The Annotated African American Folktales

by Henry Louis Gates

  By oversimplifying and reducing complex situations to their most basic terms and then amplifying them through melodramatic exaggeration, folklore intensifies the conversational stakes, giving us provocations that make it impossible to remain silent. Indeterminacy, the inability to settle on fixed meanings, contradiction, and paradox surface in African American vernacular traditions in ways that challenge us to turn into philosophers, perpetually thinking and rethinking what matters. The stories engage in Signifying, spelled with a capital S, to mark a distinction with the ordinary usage of the term. Drawing on humor, play, and self-reflexive irony to express itself, Signifying stands in direct contradiction to straight talk, suggesting that truth often comes through indirection, saying one thing and meaning both that and something else. Unlike literary irony, in which authors say one thing and mean another, Signifying creates its own supplementary meaning. It is the principal weapon in the arsenal of tricksters, those masters of artifice and duplicity who know exactly how to destabilize authority by undermining fixed meanings. They are the mediators who use the trick of mediation to keep us from settling into the status quo. And Signifying also became, in real life, the weapon of the disenfranchised.

  LOOTING A CULTURAL HERITAGE: JOEL CHANDLER HARRIS’S STORIES AND WALT DISNEY’S SONG OF THE SOUTH

  Who owns African American folklore? Does it belong to everyone? Is it the property of black people alone? To whom does black folklore matter? And who has the right to reclaim it, appropriate it, and adapt it? We have seen how, in some mysterious way, like the drumbeat that brought High John de Conquer to life, a canon of various African people’s myths and lore survived the Middle Passage to live on as chapter and verse, then mutate and thrive in the New World. The slaves who survived the Middle Passage did not arrive on these shores alone. They brought their culture, their music and dance, their religions and their gods, and their discursive practices with them. The talking skull that once refused to speak to an Ashanti tribal chief in West Africa now fails to talk for Old Master. The trickster Hare has turned into Brer Rabbit. Singing tortoises have become talking turtles, and so on. Traditional tropes, motifs, and rhetorical devices were uprooted and repurposed, mixing and mingling with the new as they took hold on distant shores. Just who is entitled to make proprietary claims on these stories?

  Enter Joel Chandler Harris, a nineteenth-century newspaperman who grew up in Georgia listening to stories in slave cabins, and Walt Disney, a twentieth-century entrepreneur and animator who had Harris’s retellings read to him as a boy. These two towering figures in the landscape of African American lore were white men who capitalized with unparalleled success on what few others had claimed to own. Appropriating and monetizing traditional tales, both reoriented the stories for an audience of children, smoothing out their jagged surfaces and rough edges while sprucing up their frayed plot lines. Harris and Disney were less invested in preserving and restoring traditions that were steadily eroding than in turning them into a new form of cultural capital that dovetailed neatly with capitalist success.

  Joel Chandler Harris’s Uncle Remus: His Songs and His Sayings (1880) and the many volumes that followed have a monumental quality that makes them impossible to ignore. The first in the series, a landmark in its time, took an African American repertoire and transformed it into entertainment for white children—the “little boy” in the frame listens and learns from his kindly black “Uncle,” a man so worn down by his labors that he is content to settle into the stoic role carved out for him by a Southern white journalist. Within months after the publication of the Uncle Remus stories, Joel Chandler Harris became what Mark Twain referred to as “the oracle of the nurseries.”

  Disney’s Song of the South selected the best known of Harris’s fables for the young and, in a burst of color, sound, and rhythm, lured children into theaters with a beat that was both entertaining and instructive. Suddenly the sinister gave way to the didactic, and the story of the tar baby became less a parable about treachery and entrapment than a cheerful lesson about the importance of staying at home and avoiding “a whole mess o’ bran’ new troubles.”

  Thanks to Harris and Disney, many African American tales circulate today, as noted, in the form of “culturally innocent” children’s stories and entertainments. Have they, through a process of cultural entropy, turned into cartoon versions of themselves? Has Brer Rabbit turned into a pale, spindly shadow of the mythical Spider and Hare? Have picture books like John Steptoe’s Mufara’s Beautiful Daughters and Robert Sans Souci’s The Talking Eggs diluted the power of the stories and consigned them to the nursery?

  Harris’s 1880 collection, cramped and cautious rather than expansive, uses a “Negro dialect” that the novelist Charles Chesnutt described in the following way: “What we call by the name is the attempt to express, with such a degree of phonetic correctness as to suggest the sound, English pronounced as an ignorant old southern Negro would be supposed to speak it, and at the same time to preserve a sufficient approximation to the correct spelling to make it easy reading.”33 We find this principle, translated onto the big screen, at work in Disney’s Song of the South, in which Uncle Remus alternately chuckles and furrows his brow as he tells stories to Johnny in language that will be accessible to all children and comforting to theatrical audiences.

  At the other end of the spectrum are collectors who cared little for the niceties of decorum and aimed instead for authenticity. In Zora Neale Hurston’s Mules and Men, African American folklore staged a comeback for adults in the middle of the Great Depression, two years before audiences began to whistle along to songs in Walt Disney’s Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. Hurston, a central figure of the Harlem Renaissance, moves us into adult storytelling circles, where she eagerly takes everything in, both as native to the land and anthropological witness. Rejecting the orthodoxies of fieldwork, she listens and relies on memory to record. “How do you learn most of your songs?” an interviewer once asked Hurston. She replied with words that hold true for her method of collecting tales as well: “I just get in the crowd with the people and they singin’ and I listen as best I can, then I start a joinin’ in with a phrase or two . . . I keep on till I learn all the song, the verses, then I sing them back to the people until they tell me I can sing them just like them. . . . Then I carry it in my memory.”34

  Hurston the anthropologist understood that storytellers use invented languages, idioms based on standard English but refashioned and encoded to become socially relevant. Invested in creating expressive art, they make the language their own, whether through borrowings from the languages of their kinship units, metaphors plucked from their own life experiences, or words communally refashioned for the sake of a cultural heritage that would be their own.

  It was, as we shall see, left to Zora Neale Hurston to reclaim African American folklore through an archaeological and anthropological feat that preserved and passed on the tradition by assimilating the vernacular into her own narrative voice. In Mules and Men, Zora Neale Hurston did not just collect, but also showed the collective in the heat of folkloric give-and-take in different social settings. We have not just stories but scenes of storytelling that motivate the narratives. Hurston revitalized folklore in her own fiction as well, using vernacular speech to narrate the consciousness of her characters and embedding storytelling rituals into her work in self-reflexive ways. Her major accomplishment was to reveal that folklore can operate in the modern era just as smoothly as it did in times past. The move she made was one that also enabled a succession of literary figures to probe the significance of a cultural heritage that continued to shape social identity in compellingly mysterious ways.

  THE AFTERLIFE OF AFRICAN AMERICAN FOLKLORE

  To speak of the afterlife of African American folklore implies subscribing to the view that Joel Chandler Harris and Walt Disney inflicted permanent damage upon living traditions. The figures that inhabit tales from times past have never really gone away or expired but, like Snow White, Cinderella, or
Jack, they lead a fugitive existence in entertainments for adults, at times shadows of themselves to be sure, but “still there.” More important, vernacular traditions served in powerful ways as the foundation for black literary culture, thus establishing a continuity, unprecedentedly robust, between oral traditions and print culture.35

  African American writers have never shown much reverence for the divide separating oral traditions from print cultures, and there are good reasons why not. They famously—and paradoxically—have chosen to write by engaging with oral traditions. Language is an expressive instrument that captures a shared ethos about how to describe reality, and also how to conceptualize it. Take the term beautiful-ugly, which has been invoked as the sign of an African American love of paradox: “The idea that a thing is at the same time its opposite, and that these opposites, these contradictions make up the whole.”36 To move from the vernacular to a purely literary register (one voiced predominately by white writers) would be to lose a heterogeneous idiom rich with ancestral wisdom, cultural truths, and hard-won collective identity.

  In cultures with long histories of the literary transmission of knowledge, oral traditions can undergo a process of entropy, shedding their intellectual weight and allure. Once the ability to decode the information in them weakens, the tales themselves begin to be seen as trivial, with no real narrative heft. As one anthropologist team pointed out about folktales: “We often dismiss them as silly or try to reinterpret them with psychobabble.”37 The same might be said about the vernacular in which these tales were told. Yet to give up that linguistic register is to shed a cultural heritage that, once probed, reveals itself to be broad and deep.

  As we have already seen, many prominent Anglo-American writers insisted on distancing themselves from oral traditions, seeing in them a lack of sophistication and erudition. By contrast, we find—paradoxically—a disavowal of the vernacular in African American literature along with a self-conscious use of it, a liquidation of the divide between what we hear and what we read or write. Ralph Ellison, who was eager to be embraced by both African American readers and the literary establishment in the United States, once irately accused Zora Neale Hurston of “perpetuating the minstrel tradition” by relying on a spoken idiom as well as on oral storytelling traditions.

  In a review of Their Eyes Were Watching God, Richard Wright decided to pull no punches and piled onto the critique, accusing Hurston of pandering to white audiences: “Miss Hurston voluntarily continues in her novel the tradition which was forced upon the Negro in the theatre, that is, the minstrel technique that makes the ‘white folks’ laugh. Her characters eat and laugh and cry and work and kill; they swing like a pendulum eternally in that safe and narrow orbit in which America likes to see the Negro live: between laughter and tears.”38 “Folklore fiction”—that’s what the writer Alain Locke called it, and Hurston was repeatedly accused of creating characters who were caricatures, lacking any real psychological depth.

  A rich mix of vernacular styles is, ironically, exactly what became the mark of high modernism in works by writers ranging from James Joyce and Samuel Beckett to John Dos Passos and Alfred Döblin. “How good you are in explosition! How farflung is your folkloire and how velktingeling your volupkabulary!” Joyce wrote in Finnegans Wake (1939).39 And who would have thought that in their correspondence T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound used Brer Rabbit and Old Possum as their monikers? 40 The language and grammar of folklore is attractive not only in its expansive artlessness but also in its restive challenge to the status quo. The Marxist sociologist and philosopher Herbert Marcuse once described how rebellion and insubordination, even when subdued in real life, burst out in the “spiteful and defiant humor” of colloquial speech—“in a vocabulary that calls things by their names: ‘head-shrinker’ and ‘egghead,’ ‘boob tube,’ ‘think tank,’ ‘beat it’ and ‘dig it,’ and ‘gone, man, gone.’ ” 41 Folklore captures the candor of the vernacular, which not only speaks truth to power but can also operate in a vibrantly rich poetic register.

  Sometimes folklore asserts its foundational importance with unexpected vehemence. In Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man, Brer Rabbit makes a spectacular appearance at a key moment in the narrative. After the Invisible Man’s brush with death in a paint factory, he lies in the hospital recovering from an explosion. How is he treated? He is subjected to shock therapy, and, in the aftermath of those jolts, his doctor shows him a series of cards. “WHO WAS YOUR MOTHER?” one asks, in an effort to determine whether his autobiographical memory is intact. Another card bears a startling inscription: “BOY, WHO WAS BRER RABBIT?” In this case, it is Invisible Man’s cultural memory that is put to the test, but in a way that demeans the narrator and disparages the folkloric character. Mystified, he asks, “Did they think I was a child?” “I felt like a clown,” he declares. But ironically it is the crash course in cultural memory that galvanizes Invisible Man into action, making him determined to be, like his folkloric antecedent, “sly” and “alert.” 42

  We could just as well ask, “Who is tar baby?” and Toni Morrison more or less does just that in her classic novel Tar Baby (1981). Morrison signifies on Ellison’s work, rewriting it with a difference. For Morrison, the tar-baby story is more than “outlaw peasant outwits inventive master with wit and cunning.” Folklorists may use that phrase as a classification category, but they flatten out the tale with a univocal message. For Morrison, the tar baby becomes a sticky mediator between master and servant (or plantation owner and slave), an object that aims to “foil and entrap” but also moves “beyond trickery to art.” What Morrison does is to breathe new life into the original tale, to take the tropes of the story, remix them, mash them up, and produce something entirely new. She gives us a love story that is also a charged cultural encounter, one that turns allegorical, with its two protagonists—one glamorous and privileged, the other strong-willed and penniless—enacting a conflicted attitude toward African American cultural memory. One heatedly disavows it; the other seeks it out and embraces it.43

  Jadine, Morrison’s heroine, is in some way the tar baby of the novel’s title, and it is she who has measured success by the standards of white culture, all the while internalizing its values. An orphan in social terms, she also becomes one in cultural terms. Son, by contrast, the man who challenges her success story, orients himself toward the past, reverting to home and a cultural heritage that refuses to accept conventional notions of accomplishment. It is he who must remind Jadine of the tar baby story and how the two of them are restaging the tale in mysteriously complicated new ways.

  Like Sterling A. Brown and Zora Neale Hurston, both Ellison and Morrison deploy the tropes of folktales to shape their plots and to encode their narratives with cultural stories different from the ones found in mainstream literary production. Embracing alterity, they reclaim Brer Rabbit and tar baby as their own, and also start talking to each other in vertiginous moments of intertextual exchange. The point here is that Brer Rabbit and tar baby were never really on life support. They are simply reanimated in ways that are entirely natural and culturally sound, breathing the air of new narrative forms and putting on display the malleability that has enabled them to survive over decades.

  Novelists like Ellison and Morrison are supremely well attuned to voices from the past and to ancestral lore, with Morrison in particular deeply committed to honoring ancestors and their stories. The folkloric elements that enter into their fiction are at times front and center, at times part of a subtle register that urges us to go back and heed voices from the past. In The Grey Album, the poet and essayist Kevin Young describes his ambition to engage in a project of reclamation, of the need to “rescue aspects of black culture abandoned even by black folks, whether it is the blues or home cookin’ or broader forms of not just survival but triumph.” 44 The pages that follow will capture pictures from life in all its variegated forms, at times harsh and raw, at times elegant and uplifting, along with everything in between.

  SOUNDS OF SILENCE:
KEEPING QUIET AND TELLING LIES

  “Cussing Master” is a story frequently included in collections of African American lore, and it reminds us of how talk can function as a release even in a culture that prohibits expressive outbursts, perhaps especially in that kind of culture. The American folklorist Benjamin Botkin described a version of the story in his “folk history” of slavery, and it features human characters with real names. When the field hand Joe Raines feels outrage about demands made by Master Ed, he goes “ ’way down in the bottoms where the corn grow high and got a black color.” He then “looks east and west and north and south.” Seeing no Master Ed, he “pitches into him and gives him the worst cussing a man ever give another man.” That is the punch line to a story that begins with Joe’s boasts about cursing his master and ends with his failure to mention to his friend Joe Murray, who has taken Joe’s advice literally and cursed his master, exactly where he let loose those curses. “Go ’way off somewhere so he can’t hear you,” Joe cautions, too late to save his friend Joe from a beating.45 A variant has Joe putting his hands up the dress of the master’s wife—the dress, as it turns out, was hanging from a clothesline.

  To reclaim by documenting and recording was, as we have seen, a challenge for those whose culture depended largely on oral transmission. Even in the aftermath of Emancipation, such projects were riddled with problems if not doomed, given the impossibility of preserving a vital and nuanced vernacular discourse in print. But more important, cursing, along with other forms of discourse, could be swallowed up in a culture of prohibition against expressive speech. Much was said in places where many might hear. But few could document and record, and some things were held back, especially for an audience of white listeners, by transcribers in acts of self-censorship that required vast reserves of restraint.