African American Folktales

by Roger Abrahams

  Finally, oral performances tend to focus on the concrete qualities of the here and now, and on the practicalities and problems faced daily in the village or small-community context in which most of these stories were collected. Personal problems and eccentricities are seldom faced head-on. Instead, those used to operating in an oral manner learn from experience how direct and personal talk about one another’s doings can adversely affect the harmony of the community. To them, then, the most effective and artful forms of speech are those that contain indirect arguments, that “go round for long,” as some some Africans put it, that couch personal suggestions in impersonal terms. The verbal arts, including storytelling, gravitate toward arresting images and concrete figures of speech. In our more literate and impersonal world, ironically, we tend to address our relationships and their problems more directly, with a greater number of rules of thumb whose formulation draws upon I and you more readily. The “hidden” and allusive characteristics of the older proverbs and parables seem strangely old-fashioned and even inauthentic because they seem to indicate that we are not speaking our minds. But people who live in one another’s laps all the time cannot afford to be so direct or so openly confrontative in their rhetoric.

  The taletelling tradition of blacks in the New World came, directly or indirectly, from the places where the slaves’ ancestors lived in the sub-Saharan area of the Old World. The major evidence for this is the relative consistency of the repertoire wherever Africans found themselves transported in the New World. The notes to sources in the Appendix will direct you to the relevant scholarship in the subject. Perhaps it may seem that I have skewed the argument to some degree by giving many examples of stories that have been more or less established as African in origin in a New World telling; if this is so, it was serendipitous, for I had picked the stories before I began the annotation. And as the reader interested in the subject will recognize, there are a number of stories included here that have come into the Afro-American repertoire from Europe or that have been reported from many places throughout the world—for example, the tar-baby stories, here represented by “Tricking All the Kings.”

  I have not included many examples of the jokes that make up a large part of the black repertoire throughout the New World; although they are traditional and certainly very interesting, jokes are a somewhat separate folkloric form, focusing on the “setup” and “punch line.” I have included only a small selection of jokes, ones that continue and expand the themes, techniques, and concerns of the more leisurely paced folktales.

  On the other hand, I have included a good deal of material that is jocular, if not actually in joke form; most of these stories did not appear in print until the twentieth-century collections were published. They report a body of tales specifically focusing on black-white relations under slavery, a subject that was hardly likely to have been brought to the notice of Joel Chandler Harris and his followers. The work of the Afro-American folklorists Arthur Huff Fauset and Zora Neale Hurston—and, later, J. Mason Brewer and Daryl Cumber Dance—really marks the time when the story lore of Afro-Americans in the United States was collected in a manner that might place the lore in the context of the people’s everyday lives.

  When the Harris books first appeared in the early 1880s, the question of the geographical and cultural origins of at least the Uncle Remus canon was raised; Harris himself, among others, presumed they were mostly African; another group sought to find their origins within the Indo-European complex. As I discuss in the Introduction, the work of recent scholars has pretty well laid to rest the Europeanist position, even for tales from the mainland of the United States. The key documents in tracking down the story behind these stories are Richard M. Dorson’s collections, effectively brought together in his American Negro Folktales; William Bascom’s series of articles “African Folktales in America,” in Research in African Literatures; Alan Dundes’s “African and Afro-American Tales,” in African Folklore in the New World; and Florence Baer, Sources and Analogues of the Uncle Remus Tales. I make extensive commentary on these works in the Appendix, and provide full bibliographical references to them (as well as all other cited materials) in the Bibliography.

  In great part, these scholars built on the earlier efforts of Elsie Clews Parsons; this indefatigable collector-ethnographer spent much of the 1920s and 1930s collecting, organizing, annotating, and publishing New World Negro stories. My debt to her work is reflected in the tales that I have derived from her books and articles. Moreover, Parsons underwrote the field research and published much of the work of others, most notably that of Melville J. Herskovits and his wife, Frances. I have found their Suriname Folk-lore an especially rich resource, unique not only in its subject area but in the felicity of their translations from the Paramaribo Creole tongue, taki-taki.

  I have also had the pleasure of conversing and corresponding with a number of collector-ethnographers, many of whom have shared texts with me as well as wise words. Daniel Crowley not only has written the most comprehensive work on the performance of tales in this culture area, I Could Talk Old-Story Good, but has shared his intimate knowledge of Afro-America without stint; and he has delivered, again and again, the most articulate renderings of the Africanist’s perspective on Afro-American lore.

  Eichard Dorson, the last great and vociferous advocate of the Europeanist perspective, carried out extraordinarily important work among black raconteurs in communities in Arkansas and Michigan in the 1950s, a time when attention to such a subject was out of vogue. His collections reflect the approved professional approach to the transcription and annotation of texts; in addition, his sketches of the performers themselves and his reproduction, in toto, of a tale-telling session prefigure recent developments in what we used to call the “science of folklore,” and which we call “folkloristics” today.

  In the wake of interest in the historical condition of Afro-Americans, a number of works have made important contributions to the understanding of the relationship between life and lore, and between studies of lore and the intellectual concerns of specific eras. Compendia of early writings on Afro-American lore emerged as an outgrowth of the Black Studies movement in the United States. Of these, none was more copious and illuminating than Alan Dundes’s gathering of a wealth of already printed, diverse materials in his Mother Wit from the Laughing Barrel. John Szwed and I attempted to provide a similar service with regard to the varia of the West Indian materials in our After Africa. The most readily available and reliable resource detailing the complex linguistic story of the Old World origin of the New World Creole languages is J. L. Dillard’s argumentative Black English. See also Walter Brasch’s equally engaging history of the writing of Afro-American talk in his Black Language and the Mass Media. The work of the social historians, especially Orlando Patterson and Edward Kamau Brathwaite in the West Indies and Sterling Stuckey, John Blassingame, George Rawick, Eugene Genovese, and Lawrence Levine in the United States, draws heavily on popular and folkloric materials, greatly filling in our understanding of the continuities of black life in one or another part of the New World. Richard and Sally Price’s continuing work on Saramakan (Surinam) life allows us to see, again and again, the large-scale similarities as well as the immense differences found in Maroon communities. Moreover, Richard Price’s work with Sidney Mintz, commenting on the Herkovitses’ position vis-à-vis African retentions and reinterpretations, has substituted reason for wishful thinking as I have developed my perspectives on Afro-American cultures.

  Finally, my personal gratitude goes to those who, over the years, have talked through these questions and have led me through the literature: Ken Goldstein, Herbert Halpert, Bob Thompson, Bill Wiggins, Melvin Wade, Jay Edwards, Bill Ferris, Marilyn White, Henry Glassie, Jerry Davis, Rich Price, Karl Riesman, Gene Genovese, Sid Mintz, and more recently, Bill Washabaugh, Skip Gates, Don Brenneis, Debora Kodish, and (always) my co-conspirator, John Szwed.

  Wendy Wolf, cherished editor and friend, had the good sense to take the
year off while this book gestated and its companion volume, African Folktales, went through the rites of publication. Her cheering thus came both from the sidelines and the center of the field, where her play is always superlative (though, by her own admisson, she needs some batting practice).

  My wife, Janet, constantly brings me back to the clear and straight, the simple approach, often by asking the hardest questions of my prose in the margins.

  WORDS WITHOUT END

  Once upon a time, there was a king who had one only daughter. The king said, “Any man who can give me a story without an end can marry the princess.” Many tried but did not succeed. There was one last man who came in after everyone else was done. He was introduced to the king, and right away started into his story. He told the king: “One man had some corn. Some locusts gathered around this corn, and one locust came and took a grain. Another locust came and took a grain of corn. Then another locust came and took a grain of corn. Then another locust came and took a grain of corn.” Soon the king grew tired. “I am sleepy. You can go and come back another time.”

  The man did so. And when he returned the following day, he started in: “And then another locust came and took a grain of corn. Another locust came and took a grain of corn. And then another locust came and took a grain of corn. And another locust came and took another grain of corn.”

  The king grew tired and he said to the man, “Your story has no end. Take the princess and marry her.”

  INTRODUCTION

  A story that has no end. Surely this is a strange way of introducing the reader to Afro-American folktales. Yet a great many stories in this book are built on similar solutions to a problem that a character has taken on for the sheer fun of trying to solve it, or to get out of the consequences he has brought upon himself. We are given no motivation; instead, we are thrown into the middle of an impulsive action being carried out for its own sake, such as courting the king’s beautiful daughter. There is no before and after here, only a clever trick.

  In most of the tales, such tricks are constantly being carried out, not in order to better oneself in life, as we find in so many European fairytales, but for the sheer joy of taking on the challenge. We expect this when the stories focus, as they commonly do, on the actions of Trickster (Brer Rabbit in the South of the United States and in the Bahamas, the West Indian Compé Anansi, or the Haitian scamp Ti Malice); shenanigans come more naturally to him than to heroes like Jack the Giant-killer. As with tricksters all over the world, even when he seems to win, there is no “living happily ever after” ending to his stories. Instead, there is a “to be continued” feeling at the conclusion; for, as in the adventures of European scamps like Reynard the Fox and Till Eulenspiegel, we know that Trickster will simply go from one predicament of his own making to another.

  For over a century, Afro-American folktales have been associated in the minds of readers with the plantation world nostalgically re-created by Joel Chandler Harris; moreover, because most of the stories he reports concern the merry pranks of animals, the tales have been consigned to the category of children’s literature even more fully than have the wonder tales of Grimm and Perrault. Consequently, these stories have been neglected by those who wish to celebrate the Black Achievement and have been regarded by observers as predominantly the response of an enslaved and exploited people to conditions imposed upon them. This is certainly an element in the tales that must be dealt with seriously, but the whole repertoire—Harris included—deserves to be looked at more closely and more sympathetically.

  Harris’s works and those of his followers appear in this collection, but the majority of the stories go far beyond Uncle Remus and his friends in the subjects they deal with, the audience to whom they are directed, and the historical times and geographical places they represent. Their geographical range takes us to Afro-American communities all over the New World—North, South, and Central America and the Caribbean included. Although most of the tales were collected in rural communities, a few texts are included from city settings as far from each other as Paramaribo, Surinam, on the mainland of South America, to Philadelphia. The sources include written accounts that predate the publication of the Uncle Bemus tales, later collections carried out by folklorists in the 1920s and 1930s, and still other from the fieldwork that I and my contemporaries have conducted since the invention of the tape recorder.

  Like other forms of Afro-American creative inventions—song, dance, and a range of techniques of body adornment—these tales testify not only to the perseverance of an uprooted and enslaved people but to the vitality of the cultural traditions they were able to maintain and build upon. The elements of storytelling were included in the only “baggage” they could carry with them: their traditional styles of personal and social adornment, as well as their ways of performing and celebrating. A great many of the stories included are actually New World versions of ones found throughout sub-Saharan Africa and therefore stand alongside the other great black performance traditions in illustrating the continuing vigor of the African aesthetic. Although many of these performance forms were put together on this side of the Atlantic, they draw upon some of the most profound dimensions of African style. If the importance of the tales in celebrating black creativity has been superseded by more lively and large-scale performances, such as jazz or break dancing, the slower, less-driven rhythms of the stories continue to enchant in their small-scale but equally outrageous way.

  These stories are associated throughout the black world with the joyful effusions of nighttime entertainments, especially with the time of the month when the moon shines brightly and old people and young come together to celebrate life’s possibilities in the face of the harsh regularities of daytime activity. As Jean Price-Mars rhapsodized three quarters of a century ago about the stories from his Haitian childhood: “They appeal to the mystery of the night as if to soften intentionally the rhythm of the narration and to place the action in the realm of the supernatural. It is … on these clear nights at the moment when ‘Rabbit is on guard’ (as we say … to describe the limpid sky studded with stars), it is at that moment that the proud ‘storyteller’ casts the spell on his audience.”1 The stories also respond to the terrible visitation of death to the community; they are told in their most liberated and outrageous renditions at wakes, after the interment. These tales, then, like the many flowerings of the improvisatory spirit by which the black world has always distinguished itself in the community of nations—through developing forms like jazz and the mambo, the blues and bossa nova, calypso and calinda—are evidence of a great ability to bring meaning to the most seemingly insignificant materials and movements. Like songs and dances, stories live in that part of black life “informed by the flash of the spirit of a certain people specially armed with improvisatory drive and brilliance.”2 It is a spirit with an incandescence that bursts in a shower of sparks and laughter.

  Read these stories, then, with this in mind: the outrageous actions they describe and the mirth they elicit are a vital response to the long night of deprivation and to death. Told in dialogue, folded into the overlapping sounds of good company, and locking everyone into the occasion by the interspersed song that animates the tellings, they are not just the frivolous aftershocks of the uprooting and enslaving experience. Instead, they are artful lies that say aloud of life, as the king did in anger and frustration to the storyteller in the tale of the locust and the grain, “Your story has no end!”

  I

  Make no mistake: this is a book of elaborate fictions told by tale spinners, first and last, for the fun of it, even when the stories are told in the face of a death in the community. They may embody larger truths, but they are called lies and nonsense nonetheless by those who tell and listen and laugh. For, as Uncle Remus explained to his young white inquisitor who was worried about the morality of some of Brer Rabbit’s antics, “Creatures don’t know nothing at all about that’s good and that’s bad. They don’t know right from wrong. They see what they want a
nd they get it if they can, by hook or crook.” We witness the doings of characters who demand that while we listen to the narrative, we suspend not only disbelief but the kind of moral conscience that asks that we judge such doings on moral grounds. The stories not only entertain but test the limits of the believable, by illustrating situations in which exaggeration, selfishness, and other kinds of reprehensible cutting-up are regarded as normal.

  If these tales are such lies, one might reasonably ask, how are they told so that we both laugh at them and take them seriously? The answer is not hard to find. The storyteller presents himself or herself as a masterful liar, through joking openers (“Once upon a time, a monkey shit lime …”), endings (“This is what I went out to find out about, and this is what I was able to return, in spite of everything, to tell you, and if you don’t believe me go look for yourself …”), and the myriad inter-spersed remarks that remind the hearer that a performance by a master talker is taking place. This running commentary is what Daniel Crowley calls the “double lie” technique; by couching the fictions in such ridiculously exaggerated terms, the wholly fictional character of the tales is underscored, and the storyteller’s reputation as an artful liar is enhanced.