Folk narratives, told in the fields and in cabins, are in many ways a significant part of an American vernacular tradition that preserved collective mother wit and wisdom in the form of story. Sometimes they were heard in snatches of conversation or in other bits and pieces of talk, and sometimes they were performed formally as story—for young and old, rich and poor, men and women, black and white, slaves and masters. They once were what fairy tales like “Cinderella” have become for us today, narratives alive with social energy constantly turning into new versions of themselves as they are repurposed for different audiences. Stunningly dramatic and melodramatic, they stage operas of emotional intensity with “What if?” premises so powerful that we suddenly find ourselves thinking more and thinking harder, not just about a story but also about its terms and how they apply to our own lives. As a quick example, take the tar-baby story, a deceptively simple tale about a mute black figure confronting a thief. As we shall see, it can be read as antic drama on one level, but also as a powerful vehicle for modeling passive resistance and survival skills.
Annotated African American Folktales takes up the challenge of restoring our cultural memory of the African American vernacular. It raids whatever managed to make it into the archive to reconstruct a repertoire that remains alive today and can also still be found in the language rituals of playing the dozens and signifying, the slang of the streets, in the rhythms of rap and hip hop, and in places ranging from barber shops to beauty parlors, Saturday night juke joints to Sunday morning church services, family dinner tables to family reunions, sporting events, restaurants, and family dens or front porches. Lest we forget, many of these stories were preserved precisely because they had once been told, not just in places of leisure, but also at the workplace, at sites of hard labor and dull tasks, where they not only fostered the ability to carry out chores but also to imagine ways out and endure.
ORDERING THE TALES IN THE AFRICAN AMERICAN UNIVERSE
This volume begins with the African heritage, with stories about Anansi the Spider, patron of storytelling, wisdom, and knowledge—a trickster figure whose philosophy acknowledges duplicity and contradiction as the engines of human intelligence. A selection of African dilemma tales reminds us that folklore operates with shock in order to help us process the unthinkable, provoke debate, and negotiate shared values even in dissent. If dilemma tales engage our mental faculties with cultural contradictions framed as intellectual conundrums (who should marry the beauty, the one who revived her, healed her, or rescued her from a monster?), fairy tales present us with the great counterfactuals. Stimulating the imagination with wonders, they remind us of the perils and possibilities inherent in the human condition. The African fairy tales included here also reveal that the familiar world of European folklore has never been the only source of plots and tropes circulating in tales told in the United States today. Finally, this first section concludes with some sample tales from oral storytelling traditions in African cultures.
From the African prelude, Annotated African American Tales moves to its main act, with narratives that emerged among storytelling communities in the New World, improvisations inspired by ritual and myth, meant for the moment and designed to be passed on by word of mouth. Imagine a world without print culture and electronic media, a time when the only conduit for passing on wisdom and knowledge was the spoken word. And then imagine an era—and it is not easy to time-travel back to the United States of the antebellum period, the era before the beginning of the Civil War in 1861—when it took courage for African Americans to speak in public, to tell, to disclose, and to broadcast, if they had the opportunity to say anything at all, especially outside the precincts of the American abolitionist movement. What remains of those narrative circuits? The surviving fragments cannot possibly retain the magic and audacity of the stories in their original form. And yet the glittering remnants also enable us to assemble repertoires, to catch glimpses of performances, and to make some sense of what mattered in another era.
The tales that comprise the first five sections of African American tales turn on language and the transformative power of words—as incantation, spell, charm, or curse. Talk and treachery, silence and strength, seductions good and evil: these are the themes that sound full chords in tales about flying Africans, witches who ride, talking skulls, singing tortoises, tar babies, and devious snakes. The legacy of Legba, the divine linguist, becomes supremely evident in these narratives, tales committed to revealing how words can be our means of bonding and our salvation yet also operate as agents of deception and duplicity. Anansi continues to weave his delicate webs silently in the corners of these narratives, reminding us that our appetites and cravings build the world but can also undermine its fragile beauty.
The next sections of Annotated African American Folktales turn to Joel Chandler Harris and Zora Neale Hurston, two collectors who could not have been more different in their approaches. Harris, a white Southerner, published Uncle Remus: His Songs and His Sayings in 1880, and the enormous commercial success of the volume affirms Charles Chesnutt’s intuition that Northern whites had an endless fascination with Southern black folklore. “Men are always ready to extend their sympathy to those at a distance, than to the suffering ones in their midst.”3 What Chesnutt could not have anticipated but quickly understood as he tracked the enthusiastic response to Harris’s work was the appeal to both the North and the South of the Uncle Remus tales, with their deeply confusing universe that invites us in with displays of solidarity (Brer this and Brer that), warmth, and friendship and then kicks us in the head with a show of unbridled appetites, false hospitality, and murderous hostility.
Between Harris and Hurston, there are a host of transitional figures, writers who traffic in local lore and superstition, reacting to Harris’s Uncle Remus figure and critiquing him by constructing characters with less stereotypical force and greater psychological depth. There are Charles Chesnutt’s complex literary refashionings of folkloric themes and Paul Laurence Dunbar’s poetic transformations of African American lore and vernacular language through his “dialect” poetic diction. And there is James Weldon Johnson’s canonical “The Creation,” which gives us a riff on its antecedents, black creation stories about “how the Negro came to be how he is.” There are the poignant and powerful glimpses of talk among African Americans in the work of E. C. L. Adams’s Tales of the Congaree. But it is in the work of Zora Neale Hurston that we find a restorative rather than a critical turn, with an anthropological mind applying ethnographic knowledge to storytelling sites at sawmills, juke joints, train stations, and porches in order to give us tales and social context.
At times, the rage for order that takes hold of anthologizers vanishes in the face of the entangled histories and kaleidoscopic variations in stories from times past. The final sections of Annotated African American Folktales take us into the deep cultural contradictions of slavery, with stories about John and Old Master, tales about obedience and feigned compliance as well as about role reversal and revenge. The pourquoi tales that follow are particularly poignant in interrogating the conditions of slavery and how things came to be the way they were. It is here, as in the John and Old Master tales, that humor surfaces as coping mechanism, as weapon, and as a way of shielding against despair.4 “Laughing to keep from crying,” as we hear in the blues. Behind most jokes lurks tragedy, temporary or protracted, and the conditions of slavery offered far too many opportunities for making light of impossible situations or indulging in dark humor.
We have included ballads about heroes and outlaws in large part because they are revealing about collective efforts to enshrine strategies for surviving and enduring as well as transcending and living, in ways both tragic and comic. Sometimes that meant living outside the limitations of slavery and its aftermath, and indeed, sometimes outside the laws of man and the laws of nature in the realm of a mythic discourse. The heroic stories told in the ballads chart forms of rebellion and lawlessness that contrast sharply with what we fin
d in preacher stories, tales about good, law-abiding men of God who are also conmen, masters in the art of using verbal skills to their advantage. Ballads about outlaws and tales about preachers capture opposite poles of the storytelling spectrum, from the mythical and mysterious to the banal and ordinary.
Finally, as a reminder of the big folkloric and mythical picture—the ocean of the stream of stories—we have included folkloric analogs from Caribbean and Latin American cultures as well as fairy tales that resonate with the European canon yet are also inflected in ways that make them culturally distinctive, African American to the core.
In 1957, long after the publication of his classic autobiographical novel Black Boy, Richard Wright declared his skepticism about anthologies: “As we all know, anthologists are legion today; to make an anthology requires simply this: Get a big pile of books on a given subject together, a big pot of glue, and a pair of sharp scissors and start clipping and pasting.”5 Cutting and pasting are no longer as laborious a task as in Wright’s day, and it could be argued that all you need now is a big pile of books and a scanner. Never mind the challenges of identifying the books, selecting the stories, and creating an organizational logic that navigates and makes sense of the myriad historical, cultural, and social forces at work in what was once a living tradition that carried the shifting weights of entertainment and instruction.
Although writers like Charles Chesnutt, Paul Laurence Dunbar, Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, Sterling A. Brown, and Arna Bontemps all took a lively interest in African American folklore, there has never been an African American equivalent to the German Brothers Grimm, who popularized stories like “Hansel and Gretel” and “Snow White,” or to the Frenchman Charles Perrault, who gave us our “Sleeping Beauty” and “Cinderella.” The challenges of collecting the tales in the Americas are far greater than what the Grimms and Perrault faced. Since the stories spread out from African roots to mix and mingle with other tales and transform themselves into something new in many different regions, efforts to canonize or to create a lineup of authoritative texts can quickly turn reductive, impoverishing rather than enriching the repertoire.
John Updike once remarked that fiction is “very greedy,” always demanding more of a writer. The same holds true for every formerly blank page of this book, with its “appetite” for “ever more information, ever more data.”6 And so the challenges of completing a volume like this one are much the same as the ones of beginning it. There is always room for more, but it is our hope that others will build on the foundations laid out here. Annotated African American Folktales represents an effort to expand the American literary canon and to let the stories settle in where they belong, as a part of our official cultural heritage.
READING THE AFRICAN AMERICAN REPERTOIRE
Stories are often meant to provide comfort through the consolations of imagination, but the tales in this volume are also confrontational, meant to unsettle and disturb. Readers will take different approaches when they pick up this anthology. Some may decide to select serendipitously, trying out different stories and ignoring the weight of the introductory material and apparatus. They may decide to march through the volume, studying certain types of tales systematically and following the trails indicated in further readings listed. Or they may create their own order by beginning with Joel Chandler Harris’s Uncle Remus stories and moving on from there. The introductory comments and running notes elaborate, explain, and provide context, but some readers will prefer to immerse themselves in the wonderful weirdness of each story, unlocking mysteries by reading carefully and using their own knowledge, intuition, and instincts to discover what lies between the lines.
Great stories have a magnetic appeal that transcends generational differences, and Annotated African American Folktales, like its counterparts in national folklore collections, is meant for young and old. Its audience is also a “double audience,” in the sense defined by James Weldon Johnson, who drew on W. E. B. Du Bois’s concept of “double consciousness” (“this sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others”) to describe the challenges faced by black writers. “The Afriamerican author faces . . . the problem of the double audience,” he wrote. “It is a divided audience, an audience made up of two elements with differing and often opposite and antagonistic points of view. His audience is always both white America and black America.”7 Today, that bifurcation can seem at times just as dramatic. Yet we also live in a multiracial nation whose younger generations have grown up, thanks to Soul Train and hip hop, impressively fluent in African American expressive culture. Even literary scholars, after the culture wars of the 1990s, have begun to understand that what they once dismissed as eccentric inventions are narratives symbolically central in the formation of American social and cultural identity.
No one understood more clearly than Ralph Ellison, whose 1952 novel Invisible Man jolted the imagination of a nation, just how easy it is to ignore what is right before our eyes. Ellison’s invisible man also has an invisible cultural heritage and social history. When teaching a course at New York University on the Harlem Renaissance, Ellison puzzled many of his students by including The Great Gatsby. “I find it significant,” he noted, “that the character who saw who was driving the ‘death car’ was a Negro; and yet, some students resist when I tie that in with Tom Buchanan’s concern over the rise of the colored races, the scene in which blacks are being driven by a white chauffeur, and the characterization of the Jewish gangster. They miss the broader context of the novel that is revealed in the understated themes of race, class, and social mobility.”8 The reading practices in much of the academy (Howard University was, among a few other institutions, an incandescent exception) rendered African American characters invisible, even when they were present in canonical works of what we call American Literature. But, more important, for a time American literary studies removed the vernacular from the mainstream, pretending that it did not exist, embracing folktales that are German, French, Russian, Italian, or Chinese, anything but African American.
Languishing for decades on what seemed to be the margins, African American folklore has nonetheless preserved a central, if rarely officially prominent, position in the culture of the Americas. Unlike European immigrants who set down roots in the United States, African slaves lacked the kind of freedom of movement and social mobility that enabled a certain kind of reinvention. However, in a deeply ironic form of compensation they possessed a genius for improvisational freedom and energy, the liberty to express themselves using their own criteria without worrying about standards alien to their own internal aesthetic rules and practices. Ellison tells us that slaves had the chance to be “culturally daring and innovative because the strictures of ‘good taste’ and ‘thou shalt-nots’ of tradition were not imposed on them.”9 (To be sure, some of those strictures came to be self-imposed, when middle-class black men and women embraced what the historian Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham has called the politics of respectability.) It is no accident that Annotated African American Tales begins with Anansi, the African trickster, master of improvisation, a spider who plots and weaves in scandalous ways, enacting stories that build the human world and make the world human, with all its paradoxes, contradictions, and ambiguities. This book also presents the narrative world of his many accomplices, and it invites readers to join the ranks of his many co-conspirators.
The Canadian novelist Margaret Atwood once observed that all writers must go from now to once upon a time, that is, they must dig deep into the past and cut through layers of cultural memory to reach some kind of mother lode, a place that she describes as “where the stories are kept.”10 It is not just writers who are duty bound to undertake the journey to that site. “All must commit acts of larceny, or else of reclamation, depending on how you look at it. The dead may guard the treasure, but it’s useless treasure unless it can be brought back into the land of the living and allowed to enter time once more—which means to enter the realm of the audience, the realm o
f readers, the realm of change.” It is our hope that this volume may make the journey somewhat less arduous and turn travel into part of the pleasure of discovering a treasure that, once unearthed and brought to light, can not only sustain us but also arouse curiosity rather than awaken fear, promote change rather than foster complacency, and hold out the golden promise of hope.
THE CONTESTED ORIGINS OF AFRICAN AMERICAN FOLKLORE
How do you make something from nothing? Or from something that appears to be nothing? African American slaves may not have owned property, but no one could prevent them from storing, remembering, recounting, and, over time, creating and re-creating their own cultural property in the form of songs, stories, and belief systems. They used narratives and other forms of expressive culture not just to strategize and survive, but also to create symbolic and imaginative spaces to which they could escape, almost like an alternate universe, where they could live and breathe. “The entire sacred world of the black slaves,” American historian Lawrence Levine writes, “created the necessary space between the slaves and their owners and were the means of preventing legal slavery from becoming spiritual slavery.”11 These were anything but the much-heralded public spaces of freedom that are the signature of democratic societies. Instead, they were private arenas, imaginary playgrounds, secular as well as sacred, in the fields, by the fire, and in cabins. Song and story emerged, often in the form of narratives encoded with symbolic meaning—things made up for the purpose of diverting and entertaining, and also for focusing and concentrating propulsive energies that could not be contained.
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