And though he would have been most reluctant to admit it, Ellison’s debt to Hurston’s uses of folklore was a considerable one.
Hurston herself collected folklore, using “the spy-glass of Anthropology,” theorized about folklore, and rendered folklore in novels, especially in her classic novel, Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937), now solidly part of the American literary canon, which we can think of as the ur text in a rich tradition of black women’s writing that is still unfolding. In her insightful essay “Characteristics of Negro Expression,” Hurston writes: “Negro folklore is not a thing of the past. It is still in the making. Its great variety shows the adaptability of the black man: nothing is too old or too new, domestic or foreign, high or low, for his use. God and the Devil are paired, and are treated no more reverently than Rockefeller and Ford. . . . The automobile is ranged alongside of the oxcart. The angels and the apostles walk and talk like section hands. And through it all walks Jack, the greatest cultural hero of the south; Jack beats them all—even the Devil, who is often smarter than God.”94
Hurston noted, prophetically, that the folklore invented by African Americans is “still in the making.” It is clear that African American folklore is alive and well in one of its principal venues, in the living tradition of African American fiction. Thanks to the brave efforts of pioneering collectors such as Alice Bacon and Arthur Fauset, and the legion of other scholars whose works ours rests upon, the canon of African American folktales was preserved. We hope that our anthology makes even a small contribution to rendering this great tradition of thought and feeling accessible to an even wider audience, both in the classroom and in homes.
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1 “Folklore and Ethnology,” Southern Workman 22, no. 7 (July 1894), 131, https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=hvd.hngblm;view=1up;seq=535.
2 Anna Julia Cooper, “Paper by Miss Anna Julia Cooper,” Southern Workman 22, no. 7 (July 1894), 133, https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=hvd.hngblm;view=1up;seq=537.
3 Alan Dundes, Mother Wit from the Laughing Barrel (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1990), 251.
4 See Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, Righteous Discontent: The Women’s Movement in the Black Baptist Church, 1880–1920 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994).
5 Lee D. Baker, Anthropology and the Racial Politics of Culture (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010), 33–34.
6 Ibid., 50.
7 Cooper, “Paper by Miss Anna Julia Cooper,” 133.
8 Melville J. Herskovits, “The Negro’s Americanism,” in The New Negro, ed. Alain Locke (New York: Touchstone, 1997), 353–60.
9 Melville J. Herskovits, “The Negro in the New World: The Statement of a Problem,” American Anthropologist 32.1 (January–March 1930), 149–50, http://www.jstor.org/stable/661054.
10 Melville J. Herskovits, The Myth of the Negro Past (Boston: Beacon Press, 1990).
11 E. Franklin Frazier, The Negro Family in the United States (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1939).
12 E. Franklin Frazier, “Is the Negro Family a Unique Sociological Unit?” Opportunity 5 (June 1927), 166.
13 Baker, Anthropology and the Racial Politics of Culture, 13.
14 Ronald Wardhaugh, An Introduction to Sociolinguistics (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishers, 2010), 79.
15 Herbert Aptheker, American Negro Slave Revolts (New York: International Publishers, 1978), 64.
16 Robert E. Park, “The Conflict and Fusion of Cultures with Special Reference to the Negro,” The Journal of Negro History 4, 2 (April 1919), 117, doi: 10.2307/2713533.
17 Frazier, The Negro Family in the United States, 7–8.
18 Park, “The Conflict and Fusion,” 117; quoted in Frazier, The Negro Family in the United States, 8.
19 Ibid.
20 A. C. Carmichael, Domestic Manners and Social Condition of the White, Coloured and Negro Population of the West Indies, Vol. I. (London: Whittaker and Co, 1834), 251–52.
21 Ibid., 251–52; Park, “The Conflict and Fusion,” 117.
22 David Eltis, email to author, August 10, 2016.
23 William Wells Newell, “The Importance and Utility of the Collection of Negro Folk-Lore,” Southern Workman 22, no.7 (July 1894), 131–32, https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=mdp.39015080382800;view=1up;seq=82.
24 Nathaniel S. Shaler, “The Negro Problem,” The Atlantic Monthly 54 (November 1884), 703.
25 Nathaniel S. Shaler, “Science and the African Problem,” The Atlantic Monthly 66 (July 1890), 36–44.
26 Alice M. Bacon, Southern Workman 20, no. 12 (December 1893), 179.
27 Baker, Anthropology and the Racial Politics of Culture, 47.
28 Newell, “The Importance and Utility of the Collection of Negro Folk-Lore,” 132.
29 Ibid.
30 Ibid.
31 Frederick Douglass, Life and Times of Frederick Douglass Written by Himself (Hartford, CT.: Park Publishing Co., 1882), 25.
32 Newell, “The Importance and Utility of the Collection of Negro Folk-Lore,” 132.
33 Bruce Jackson, The Negro and His Folklore in Nineteenth-Century Periodicals (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1967).
34 William B. Smith, “The Persimmon Tree and the Beer Dance,” in The Negro and His Folklore in Nineteenth-Century Periodicals, ed. Bruce Jackson (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1967), 4–9.
35 J. Kennard Jr., “Who Are Our National Poets?” in The Negro and His Folklore in Nineteenth-Century Periodicals, ed. Bruce Jackson (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1967), 27.
36 Ibid., 24–25.
37 Y. S. Nathanson, “Negro Minstrelsy: Ancient and Modern,” in The Negro and His Folklore in Nineteenth-Century Periodicals, ed. Bruce Jackson (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1967), 45.
38 Ibid.
39 William Francis Allen, Charles Pickard Ware, and Lucy McKim Garrison, eds., Slave Songs of the United States (New York: A. Simpson & Co., 1867), x.
40 James Baldwin, The Fire Next Time (New York: Vintage, 1992), 69.
41 Elsie Clews Parsons, Folk-lore of the Sea Islands, South Carolina (Cambridge, MA: American Folk-lore Society, 1921), xiv.
42 Jackson, The Negro and His Folklore, xxii–xxiii.
43 Thadden Norris, “Negro Superstitions,” in The Negro and His Folklore in Nineteenth-Century Periodicals, ed. Bruce Jackson (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1967), 135–43.
44 Robert Lee J. Vance, “Plantation Folk Lore,” Open Court II (1888), 1028–32, 1074–76, 1092–95.
45 Abigail Mandana Holmes Christiansen, “De Wolf, De Rabbit, and de Tar Baby,” Springfield (Mass.) Daily Republican (June 2, 1874).
46 Christensen, Afro-American Folk-lore: Told Round Cabin Fires on the Sea Islands (Boston: J. G. Cupples Company, 1892), xii–xiii.
47 Joel Chandler Harris, His Songs and His Sayings (New York: D. Appleton, 1880).
48 Joel Chandler Harris, Nights with Uncle Remus (New York: McKinlay, Stone & Mackenzie, 1911).
49 William Owens, “Folklore of the Southern Negroes,” in The Negro and His Folklore in Nineteenth-Century Periodicals, ed. Bruce Jackson (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1967), 145–56.
50 Charles Colcock Jones Jr., Negro Myths of the Georgia Coast (Boston: Houghton-Mifflin, 1888), v–vi.
51 Mary Alicia Owen, Voodoo Tales as Told Among the Negroes of the Southwest (Whitefish, MT: Kessinger Publishing, 2007).
52 Donald J. Waters, Strange Ways and Sweet Dreams: Afro-American Folklore from the Hampton Institute (New York: ACLS Humanities E-Book, 2008).
53 Thomas W. Talley, Negro Folk Rhymes (Wise and Otherwise) (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1991).
54 Arthur Huff Fauset, “Negro Folk Tales from the South (Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana),” in The New Negro, ed. Alain Locke (New York: Touchstone, 1999), 238–44.
55 Arthur Huff Fauset, Black Gods of the Metropolis (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2002).
56 Fauset,
“Negro Folk Tales,” 238.
57 Tanika JoAnn Beamon, “A History of African American Folklore Scholarship,” PhD diss., University of California, Berkeley (2001), 46.
58 Fauset, “Negro Folk Tales,” 238–41.
59 E. C. L. Adams, Nigger to Nigger, in Tales of the Congaree (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1987), 103–302.
60 Zora Neale Hurston, “Hoodoo in America,” Journal of American Folklore 44 (October–December 1931), 317–417, doi 10.2307/535394.
61 Zora Neale Hurston, Mules and Men (New York: HarperPerennial, 2008).
62 Hurston, Tell My Horse: Voodoo and Life in Haiti and Jamaica (New York: HarperPerennial, 2008).
63 Benjamin Botkin, Lay My Burden Down: A Folk History of Slavery (New York: Delta, 1989).
64 Langston Hughes and Arna Bontemps, The Book of Negro Folklore (New York: Dodd Mead, 1983).
65 Roger D. Abrahams, Deep Down in the Jungle: Negro Narrative Folklore from the Streets of Philadelphia (New Brunswick, NJ: AldineTransaction, 2009).
66 Richard M. Dorson, American Negro Folktales (Mineola, NY: Dover Publications, 2015).
67 J. Mason Brewer, American Negro Folklore (New York: Quadrangle, 1968).
68 Bruce Jackson, Get Your Ass in the Water and Swim Like Me: African American Narrative Poetry from Oral Tradition (New York: Routledge, 2004).
69 Henry Louis Gates Jr., The Signifying Monkey (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988; rpt. 2014).
70 Harold Courlander, A Treasury of Afro-American Folklore (New York: Crown Publishing, 1988).
71 Daryl Cumber Dance, Shuckin’ and Jivin’: Folklore from Contemporary Black Americans (Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1978).
72 Dance, From My People: 400 Years of African American Folklore: An Anthology (New York: Norton, 2003).
73 Langston Hughes, “The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain,” The Nation 122 (June 23, 1926), 692–94.
74 George Schuyler, “The Negro Art Hokum,” The Nation 122 (June 16, 1926), 662–64.
75 Arna Bontemps, “Why I Returned,” in Black Voices: An Anthology of Afro-American Literature, ed. Abraham Chapman (New York: Signet, 2001), 309–10.
76 James Weldon Johnson, Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man (Boston: Sherman, French & Company, 1912), 178.
77 Baker, Anthropology and the Racial Politics of Culture, 35.
78 Charles W. Chesnutt, “The Goophered Grapevine,” The Atlantic Monthly 60 (August 1887), 259–60.
79 Charles W. Chesnutt, The Conjure Woman (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1993).
80 Charles W. Chesnutt, “Superstitions and Folk-lore of the South,” Modern Culture XIII (May 1901), 231.
81 Ibid.
82 Charles W. Chesnutt, “Post-Bellum Pre-Harlem,” Colophon 2.5 (February 1931).
83 Sterling A. Brown, “Folk Literature,” in A Son’s Return (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1996), 226.
84 Sterling A. Brown, “Negro Folk Expression,” Phylon 11.4 (1950), 318.
85 Brown, “Folk Literature,” in Negro Caravan, ed. Sterling A. Brown, Arthur Paul Davis, and Ulysses Lee (New York: Dryden Press, 1941), 433.
86 Brown, “Negro Folk Expression,” 322.
87 Brown, “Folk Literature,” in Negro Caravan, ed. Sterling A. Brown, Arthur Paul Davis, and Ulysses Lee (New York: Dryden Press, 1941), 433.
88 Brown, “Folk Literature,” in Negro Caravan, ed. Sterling A. Brown, Arthur Paul Davis, and Ulysses Lee (New York: Dryden Press, 1941), 431.
89 Ibid., 433.
90 Brown, “Negro Folk Expression: Spirituals, Seculars, Ballads and Work Songs,” in A Son’s Return (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1996), 264.
91 Brown, “Folk Literature,” 433.
92 Richard Wright, “Blueprint for Negro Writing,” in African American Literary Theory: A Reader, ed. Winston Napier (New York: New York University Press, 2000), 47–48.
93 Ralph Ellison, “A Very Stern Discipline,” Harper’s 234 (March 1967), 80.
94 Zora Neale Hurston, “Characteristics of Negro Expression,” in African American Literary Theory: A Reader, 36.
INTRODUCTION
Recovering a Cultural Tradition
by Maria Tatar
The stories in this volume have designs on us. They take us out of our comfort zones, shaking us up in the process and sometimes even rewiring our brains. Their wizardry puts us back in touch with lived experience and reconnects us with a history that many have wanted to put behind them. Their expressive intensity enables us to explore the institution of slavery in the United States, the strategies used to survive as well as the ways of managing the complex legacy still with us today. The stories in this volume entered the bloodstream of the vernacular to become communal wisdom in an era when few had access to the instruments of writing and reading. They were meant to entertain, but also to provoke conversation and promote collective problem-solving. Their every word reminds us of the high-wattage power of stories and histories.
Who will tell your story? My story? Or, for that matter, our story? And whose story is “our” story? Those are the questions haunting our culture today, for in our technology-driven world we are quickly learning the value of storytelling as a way to keep the world vital, alive, and human. The past decades have been a time of unprecedented concern with the politics of identity formation in its many different facets. It has also been an era in which cultural memory has been passionately contested, as gender, race, and ethnicity begin to complicate the historical record. What stories do we choose to tell? Which ones have been disavowed and forgotten? Which ones do we want to revive and pass on?
The Annotated African American Folktales aims to capture stories from times past, not autobiographical accounts or biographical narratives so much as collective forms of symbolic expression. Those narratives are part of a heritage that has received scant attention from the gatekeepers and priests of high culture, for they circulated as song and speech, rarely written down and documented since they were part of a vast network of oral storytelling. The time has come to secure a place for them in our history.
Efforts to begin recording these stories began just when what we now call American literature was finding its voice. In 1850, Nathaniel Hawthorne published The Scarlet Letter, a novel that D. H. Lawrence was to describe as a perfect work of the American imagination. A year later, Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick, dedicated to Hawthorne, appeared in print and came to be enshrined as the Great American Novel. Louisa May Alcott wrote Little Women (1868), a “girl’s book” she did not enjoy writing, but that has been hailed as a vision of the “all-American girl.” Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass went into its sixth printing in 1876 and would be distributed to U.S. soldiers marching off to World War II as a symbolic expression of the American Way. In the same year, Mark Twain published The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and a decade later The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, two novels that captured boyhood in its quintessential American form. Then came Henry James with Washington Square in 1881, just a year after Joel Chandler Harris’s Uncle Remus: His Songs and His Sayings was rolling from the presses and just a few years before Charles Chesnutt’s The Conjure Woman, and Other Conjure Tales (1899).
All the works put on parade here are still in the literary canon, with the exception of the Uncle Remus stories. In the past decades, African American folklore has begun to stage a comeback in its less adulterated form, finally earning a deserved place as part of our literary heritage. In this volume, we hope to make its cultural energy more visible and more palpable than ever before.
In the archive—a place for storing print documents, videos, and digital materials—historical memory has been preserved as something seemingly stable, even if it is always also malleable and subject to misreading and reinterpretation. Side by side with what is in the archive exists a repertoire of song, story, dance, spectacle, theater, and other forms of expressive performance that are more fragile and ephemeral, even though they can be committed to memory, internali
zed, transmitted, and reanimated, sometimes even finding their way into the archive.1 This is the repertoire that UNESCO (The United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization) is working to preserve by “safeguarding, protecting and revitalizing cultural spaces or forms of cultural expression proclaimed as ‘masterpieces of the oral and intangible heritage of humanity.’ ”2
Intangible cultural property has a way of holding its own, containing within itself boundless reserves of expressive energy. But in some cases it is indeed an endangered species, particularly if it is not valued as something worth preserving. That has been the case with African American folklore, which has been regularly anthologized but rarely seen as culturally central to the American imagination and often repudiated because of its associations with slavery. Spirituals and other forms of song and music managed to survive and thrive in the era after the Civil War and were canonized by W. E. B. Du Bois in The Souls of Black Folk (1903) and by James Weldon Johnson in his Book of American Negro Poetry (1922), as well as in his Book of Negro Spirituals (1925). But the tales that circulated among African American slaves and their descendants performed what sometimes feels like a vanishing act. That was the case until writers like Charles Chesnutt and Paul Laurence Dunbar used them as the stuff of their fiction and poetry, while figures like Langston Hughes, Arna Bontemps, Sterling A. Brown, and Zora Neale Hurston collected them and put them between the covers of a book. Unlike the slave narratives which were only salvaged from the archive after great difficulty and since have become an important part of our literary heritage—those written down by Frederick Douglass, William Wells Brown, Solomon Northup, Mary Prince, and Harriet Jacobs immediately come to mind—African American folktales were all too often dismissed by many as vulgar and juvenile, a playfully eccentric mix of mischief and gibberish.
The Annotated African American Folktales Page 5
