David and Goliath: Underdogs, Misfits, and the Art of Battling Giants

meetings until people got home from
work late in the afternoon. They would
form out on the side and it would look
like a thousand folks. We weren’t
marching but twelve, fourteen, sixteen,
eighteen. But the papers were reporting
fourteen hundred.”
It was a situation straight out of one of
the most famous of all trickster tales—
the story of Terrapin, a lowly turtle who
finds himself in a race with Deer. He
hides just by the finish line and places
his relatives up and down the course, at
strategic intervals, to make it seem like
he is running the whole race. Then at the
finish line, he emerges just ahead of
Deer to claim victory. Deer is
completely fooled, since, as Terrapin