The Annotated African American Folktales
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35 Gates, The Signifying Monkey, xxii.
36 Marshall, Reena and Other Stories, 9.
37 Elizabeth Wayland Barber and Paul T. Barber, When They Severed Earth from Sky: How the Human Mind Shapes Myth (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004), 2.
38 Richard Wright, “Between Laughter and Tears,” New Masses (October 5, 1937), 22–23.
39 James Joyce, Finnegans Wake (New York: Viking Press, 1967), 419.
40 Michael North, “Old Possum and Brer Rabbit: Pound and Eliot’s Racial Masquerade,” in The Dialect of Modernism: Race, Language, and Twentieth-Century Literature (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994), 77–99.
41 Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man: Studies in the Ideology of Advanced Industrial Society, 2nd ed. (Boston: Beacon Press, 1991).
42 Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man, 2nd ed. (New York: Random House, Vintage, 1995).
43 All quotations are cited from Toni Morrison, Tar Baby (New York: Random House, Vintage, 2004), xi–xii.
44 Kevin Young, The Grey Album: On the Blackness of Blackness (Minneapolis: Graywolf Press, 2012), 15.
45 B. A. Botkin, ed., Lay My Burden Down: A Folk History of Slavery (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1945), 8–9.
46 Richard Wright, Black Boy (American Hunger): A Record of Childhood and Youth (New York: Harper Perennial, 2004), 3–4.
47 Ibid., 8.
48 Ibid., 39.
49 Young, The Grey Album, 17.
50 http://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/national-book-awards-ursula-le-guin, accessed January 12, 2015.
51 Gayl Jones, Liberating Voices: Oral Tradition in African American Literature (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991).
52 Thomas W. Talley, The Negro Traditions, ed. Charles K. Wolfe and Laura C. Jarmon (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1930), xxv.
53 Jones, Liberating Voices, 58.
54 See the discussion of Gates’s phrase about dialect turning “metaphor against its master” in Eric Sundquist, The Hammers of Creation: Folk Culture in Modern African-American Fiction (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2006), 60–62.
55 John Edgar Wideman, Foreword, Every Tongue Got to Confess: Negro Folk-tales from the Gulf States, ed. Carla Kaplan (New York: HarperCollins, 2001), xvii.
This gold-covered staff, with Anansi the spider god at its center, was carried by officials within the courts of Akan chiefs in the region once known as the Gold Coast (present-day Ghana). Anansi, who brings wisdom, stories, and weaving to the Akan, is linked to language and becomes the chief linguist at the court. Gift of the Richard J. Faletti Family, 1986 (1986.475a-c). Image copyright © The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Image source: Art Resource, NY.
PART I
MAKING SENSE OF THE WORLD WITH ANANSI: STORIES, WISDOM, AND CONTRADICTION
The wisdom of the spider is greater than that of all the world put together.
Woe to him who would put his trust in Anansi—a sly, selfish, and greedy fellow.
—WEST AFRICAN PROVERBS
How fitting that the origins of storytelling begin with Anansi—a figure both human and animal, a creature who weaves webs of beautiful complexity and tells stories about the tangled webs we weave. Anansi stories not only capture the ephemeral—lived sensation and experience—but also provide practical magic and spiritual nourishment. Where there are roadblocks, they tell us about paths forward. Where there are dilemmas, they give us talking points. Where there is darkness, they shine beams of light. They also tell of cunning, deceit, appetite, and greed, encapsulating the story of how humans rose to the top of the food chain and conquered the planet. Anansi never lets us forget, through his antics, that beastliness and beauty coexist and that our capacity to undo all that is good in the world vies with our ability to ennoble and create.
This image of a spider and its delicate web illustrates the tale “The Squirrel and the Spider” in African Myths Together with Proverbs, an anthology of African folklore collected by historian and teacher Carter G. Woodson.
Anansi tales, sometimes collectively referred to as “Anansem,” can be traced back to the Ashanti people of Ghana in Western Africa. Anansi, the Akan word for spider, is sometimes written as Ananse. Both spider and man, Anansi is able to communicate with the Sky God, Nyankopon or Nyame. He is husband, father, and everyman, at times selfish and greedy, at times cunning and admirable. The story of how Anansi acquires stories from the Sky God (the tales were once called Nyankonsem or “words of the Sky God”) is a foundational myth, revealing how greed, vanity, and stupidity fall victim to the sly Anansi as he acts out the stories and thereby makes them his own, becoming the patron saint of storytelling.
It is no accident that the guardian of stories is embodied in animal form as a spider. Like storytellers, he weaves a fine web of language that captures both the beauty and the horror of human existence. Filmy and fragile, delicate and graceful, Spider’s web may be a thing of beauty, but it is also a deathtrap. Anansi himself is a figure of ambivalence—generous and greedy, amiable and treacherous, courageous and cowardly, magnanimous and selfish. Like language itself, he is an expert in double-dealing, using the self-reflexive nature of the words we speak to show how duplicity can be a creative, life-sustaining strategy and a weapon deadly and destructive.
Robert S. Rattray, an anthropologist and British officer in Ghana, employed twelve unnamed West African artists to illustrate Akan-Ashanti Folk-Tales, published in 1930. For “How the Spider Got a Bald Head,” Anansi is depicted as a hybrid creature with human features and the body of a spider.
A bundle of contradictory traits, Anansi embodies paradoxes. As both animal (anansi) and man (Anansi), he bridges the divide between the two, revealing that one is no more ferocious or benevolent than the other. As a boundary crosser and a figure who stands at and guards the crossroads, he is a disruptive presence, constantly challenging the rules of the social order, yet also paradoxically reinforcing and consolidating their hold on us by revealing the scandals that result from testing them.
In an illustration for “How Aketekyire, the Cricket, Got His Teeth Burned,” Anansi’s indifference to suffering becomes evident. For him, survival is everything.
Anansi not only bridges the divide between human and animal. He is also the mediator between the human and the divine, brokering deals with Nyame the Sky God, who has endless tolerance for his bad manners and impertinence. A master of punning, word play, and double entendre, Anansi is the master of direction through indirection, a signifying cultural presence capable of challenging the stability of the linguistic order as well as the social order. “Talking brought me here”—those spooky words, spoken by a skull as a warning against speaking and storytelling, could also be Anansi’s motto. Talk is what brings us to life but it also can spell our doom and is itself doomed to vanish.
Anansi is presented as a sober, focused figure rather than as an antic trickster in this illustration for Akan-Ashanti Folk-Tales.
Closely linked to Anansi are the trickster gods Eshu of Yoruba origins and Legba of the Fon peoples in Benin. Eshu is a deity who revels in ambiguity and conflict: “Sowing dissension is my great delight,” he declares in one of the foundational stories about his powers. A master musician, Eshu is often depicted with a flute or whistle, and he is sometimes portrayed as having two mouths, truly a figure who can talk out of both sides of his mouth and an expert in doubletalk. On Brazilian plantations Eshu became an agent of freedom for slaves, killing and poisoning their enemies, if only in the domain of imagination. Legba, also known as the “divine linguist,” has the ability to speak all languages and is described as an interpreter, facilitating understanding between gods and humans. In his passage to the New World, he was less radical insurgent than an exhausted old man struggling to stay alive. Haitians, who brought the old gods with them from Benin, created Carrefour and Ghede, masters of the crossroads and of language—trickster gods who embody all of Legba’s lost vitality.
Anansi is depicted alterna
tely as a man and a spider in these illustrations by Cecilia Sinclair for West-African Folk-Tales, compiled by Sinclair and William Henry Barker and published in London in 1917.
It seems astonishing to some that Anansi survived the Middle Passage, but the “complete annihilation” of Anansi and his stories would have been “far more remarkable than their preservation” (Gates 1988, 4). Anansi landed in the New World, in places like Jamaica, where he used his wits in conflicts with Tiger rather than the Ashanti Sky-God. In South Carolina Sea Island folklore, he turns up as Miss Nancy, and in Gullah as Aunt Nancy. In Haiti, he is called ’Ti Malice. In this new culture, Anansi was less invested in testing and preserving than in demolishing: “On the Jamaican plantations, Anansi had the potential to serve as the destroyer of an enforced and abhorrent social system rather than challenging the boundaries of a West African society” (E. Marshall 2010, 175). Or he might simply have modeled the art of surviving and winning small battles under the harshest of circumstances.
Walter Jekyll, a folklorist who collected Annancy stories in Jamaica, discovered that the tales—filled with sweetness and cynicism, compassion and outrage, cruelty and concern—produced “peals of laughter.” He added: “At the recital of any special piece of knavery on Annancy’s part, ordinary means of expression fail and [the listeners] fling themselves on the ground and wriggle in convulsions of merriment” (Jekyll, 1). What is appealing about Annancy? Here are the words extracted from Jekyll’s description of Annancy’s attributes: laziness, gluttony, selfishness, treachery, and cruelty. Whatever Annancy can get away with, he does. He reaches for something other than the fulfillment of wishes found in fairy tales. Never satisfied, he incarnates a pleasure principle that gives us all the rough-and-tumble joys of a wild ride through the world.
In the tales that follow, we discover how Anansi stories came to be, in both African settings and in the United States. From there we move to a set of foundational narratives about wisdom, contradiction, and the importance of perspective. The section concludes with questions about justice in a parable about crime, excess, and punishment.
HOW THE SKY GOD’S STORIES CAME TO BE KNOWN AS SPIDER STORIES
“We do not really mean, we do not really mean, that what we are going to say is true.”1
Kwaku Ananse,2 or Spider, once went to Nyankopon,3 the Sky God, in order to buy the Sky God’s stories. The Sky God said, “Will you be able to buy them?”
Spider said, “I am sure I will be able to buy them.”
The Sky God said, “Great and powerful towns like Kokofu, Bekwai, Asumengya4 have come, but they were unable to purchase them, and you who are but a mere masterless man, will you really be able to buy them?”
Spider said, “What is the price of the stories?”5
The Sky God said, “They cannot be bought for anything except Onini the Python,6 Osebo the Leopard, Mmoatia the Fairy, and Mmoboro the Hornets.”
Spider said, “I will bring some of all these things, and what’s more, I’ll add my old mother, Nsia, the sixth child, to the lot.”
The Sky God said, “Go and bring them then.” Spider returned home and told his mother all about what had happened, saying, “I wish to buy the stories of the Sky God, and the Sky God says I must bring Onini the Python, Osebo the Leopard, Mmoatia the Fairy, and Mmoboro the Hornets. And I said I would add you to the lot and give all of you to the Sky God.”
Spider consulted his wife Aso, saying, “What is to be done that we may capture Onini the Python?” Aso said to him, “Go cut off the branch of a palm tree and cut some string-creeper as well, and bring them back.” And Spider came back with them. Aso said, “Take them to the stream.” So Ananse took them, and, as he was moving along, he said, “It’s longer than he is. It’s not as long as he is. You lie, it’s longer than he is.”
Spider said, “There he is, lying over there.” Python, who had overheard the imaginary conversation, said, “What’s this all about?”
Spider said, “It’s my wife Aso, who is arguing with me and telling me that this palm branch is longer than you are, and I say she is a liar.”
Onini the Python said, “Bring it over here, and come measure me.” Spider took the palm branch and laid it out next to Python’s body. He said, “Stretch yourself out.”
Python stretched himself out, and Ananse took the rope-creeper and wound it around—the sound of the tying was nwenene! nwenene! nwenene!—until he reached the head. Ananse the Spider said, “You fool! I shall now take you to the Sky God and receive the Sky God’s tales in exchange.” Ananse took him off to Nyame, and the Sky God said: “My hand has touched it, but there remains what still remains.”
Spider returned and told his wife what had happened, saying, “There remain the Hornets.” His wife replied, “Look for a gourd, fill it with water, and go off with it.”
Spider went along through the bush, when he saw a swarm of Hornets hanging in the air. He poured out some of the water and sprinkled it on the Hornets. Spider then poured the rest on himself and cut a leaf of the plantain7 and covered his head with it. Then he addressed the Hornets, saying, “Now that it’s raining, you should go into the gourd so that the rain won’t beat down on you. Can’t you see that I’ve covered myself with a plantain leaf?”
The Hornets replied, “We thank you, Aku, we thank you, Aku.” The Hornets all flew into the gourd and disappeared—fom! Father Spider covered its mouth, and he said, “Fools, I have caught you, and I am going to exchange you for the Sky God’s stories.” And he took the Hornets to the Sky God. The Sky God said, “My hand has touched them, but there remains what still remains.”
Spider came back again and said to his wife, “There remains Osebo the Leopard.” Aso said, “Go and dig a hole.”
Ananse said, “That’s enough, I understand.” Then Spider went off to look for the Leopard’s tracks, and once he found them he dug a very deep pit and covered it. Then he went home. Early the next day, when objects started to become visible, Spider said he would go out, and when he was moving along, lo and behold, a Leopard had landed in the pit. Ananse said, “Little father’s child, little mother’s child. I told you not to get drunk, and now, just as expected, you have become intoxicated. That’s why you fell into the pit. If I were to agree to lift you out, the very next day, if you saw me or any of my children, you would run after them and catch them.” The Leopard said, “Oh! I would never do such a thing.” Ananse went and cut two sticks, put one here, and one there. He said, “Put one of your paws here, and the other one there.” The Leopard placed his paws where he had been told. As he was about to climb up, Ananse lifted up his knife, and in a flash it descended on his head. Gao! was the sound it made. The Leopard landed in the pit and fom! was the sound of the falling. Ananse got a ladder to climb into the pit so that he could pull the Leopard up. He got the Leopard out and went on his way. He said, “Fool, I am taking you to exchange for the stories of the Sky God.” He lifted up the Leopard to go and give to Nyame, the Sky God, who said, “My hands have touched it, what remains still remains.”
Spider came back and carved an Akua’s child. He tapped some sticky fluid from a tree and plastered the doll’s body with it.8 Then he pounded some yams and put them in the doll’s hand. He pounded some more yams and placed the doll in a brass basin. He tied some string around the doll’s waist and went off with it and put it at the foot of an odum tree, the place where Fairies come to play. And a Fairy came along. She said, “Akua, may I eat a little of this mash?” Ananse tugged at the string, and the doll nodded her head. The Fairy told one of her sisters, “She says I may eat some.” The sister said, “Eat some then.” The Fairy finished eating and thanked the doll. But when she thanked her, there was no answer. The Fairy said to her sister, “When I thanked her, there was no answer.” The sister of the Fairy said, “Slap her crying-place.” And she slapped it, pa! And her hand stuck there. She said to her sister, “My hand is stuck.” The sister said, “Take your other hand and slap her crying-place again.” And she took it
and slapped her, pa!, and this one, too, stuck fast. The Fairy said to her sister, “Both my hands are now stuck.” The sister said, “Push it with your stomach.” She pushed it with her stomach, and her stomach got stuck too. Ananse came and tied her up, and he said, “Fool, I have got you. I shall take you to the Sky God and exchange you for his stories.” And he took her back home with him.
Ananse told his mother, Ya Nsia, the sixth child, “Rise up, let us go, for I am taking you along with the Fairy to exchange you for the Sky God’s stories.” He lifted them up and went to the place where the Sky God lived. He said, “Sky God, here is a Fairy along with my old mother whom I told you about. She is here too.”
Now the Sky God called his elders, the Kontire chiefs, the Oyoko, Ankobea, and Kyidom. And he put the matter before them, saying, “Great kings have come and were not able to buy the Sky God’s stories, but Kwaku Ananse the Spider has been able to pay the price. I received Mmoboro the Hornets from him. I received Mmoatia the Fairy9 from him. I received Osebo the Leopard from him. I received Onini the Python from him, and, of his own free will, Ananse has added his mother to the lot. All of these things are here.”
He said, “Sing his praise.” “Eee!” they shouted. The Sky god said, “Kwaku Ananse, from today and forever, I take my Sky God’s Stories and present them to you. Kose! Kose! Kose! My blessing, my blessing, my blessing. We shall no longer call them the stories of the Sky God and from now on they will be Spider stories.”
This is my story,10 which I have told. If it be sweet or if it be not sweet, take some elsewhere and let some come back to me.11
SOURCE: Adapted from R. S. Rattray, Akan-Ashanti Folk-Tales, 55–58.