The Annotated African American Folktales

by Henry Louis Gates

  Over time, however, our culture has lost touch with many of these improvisations and inventions: “We don’t live in places where we can hear . . . stories anymore; parents don’t sit around and tell their children those classical, mythological archetypal stories that we heard years ago. But new information has got to get out, and there are several ways to do it,” Toni Morrison once remarked.12 Her strategy was to embed black folklore in the postmodern black novel. Others have made the stories new in a range of creative ways. Or they have laid the groundwork for what we attempt in this volume: collecting, contextualizing, and organizing what remains of stories from times past.

  Few have captured more vividly the indestructible energy and resilience of story than Zora Neale Hurston, who documented folklore in action in her 1935 Mules and Men, a volume that doubles as autobiography and ethnography. She understood that, notwithstanding the multiple traumas of the Middle Passage and plantation life, it was impossible to restrain the animating energy of telling tales. In a counternarrative to what Richard Wright, author of Native Son and Black Boy, reports about the silencing of voices and the damaging losses suffered by slaves, she invokes a tale of survival, one that shows how words, stories, and beliefs made it across the Atlantic and flourished on distant shores. Here is how Hurston works magic with words, reviving stories from times past and bringing to life cultural heroes from faraway lands. High John de Conquer, the mythical trickster and strongman hero of African American lore, was not, as she tells us, a “natural man” in the beginning:

  First off, he was a whisper, a will to hope, a wish to find something worthy of laughter and song. Then the whisper put on flesh. His footsteps sounded across the world in a low but musical rhythm as if the world he walked on was a singing drum. The black folks had an irresistible impulse to laugh. High John de Conquer was a man in full, and had come to live and work on the plantations, and all the slave folks knew him in the flesh.13

  In this extraordinary scene of animation and embodiment, we are given a cascading sequence of words and phrases that become flesh, a chain of attributes that revive and vivify. High John de Conquer begins as a whisper, transmutes into a wish, and comes alive. His footsteps are attuned to the frequencies of whispers and hopes, amplifying them and turning them into audible laughter and music. The world becomes a “singing drum,” sounding in measured, communicative cadences.14

  In one creative flash, Hurston, who made it her mission to validate and ennoble the African American vernacular, mobilizes High John de Conquer of African American lore to open the possibility for utopian aspirations that defy all the social odds. At a time of scarcity and lack, when everything seems doomed to disappoint, suddenly there is a sign that even those flimsiest of things, whispers and dreams, are more than fugitive and futile acts of imagination. They assert brute presence and material solidity, refusing to remain invisible. This is not mere magical thinking; it is words working miracles.

  Hurston reveals how the make-believe of folktale, myth, and legend operates in the making of beliefs. Illusion can become so compelling that it rivals material reality, and suddenly the word becomes flesh and phantoms of the mind have substance. It is here that we discover the truth of the maxim that the consolations of imagination are not imaginary consolations. In powerful stories like “And the People Could Fly” (included in this anthology), the enabling force of faith becomes evident. The tale of High John de Conquer gives us the flip side to that story, offering a parable of materialization and empowerment rather than a transcendent vanishing act. But in both stories, passion and desire are so forceful and energetic as to become real.

  The transformative energy of bravura moments like the materialization of High John de Conquer is what makes folktales stick and what kept them—and keeps them—from disappearing, even in a culture of material deprivation and physical coercion. Recall the wizardry of Mozart’s music in a scene from The Shawshank Redemption, a film released in 1994, when the character played by Tim Robbins enraptures the men serving time at Shawshank with song. In a voice-over that comes after the broadcast of a duet from Mozart’s opera Nozze di Figaro, Morgan Freeman reveals the liberating power, not only of sonic beauty but also of the words used to describe its effects: “It was like some beautiful bird flapped into our drab little cage,” Freeman intones (adverting elliptically to Paul Laurence Dunbar’s verse about why the caged bird sings), “and made those walls dissolve away, and for the briefest of moments, every last man in Shawshank felt free.” Hurston’s tale about willing a hero to life reveals the same power of words to summon liberating reserves of strength.

  The stories in Annotated African American Folktales will offer evidence of High John de Conquer’s resurrection in the New World. The volume will begin, as noted, with folklore from African discursive traditions to show how a rich repertoire of stories became powerful source material for a sprawling tangle of tales told by African Americans, which constitute the core of this volume. But rather than rehearsing academic debates about the fate of African cultures in the diaspora, it will lay out the evidence for connections and bonds pointing to a culture that is both of a piece with and distinct from other global traditions. Hurston’s survivalist model surely trumps Wright’s narrative of cultural obliteration. By embracing it, we can begin to explore how stories migrated and how poetic geniuses made new versions of them in creative bursts that defied efforts to silence and enslave. By borrowing bits and pieces of the old and merging and melding traditions, storytellers in the New World displayed an unparalleled determination to honor ancestral knowledge by preserving the cultural memory encapsulated in stories from times past.

  Who wrote these stories down on paper? Not the tellers, who, of course, often lacked access to pen, ink, and paper, but anthropologists, folklorists, and others whose curiosity was piqued by cultural difference and by the desire to create a historical record. To be sure, much was lost in the transition from a performance that emerged organically within a ritualized, communal setting to a formal recitation often aimed to please a scribe putting words down on a page and unconsciously also putting new words into the mouths of the tellers. But all was not lost, much was preserved, and the stories are still here, printed as columns in local newspapers and as features in magazines, embedded in novels and memoirs, collected in anthologies for young and old, invoked in conversations and reminiscences, and still told today. There have been, in short, multiple accomplices in this project of excavating, reclaiming, and anthologizing.

  THE LITERATURE OF THE FRONTIER AND THE POETRY OF THE CABINS

  Anyone researching ballads about Stagolee, John Henry, Shine and the Titanic, the Signifying Monkey, or Frankie and Johnny will eventually encounter Mark Twain’s America by the eminent twentieth-century critic Bernard DeVoto. DeVoto emphasizes how Americans are “story-tellers,” and he describes and animates the “frontier leisure and frontier realities” that shaped American literature. He evokes with nostalgic joy campfires on the shores of rivers, on the plains, in forests, and on mountains, along with narratives about folk heroes ranging from Mike Fink and Kit Carson to Davy Crockett and “Honest Abe.” In passing he mentions Annie Christmas, along with Jim Henry [sic] and Frankie and Johnny. He declares these stories to be “the frontier examining itself, recording itself, and entertaining itself.” “It is,” he observes in a final rhetorical flourish, “a native literature of America.”15

  Frontier leisure? The frontier entertaining itself? How could DeVoto get things so wrong when it came to ballads and folklore? Did he seriously believe that the ballad about John Henry’s tragic contest with a machine was born during a rollicking good time telling stories around blazing campfires? Was he serious when he invoked in a completely untroubled fashion the “rich life of America, and of the common man who composed it”? Of course, DeVoto had a very different tradition in mind, one that flourished in what had already become American literature in its official form. He may have nodded politely in the direction of the legendary Annie Christmas
, but he never paid any serious attention to her or to the lives of her folkloric cousins. Nor did it occur to him in the early 1930s to include the slave cabin or the campfires around those cabins in his inventory of storytelling sites. We have “campfires on the shores of lakes and rivers,” “taverns, stores, groggeries, and meetinghouses,” along with “decks of rafts, scows, flatboats, broadhorns, and steamboats,” but no mention of stories told in cultural spaces where black genius manifested itself in the vernacular. For DeVoto, the frontier, an emblem of bold, spirited exploratory energy, was a symbol of the “rugged individualism” prized by American writers. The spirit of storytelling that was to animate American literature for him was overwhelmingly white and male: “wherever frontiersmen met for conversation, this literature flourished.”

  “I love to sail forbidden seas, and land on barbarous coasts,” Ishmael tells us in Herman Melville’s epic Moby-Dick (1851), and with those words he captured the driving desires of heroes who came to be enshrined in the pantheon of American literature.16 That longing was already and nowhere more powerfully alive than in the slave cabin, with its songs and stories about breaking loose to freedom. Right alongside the oral tradition described by DeVoto—all those frontier narratives that served as forerunners to the “classics”—was another storytelling culture that had clearly preceded it, one rarely written down because it was kept alive largely by voices. Oppositional and subversive rather than celebrated and enshrined, these were the stories invented by African Americans.

  Others have pondered what seems like willful, some might argue institutionalized, blindness to traditions that are visibly present for anyone who takes the time to see them. Houston A. Baker Jr.’s Long Black Song, a collection of essays on “Black American Literature and Culture,” begins with autobiographical reflections about growing up with books about sports, pioneers, and literary classics with “American” heroes. There came a moment in Baker’s postgraduate education when he realized that there were two perspectives on America: one in which the country was seen as a “domain of boundless frontier,” the other as one of “endless slavery.” Out of the experience of slavery there emerged what he described as a distinctive body of folk expression: “oral, collectivistic, and repudiative—each of these aspects helps to distinguish black American culture from white American culture.”17

  Writing in the 1960s, at a time of desegregation and racial integration in the United States, Richard Dorson pointed out, in his Negro Folktales in Michigan, that black folklore formed a “distinctive repertoire,” one that was entirely separate from the narratives of “West Africa, the West Indies, Europe, the British Isles, and white America.”18 He believed that folklore from all of these regions had mixed and mingled with the lived experience of African Americans to produce a unique, independent folk tradition. But in many ways, these stories are the indigenous lore of the United States, white and black. In fact, many of the nineteenth-century collections were put together by white men who had heard the stories from black people as children. Unlike the tales of the Brothers Grimm and Charles Perrault, which were imported almost word-for-word from abroad, stories about Brer Rabbit, John Henry, John and Old Master sprang up from native soil. But because their content was associated with slavery and because their language was marked as lacking signs of formal education, they were often publicly disavowed by middle-class, educated blacks and whites alike, even when they constituted a significant part of the nation’s collective cultural heritage. These stories were seen, on the one hand, as the linguistic remnants of slavery and, on the other, as signs of ignorance. Those who aspired to join mainstream, middle-class America and who sought social acceptance by embracing the politics of respectability were intent on distancing themselves from what they saw as lowbrow forms of entertainment.

  Linked with slavery and conditions that evoke a sense of shame rather than pride, African American folklore was additionally constrained by class pressures, with a middle class firmly opposed to going public. There were also strategic reasons for remaining protective of cultural property that had bored deep into the souls of the enslaved while providing wisdom, sustenance, and diversion over decades of economic subordination. Why let these stories seep out into the public domain, where they could become a fund of knowledge about the “Negro mind” (as white collectors often avowed was the case) or, worse yet, a target of derision for those who failed to recognize that black vernacular was a self-conscious invention, crafted and nurtured over time?

  As Zora Neale Hurston emphasized, “everything that [the Negro] touches is re-interpreted for his own use.” That includes language. But as Charles Joyner points out, black speech was stigmatized and associated with those who worked in the fields, “in contrast to the high prestige of ‘proper’ English.” “In retrospect,” he adds, “one should be more impressed with the success of the slaves, a people of diverse linguistic backgrounds and limited opportunities, in creating a creole language and culture than appalled at their ‘failure’ to adapt it to the language and culture of their masters.”19

  In the introduction to a collection of her short stories, Paule Marshall emphasizes the proprietary and empowering dimensions of storytelling. She reminisces about growing up surrounded by “poets in the kitchen,” women who fought back against “invisibility” and “powerlessness” with the spoken word, “the only weapon at their command.” “Those late afternoon conversations,” she writes, “. . . were a way for them to feel they exercised some measure of control over their lives and the events that shaped them. ‘Soully-gal, talk yuh talk!’ they were always exhorting each other. ‘In this man world you got to take yuh mouth and make a gun!’ They were in control, if only verbally and if only for the two hours or so that they remained in our house.”20 This volume captures the voices of poets in the kitchen and in the fields, as well as the storytellers in cabins and around campfires.

  “STILL HERE”: CAPTURING FOLKTALES AND PUTTING THEM IN A BOOK

  Identifying African cultural traditions and their residues in the diaspora is a complicated enterprise. These stories were created and narrated in the only places where it was possible for a black person to speak freely, to have a voice: in the center of a black discursive and culturally private universe, where talking, telling, reporting, and having the freedom to create unfolded within the Veil, as W. E. B. Du Bois so perceptively put it. In his sociobiological analysis of the human condition, E. O. Wilson tells us that the activity of building campfires, constructing nests, and telling stories enabled the conquest of the planet.21 Slave owners may have intuitively understood that talk was not in their interests, for it could promote world-building, communal forms of knowledge, and collective wisdom that could be liberating in every sense of the term. At the same time, they also understood the need for licensed forms of social release, for slavery could endure as an institution only with those outlets. Some encouraged group rituals ranging from religious services with song and dance to cultural celebrations on holidays. Even more important were the spaces that slaves carved out in the interstices of enslavement. How else could they have survived? The “urge to culture” is boundless, irresistible, and, short of death, invincible. Contrary to Hollywood’s depictions of slavery as a totalizing institution with power consolidated in the hands of sadistic masters and overseers, the ultimate goal was to “grow” slaves rather than to massacre them, to control them and to kill them only when it was deemed necessary. A labor force of 388,000 slaves shipped to the United States before 1808 grew to become almost four million slaves by 1860. Disciplinary regimes require occasional outlets, even if the social, spiritual, and intellectual capital acquired always brings with it the potential for insurrectionary and emancipatory action. As the philosopher Ernst Bloch put it, once people start telling stories, they dream about the utopian promise of “something better,” or a “more colorful and easier somewhere else.”22

  It’s “still here,” Langston Hughes remarked of the cultural heritage he treasured and put between th
e covers of The Book of Negro Folklore. Perhaps unwittingly, perhaps deliberately, he pointed to how African American folktales are both here and not here, visible yet also hidden from sight. On the one hand, the stories have defied the odds and survived. But “still here” can also imply that silence has descended on the repertoire and that the tales have been imprisoned in something resembling what Walt Disney Studios notionally refers to as the vault. The turbulent cultural energy of the tales may have settled into a motionless calm that has rendered them tame, harmless, and inert.

  African American folklore is indeed still here, although not in ways that are immediately self-evident. To be sure, the tales, at the most obvious level, have been repackaged for children, turning them into “harmless” bedtime reading in beautifully produced volumes by Julius Lester, Virginia Hamilton, and others. When Julius Lester, author of Look Out, Whitey! Black Power’s Gon’ Get Your Mama (1968), decided to retell the tales of Uncle Remus, he published them under the imprint of Dial Books for Young Readers. He hoped to make the tales accessible so that they could be read out loud “in the living rooms of condominiums as well as on front porches in the South.” And, in the introduction to the volume, with an unlikely nod in the direction of the politics of respectability from a onetime black nationalist, he reports that he set out to retell the stories with the “same affectionate sense of play and fun as the original, but without evoking associations with slavery.”23 Was this tongue in cheek? Julius Lester surely knew better than anyone else that it is impossible to wipe clean the slate of history and to pretend that the tales had nothing at all to do with the conditions from which they evolved.

  Virginia Hamilton had a less sentimental orientation in her large-format, illustrated volume The People Could Fly: American Black Folktales. She emphasized that the tales emerged from an “oppressed people” and that they were a “creative” outlet for expressing fears and hopes. “They can be enjoyed by young and old alike,” she declared.24 Yet a quick look at the back cover reveals that the volume has a young audience in mind, or was, at the least, marketed and advertised to them. It was designated as a Notable Children’s Book by the American Library Association and as a Notable Children’s Trade Book in the Field of Social Studies. And, in addition, the School Library Journal and The Bulletin of the Center for Children’s Books praised the book in reviews.