Tennessee's Partner: Loyalty, Revenge, and Southwestern Humor

Publication and Surface Narrative. "Tennessee's Partner," first published in the Overland for October 1869, represents the highwater mark of Harte's fiction. On the surface it seems a perfectly transparent story of loyalty and friendship. After the highwayman and petty criminal Tennessee elopes with his Partner's bride, the Partner seems to take "the loss of his wife simply and seriously, as was his fashion" (Luck 50). When Tennessee returns to Sandy Bar alone, however—the woman "having smiled and retreated with somebody else"—the two men are immediately reconciled, much to the dismay of the miners, "who had gathered in the cañon to see the shooting" (50).

Trial, Bribery, and Execution. After Tennessee is arrested for robbery, his Partner appears at his trial and, while ostensibly testifying on his behalf, lays out the case against him as eloquently as any prosecuting attorney: "He lays for a stranger, and he fetches that stranger. And you lays for him, and you fetches him; and the honors is easy" (53). The Partner tries, to no avail, to bribe the judge and jury with $1,700 in gold if they will simply release the defendant. After Tennessee is found guilty and hanged, the Partner claims his body and buries it in the garden plot of their cabin.

New Critical Objections and the Sentimental Reading. At the most superficial level the tale seems to evade the issue raised by Tennessee's theft of his Partner's wife. As a result, "Tennessee's Partner" became something of a whipping boy for the New Critics in the 1950s. According to Cleanth Brooks and Robert Penn Warren in Understanding Fiction (1959), the story seemed to epitomize all that was wrong with mid-19th-century American literature. It was doggedly sentimental, they argued, valorizing the Partner's undying friendship for the rascal Tennessee: "Bret Harte is so thoroughly obsessed with the pathos of the partner's loyalty that he has devoted no thought to the precise nature of that loyalty." Even Mark Twain wondered why Harte has the Partner "welcome back a man who has committed against him that sin neither the great nor the little ever forgive."

Southwestern Humor and the Revenge Plot. Read through the lens of southwestern humor, however, the story contains a trap for the unwary set by the author. Harte deftly structures the tale around the Partner's elaborate scheme to avenge his loss of a wife, the act of victimization central to southwestern humor. The narrator betrays no more emotion in relating the story than the poker-faced Partner reveals in plotting revenge on the man who stole his wife. The miners in Sandy Bar who expect the Partner to shoot Tennessee on sight might have vented their indignation in "sarcasm" but for a look in the Partner's eye "that indicated a lack of humorous appreciation. In fact, he was a grave man, with a steady application to practical detail which was unpleasant in a difficulty" (50).

The Partner has already begun to hatch his plot and bides his time. With Tennessee under arrest, the miners of Sandy Bar "were ready to listen patiently to any defense" of his guilt, and the Partner exploits the opportunity to serve frontier justice when he appears in court at precisely the moment Tennessee's trial has become "irksomely thoughtful" (52). The legal contest becomes something of a card game, with Tennessee folding his hand and the Partner in the role of the dealer. When he offers a bribe to the judge and jury, the court is suddenly galvanized, for the "unparalleled insult" erases "any wavering determination of Tennessee's fate"—at which point Tennessee laughs, congratulates his Partner with the words "Euchred, old man," and shakes his hand (54).

The gesture is neither one of gratitude for the failed attempt to save his life nor one of friendly parting, but a sporting gesture, in effect congratulating the Partner for playing the trump card. After Tennessee is found guilty and hanged, the Partner unceremoniously hauls the body of the deceased in a donkey cart usually used "in carrying dirt" to a shallow grave at an "unpicturesque" site near his cabin. He buries the body in the earth he had cultivated during "the brief days of [his] matrimonial felicity" with the woman Tennessee stole from him. In his eulogy to the assembled miners, the Partner emphasizes his own fidelity to the friendship Tennessee betrayed: "It ain't the first time that I've packed him on my back, as you see'd me now. It ain't the first time that I brought him to this yer cabin when he couldn't help himself; it ain't the first time that I and Jinny have waited for him on yon hill, and picked him up and so fetched him home, when he couldn't speak and didn't know me" (56). In effect, he asks the assembled mourners who can blame him for wishing this man dead?

Funeral Ambiguity and the Triumph over a Rival. After the funeral (or "fun," as the Partner calls it), the crowd disperses. Seen from a distance, the Partner sits "upon the grave" with his face swathed "in his red bandanna handkerchief" (57). But, is he weeping or laughing? As the narrator notes, "You couldn't tell his face from his handkerchief at that distance, and the point remained undecided" (57). He is, more probably, sitting on the grave in triumph over his erstwhile partner and rival.

Decline, Death, and the Chillingworth Parallel. From the day he inters Tennessee, however, "his rude health and great strength seemed visibly to decline" (57) and he dies the following spring. Like Roger Chillingworth in The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne—one of Harte's favorite authors—the Partner has only lived to avenge his cuckolding. If he is reconciled with Tennessee in heaven, as the end of the story implies, they are, as have Chillingworth and Arthur Dimmesdale, "have found their earthly stock of hatred and antipathy transformed into golden love" in the Great Beyond.

Legacy, Translations, and Film Adaptation. "Tennessee's Partner" has proven over the years to be one of the most durable of Harte's stories. It has been translated into no fewer than 11 languages, including Romanian, Serbo-Croatian, and Vietnamese, and it remains a chestnut in modern anthologies of American literature. A loose adaptation of the tale starring Ronald Reagan, John Payne, and Rhonda Fleming was released in 1955.

For Discussion or Writing.
1.Which interpretation of "Tennessee's Partner" seems more reasonable: the straightforward, sentimental account of the two men's partnership in the mines or the satirical account of the Partner's quest for revenge? What objections to the satirical reading might discredit it?
2.Identify the ways that Partner's relationship with Tennessee parallels the relationship of Roger Chillingworth and Arthur Dimmesdale in Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter.