The Annotated African American Folktales

by Henry Louis Gates

  African American folktales are not just for children. Once part of multigenerational oral traditions that structured and mirrored social rituals no longer with us today, they continue to lead a robust albeit often subterranean afterlife in adult cultural production, as writers rediscovered, repackaged, and reinvented the tropes of lore from times past. It is in the novel that folklore vibrantly lives on in its most obvious manifestations, for narrative—as Richard Wright points out—eagerly absorbs “folk tradition into its thematic structures, its plots, symbolism and rhetoric.”25 But we also often never know exactly how, where, and when folktales will land and come back to life, and they often appear in clever disguises, camouflaged, as we shall see later in this volume.

  Fiction for adults, unlike the tales anthologized in volumes for children, pulls no punches about the tales, recognizing them as repositories of ancestral wisdom, with powerful cultural energy and moral authority. Toni Morrison’s Tar Baby, for example, engages with a story that has been seen as deeply problematic in its representation of blackness, and although the story is still around, it is a tale unlikely to be read to children today. The trope of the black, sticky figure that traps through its silence and passivity has become radioactive cultural property, hiding behind a big sign reading, Don’t touch. Yet Toni Morrison, as we shall see, animates the figure, using it to reimagine ancestral lore while also making it relevant for new generations.

  African American folktales are, of course, “still here” for children, even if they are stripped of their rough earthiness. They have also survived in cultural production for adults, where they thrive as they are refashioned and brought up-to-date. But what did the stories look like when they were first told? What can we recover of an oral tradition that was kept off the historical record because it was both ephemeral and transgressive, and because those who created it were not allowed to learn to write? How can we collect stories in ways that ensure that they enter our modern consciousness with a sense of their layered history?

  Julius Lester reminds us that putting a tale between the covers of a book does not necessarily sap its vigor or spell the end of its narrative life. “Don’t forget,” he enjoins his readers. “Your telling the tale will not hurt it. It was here before you; it will be here after you.”26 In other words, print does not fix a text permanently and can instead enable it to survive and give rise to “talk” as it migrates back into the vernacular. There is no way to kill a good story.

  Annotated African American Folktales is driven by an expansive collecting impulse, favoring capaciousness rather than giving in to restraining orthodoxies. Gathering multiple variants of a tale, each capturing a different aspect of how it is told, makes it all the easier to get at the narrative core. Talking skulls, singing tortoises, headless hants, flying Africans, and witches that ride—tales with these tropes all pick up bits and pieces of their cultural surround as they move from one continent to another, from one island to another, and from one state to the next. There is no original, just variants and variation, endlessly living, breathing, throbbing variations on ur-forms and ur-themes.

  The stories collected here reach back to the nineteenth century and take us into our own time, with Zora Neale Hurston, Toni Morrison, and others acting as agents in the process of reclaiming African American folklore. Joel Chandler Harris’s Uncle Remus: His Songs and His Sayings (1880) and Disney’s Song of the South (1946), contrary to Alice Walker’s view, could not kill African American folklore. Both the anthology and the film have remained cultural reference points with an astonishing impact on white audiences, who embraced them with unexpected fervor. Even if the ghosts of those efforts to memorialize the tales dogged the efforts of later collectors, the stories in Harris’s collection gave us a snapshot of one moment in the history of the tales. For many decades, they served, for better or for worse, as authoritative sources for the lore, and even today they remain intriguing in what they conceal and reveal about sources, their audiences, and cultural context. “That’s not how I heard it!” or “That’s not the right way to tell it!” are not only legitimate responses to Harris’s stories and Disney’s film, they are also the best responses and the first step toward making the stories your own.

  Before turning to some of the foundational themes that animate the stories in this volume, it is important to look at motives. What drove collectors to recognize the value of the stories and then made them feel compelled to document their existence? Many of the first to write down tales from the African American repertoire were outsiders to the culture. Whether we look at collections assembled by missionaries who traveled to Africa in search of tales from “primitive” cultures or consider Joel Chandler Harris’s efforts to capture an authentic African American storytelling voice or turn to American and African American folklorists who published anthologies of native lore, we run up against the problem of witnesses observing and recording rather than participants enacting and inscribing their own stories in their own voices for themselves. It was not until the Hampton Institute folklorists settled down to work and not until Zora Neale Hurston published Mules and Men (1935) that insiders began to record African American tales in systematic fashion—though Hurston herself recognized that she had become something of an outsider and interloper in her own hometown of Eatonville, Florida.

  When there is no deep communal connection to stories heard, something is lost in their recording. Suddenly the letter rules, and the spirit withers under the frosty scrutiny of the collector, who often aims for authenticity, whatever that may be, above all else. There is, in any case, inevitable distortion in the move from improvised performance—with its gestures, asides, and inflections—to written script. How do you represent the oral sign that the spoken black vernacular is? How do you make an adequate transcription of the spoken and performative? Gone also is the give-and-take or call-and-response that structures the telling of a tale and makes of it a collective effort. To be sure, insiders do not necessarily get things right, but they are often attuned to the lived experience of oral tradition and more likely to focus on the spirit rather than the letter of the stories transmitted.

  The white missionaries and anthropologists who traveled into African regions and wrote down stories told by Africans were also the first to fret about the fact that they were offering an imperfect record of traditional wisdom. Yet they rarely blamed themselves. Almost all of them worried that the small armies of tellers, transcribers, and translators they had recruited were engaging in forms of self-censorship. They knew that native informants tweaked and edited, spontaneously in some cases, with calculation in others. There was no pleasing everyone who would be looking at the material. These early anthropologists, amateur and professional but nearly always virtuoso by contrast with the arrested development of their contemporaries, were willing to compromise for the sake of getting something on the record. And get it on the record they did, in ways that enable us to find astonishing antecedents for many of the tales later told and anthologized in the United States. Never mind that many of them were motivated by a desire to “read the Negro’s mind” or that the tale-tellers may have been determined to foreclose that possibility by giving a mangled version of a story. The stories are on the record and the actions—antic and heroic—of their characters reverberate in African American folklore. In the rich African American repertoire that includes tales about John and Old Master, preachers and parishioners, Brer Rabbit and Brer Fox, Anansi and his son, as well as fairy tales about stolen voices, talking eggs, singing tortoises, and cannibalistic mothers, we find footprints that lead directly back to African sources.

  Enter anthropologists and folklorists in the United States, who valued African American tales for providing a window into “the sentiments and habits of the negroes themselves.”27 Or, as one reviewer put it, in more sophisticated and obscure terms, folklore could help “penetrate the mysterious and always vanishing recesses of the ethnological labyrinth.”28 The “curiosities” of African American folklore seemed wor
th recording, analyzing, and studying largely because it was such a challenge to try to make any sense of them at all. Told in language that was not considered Standard English, these tales seemed more like fractured oddities than purveyors of folk wisdom. What few white collectors realized at the time was that the tales were not only encoded and encrypted, but also deliberately told in the language spoken by the tellers and consumers of the tales, a dialect that functioned as a barrier to outsiders. And, in a self-consciously stylized form, a poetic diction, or a well-studied and well-understood rhetorical structure, as it were, folktales were a performance space within the black community. Still, many collectors, some of whom were professional folklorists, could not miss the fact that the voice of Brer Rabbit might be channeling mythical wisdom for the here and now or that John and Old Master might be reenacting rivalries that reached back to another time and place and were remade to become socially relevant.

  What, then, enabled the stories to survive? In many cases, there was a seemingly fatal asymmetry between what collectors were hoping to gather (curiosities) and what storytellers aimed to communicate (wisdom and strategies for survival). How could an African American narrator slip the trap and tell a story straight up to a white outsider without betraying his own community? Charles Chesnutt may have found one answer when he published a story like “The Goophered Grapevine” in a collection called The Conjure Woman (1899). In it, as noted earlier, a white man retells a tale from an African American informant (Chesnutt was critiquing the narrative situation in Joel Chandler Harris’s work) and thereby discovers the power of stories to challenge, move, and persuade. But for the full answer to the question of how to tell stories with consummate duplicitous finesse, we need to return to Africa.

  TRICKSTERS AND PARADOX

  In his novel American Gods, Neil Gaiman cited a specialist in African American folklore: “One question that has always intrigued me is what happens to demonic beings when immigrants move from their homelands? Irish-Americans remember the fairies, Norwegian-Americans the nisser, Greek-Americans the vrykólakas, but only in relation to events remembered in the Old Country.”29 Gaiman’s answer to that question was long and complicated (taking up nearly six hundred pages), but it boiled down to the fact that mythical creatures migrate along with the people who have faith in them, although they may manifest themselves in new forms and guises.

  The Africans who came to the New World were, of course, not immigrants but enslaved peoples. But in their case too we discover that deities—Esu Elegbara of Yoruba cultures in West Africa, for example—traveled with them, reemerging in the United States, Cuba, and other places where the slave trade flourished. There, like the African Anansi who transformed himself into the Jamaican Aunt Nancy, Esu Elegbara became known by new names, as Exú in Brazil, Echu in Cuba, Papa Legba in Haiti, or Papa La Bas in the Southern United States. As the muse of storytelling, signifying, and interpretation, he was also a messenger of the gods, a figure who stood at the crossroads and who was affiliated with generation and fecundity in both spiritual and biological senses.

  Stories migrated right along with the gods into the New World. And those stories were structured by a set of discursive practices associated with Esu Elegbara, the trickster god who mediates between good and evil, truth and lies, revelation and disguise, surfaces and essences, along with all the other contradictions that arise from human social activities. In his magisterial study of the trickster figure, the cultural critic Lewis Hyde noted that Legba, the West African trickster god, works “by means of lies that are really the truth, deceptions that are in fact revelations.”30 Long before the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche preached the gospel of indeterminacy in German-speaking lands at the turn of the nineteenth century and undermined stable meanings by emphasizing the primacy of perspective, African mythologies had enshrined those very ideas as guiding truths.

  Yoruba mythology encoded the concept of indeterminacy in a foundational cultural story commonly known as “The Two Friends.” That story, included in this volume, enacts the principle, showing how perspective changes everything when it comes to the perception and interpretation of reality. In the version recorded by Ayodele Ogundipe in his study of Esu, the Yoruba god wears a hat that is black on one side, white on the other. The friendship of the two men in the title, both farmers, is put to the test by Esu, whose cap becomes a source of dissension, with one of the farmers insisting that it is white, the other adamant in his view that it is black. Each is right, yet also wrong, and both fail to embrace differences in perspective. Insisting on one single meaning or truth leads to a destructive undermining of the fragile institutions that we have constructed to keep us human.31

  West African myths, more powerfully than the lore of other regions in Africa, repeatedly foreground contradiction, paradox, and indeterminacy, to the point of telling stories that at times seem to turn on philosophical principles as much as on figures with real-life struggles and conflicts. Abstractions become the actors in narratives, as in the extraordinary African tale about a man who hates contradictions and discovers the hazards of failing to accept them. Known by the name of Hate-to-Be-Contradicted, he embodies a principle rather than a person, revealing more about mental processes and how our brains work than about human interactions and their consequences.

  The tales told in slave cabins were in many instances deceptively simple, seeming to lack the sophistication of their African antecedents. But they are also—and here we return to their African roots—simply deceptive. Deeply enmeshed with African storytelling traditions that privileged double-talk, duplicity, cunning, deception, lies, and artful dodging, African American folktales could also masquerade as harmless confections that were nothing but idle entertainments designed to while away time. On the surface, these stories have what a character in Milan Kundera’s The Unbearable Lightness of Being calls “an intelligible lie.”32 Beneath lurks “something different, something mysterious or abstract,” what could be called an unintelligible truth. The genius of storytelling lies in its double nature as a riveting contrivance revealing as it conceals, feeding our curiosity as it arouses it, and talking to us in order to get us thinking.

  TALK AND SILENCE

  Two types of African tales are foundational in modeling what is at stake in African American storytelling practices, and each reveals how narrative shuttles between conversation, talk, revelation, and disclosure on the one hand, and silence, reticence, secrecy, and concealment on the other. To illustrate how African American lore is fueled by the self-reflexive strategies of African tales, let us turn for a moment to a story known as “The Talking Skull” and “The Talking Skull Refuses to Talk.” We can trace that tale back to multiple sources in Nigeria, Angola, Ghana, and Tanzania, and it is also widely disseminated in the United States, with versions recorded in Michigan, Pennsylvania, Arkansas, Mississippi, and other states. Variants of the story, along with tales about a singing tortoise, can be found in this volume, and they document how the compact narrative has remained a vital, urgently present source of wisdom.

  In a story that is nothing but “talk,” a skull reveals the source of its misfortune: “talking got me here.” The fellow who encounters it cannot keep his own mouth shut, and he soon joins the loquacious skull in the dust. By boasting about what he has witnessed, he is branded a liar (the skull refuses to speak to others) and executed. Talk is demonized as frivolous, boastful, and ultimately self-defeating in a medium that consists of nothing but that. In this master narrative of African and African American folklore, we have a densely packed golden nugget of wisdom that remains as relevant in larger communities it was in slave cabins by engaging with questions of speech and silence, deception and straight talk, expression and repression, survival and mortality.

  Talking skulls, along with other paradoxical wonders and contradictory concepts, have kept stories alive by inviting us to puzzle out their terms. They tease us, leaving us with a breathless desire to engage in conversation to solve the vexing inter
pretive problems at their core. Another set of African stories, known as dilemma tales, operates at a more explicit level, posing moral questions and challenging listeners to come up with answers. In one such example, an abusive father boots his son out of the house. A wealthy man adopts the boy and treats him like a beloved son while he raises him. One day, the boy is at a crossroads, given a sword, and told he must slay either his biological father or his adoptive father. Which one should he choose? These tales may not constitute part of the African American folkloric canon, but their commitment to using story as a platform for more talk and more thought informs much of what appears in the New World, especially because so few stories close with the concept of “happily ever after.”

  Dilemma tales invite listeners to chime in, turning them into chatty collaborators, eager to participate in both the telling of the tale and its interpretation. Told in a communal setting, where values are contested and negotiated (with the understanding that all values are recognized as contingent, partial, and provisional), the stories validate a de-centering of authority and endorse a kind of collective bargaining, even if we are in the realm of the hypothetical and counterfactual.

  Dilemma tales, delicate and difficult, resemble haiku forms in their use of narrative shorthand to sketch the main features of their plots. They withhold vital information about interiority—the mix of emotions inside the heads of characters. We know very little about what goes on in the minds of the trio of characters in the dilemma tale that ends with a boy, a sword, and two fathers. Because the characters are standard issue (biological father, adoptive parent, and boy) with virtually no psychological depth (we come to know them only through their actions), we are all the more motivated to fill in the gaps and create textured richness in the story at hand. Folklore gets us talking, thinking, and forming opinions. And, as importantly, it reminds us, in another set of tales, that at times it is also shrewd to hold your tongue.