had eaten the last beautiful strawberry, he smiled a very, very brave smile, and he said, ‘That didn’t hurt!'”
