The Annotated African American Folktales

by Henry Louis Gates

  The soil having been so carefully prepared, the crops promised exceedingly well. Mybrow visited them from time to time, and congratulated himself on the splendid harvest he would have.

  One day, while maize and yams were still in their green and milky state, Mybrow’s wife came to him. She wished to know where his field lay, that she might go and fetch some of the firewood from it. At first he refused to tell her. Being very persistent, however, she finally succeeded in obtaining the information—but on one condition. She must not answer any question that should be asked her. This she readily promised, and set off for the field.

  When she arrived there she was utterly amazed at the wealth of the corn and yam. She had never seen such magnificent crops. The maize looked most tempting—being still in the milky state—so she plucked an ear. While doing so she heard a voice say, “Who is there, breaking the corn?” “Who dares ask me such a question?” she replied angrily—quite forgetting her husband’s command. Going to the field of yams she plucked one of them also. “Who is there, picking the yams?” came the question again. “It is I, Mybrow’s wife. This is my husband’s field and I have a right to pick.” Out came the fairies. “Let us all help Mybrow’s wife to pluck her corn and yams,” they said. Before the frightened woman could speak a word, the fairies had all set to work with a will, and the corn and yams lay useless on the ground. Being all green and unripe, the harvest was now utterly spoiled. The farmer’s wife wept bitterly, but to no purpose. She returned slowly home, not knowing what to say to her husband about such a terrible catastrophe. She decided to keep silence about the matter.

  Accordingly, next day the poor man set off gleefully to his field to see how his fine crops were going on. His anger and dismay may be imagined when he saw his field a complete ruin. All his work and foresight had been absolutely ruined through his wife’s forgetfulness of her promise.

  SOURCE: William Henry Barker and Cecilia Sinclair, West African Folk-Tales, 181–84.

  Silence, discretion, and trustworthiness are important values in the universe of the folktale, particularly when it comes to transactions with mysterious, otherworldly creatures. Some readers may be familiar with what folklorists call “The Gifts of the Little People,” a story about elves, fairies, or dwarfs who offer help or a reward to a figure in need and then withdraw it or discontinue their services when they are offended in some way. The enigmatic story “The Elves and the Shoemaker,” collected by the Brothers Grimm in the nineteenth century, falls into that category.

  PART IV

  SILENCE AND PASSIVE RESISTANCE: THE TAR-BABY STORY

  How is it that tar baby has become taboo? Once among the most widely distributed tales in the world, “The Wonderful Tar-Baby Story” has become an endangered species in the folkloric universe. While variants of fairy tales like “Little Red Riding Hood” and “Sleeping Beauty” seem to proliferate at exponential rates, colonizing new media and settling comfortably into new cultural territory, the tar baby story risks extinction. It has become a sticky subject, especially because of the nexus of associations tied to it, linking blackness with silence and passive-aggressive behavior.

  Folklorists have tried to capture the story’s essence with the phrase “outlaw peasant outwits inventive master with wit and cunning,” but the story resists superficial efforts to pin down its meaning and does its cultural work at a much deeper level than that phrase suggests. Efforts to contain its meaning are doomed, for like many folktales it contains at its core a hermeneutic puzzle, in this case an amorphous mass—mute, passive, and evasive—that invites us to make sense of it and solve its mysteries, if only for our own time and place.

  There has been no shortage of critical interventions that read the tar-baby story, rooted in an agrarian culture, as an allegory of slavery, a tale grounded in human passions but with animal actors. Bernard Wolfe, for example, famously read the tar baby story in historical terms as a fable depicting race relationships in the United States, with the tale’s central figure as the embodied expression of resistance. “The Negro, in other words, is wily enough to escape from the engulfing pit of blackness, although his opponents, who set the trap, do their level best to keep him imprisoned in it,” he wrote (31–41). Lawrence Levine read African American tales like “The Tar Baby” as therapeutic exercises offering “psychic relief” and a “sense of mastery” (Levine 1977, 105). More than expressions of wish-fulfillment, they also broadcast lessons about “the art of surviving and even triumphing in the face of a hostile environment.” Both Wolfe and Levine emphasize the therapeutic and strategic value of folklore, all the while keeping their sights trained on the canonical Uncle Remus story.

  Over the decades, African Americans made the story of the tar baby their own. They were working within a long and venerable tradition, one that drove Joel Chandler Harris, among others, nearly to distraction. Was the tale of “remote African origin,” as Harris speculated, in which case it functioned as “mere amusement”? Or is there something uniquely American about Brer Rabbit? “It needs no scientific investigation,” Harris wrote, “to show why he [the Negro] selects as his hero the weakest and most harmless of all animals. . . . It is not virtue that triumphs, but helplessness . . . the parallel between the case of the ‘weakest’ of all animals, who must, perforce, triumph though his shrewdness, and the humble condition of the slave raconteur, is not without its pathos” (Harris 1880, 158–59). Pathos perhaps, but also anxiety about creatures who do not hesitate to maul and murder, getting revenge as they kill and maim.

  Today it seems obvious that the tar-baby story could not possibly have materialized from thin air. Tradition and lore crossed the Atlantic with slaves and were reinvigorated and transmuted to become socially relevant, up close and personal yet also expansive and communal. As we shall see, the tar-baby story has struck deep roots in many cultures. Crucial to understanding its African American incarnations is a look at the broader landscape of the story and the core issues that have given it remarkable staying power.

  What quickly becomes evident in combing through a folkloric record that includes hundreds of tar baby stories is the power of the tale’s principal trope: a sticky trap that works much like quicksand, perversely drawing its power to ensnare from resistance. Helplessness could not be more vividly evoked. Is it any wonder that the story of the tar baby came to be enshrined as slavery’s most ubiquitous narrative, paradoxically capturing both the physical impossibility of liberation as well as the intellectual hope of using words and wit to elude captivity? Brer Rabbit may not be able to use his brawn to escape the grip of the tar baby, but he does cheat a deathtrap through mental agility and the clever use of language.

  As we shall see, folklorists have worked hard to describe the story’s architecture and its dramatis personae, but they have not drawn up an inventory of the story’s binaries, the way in which the plot lines up work against theft, deception against innocence, assault against passive resistance, loquacity against silence, and in some instances male against female as well as human against simulacrum. The story may unfold in an orderly fashion, but it is soon disturbed by disorderly behaviors, drawing listeners and readers into a vortex of cultural oppositions and contradictions. As we try to make sense of the tale, it turns on us, trapping us as we make feints and thrusts to get at its core.

  At the mysterious center of the American Brer Rabbit story stands the tar baby—“artfully shaped, black, disturbing, threatening yet inviting” (Morrison 1981, xiii). Enigmatic in its silence, it triangulates the contest between two antagonists and animates the binaries that drive its plot. That figure of blackness anchors the story and represents one of the constitutive features of the tale. But it is just one of many features, and research by folklorists has established many other key components in the tale’s structure. Aurelio Espinosa collected well over one hundred versions of the story and set down the following typology:

  1.A man or an animal has a garden or orchard, or just food put away somewhere.

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sp; 2.A certain animal (a jackal, a monkey, a hare or rabbit, etc.) comes night after night to steal the garden produce, the fruit, or the food.

  3.The man or animal wishes to catch the thief and sets up a tar-figure, male or female (tar-man, tar-woman, tar-monkey, etc.).

  4.A thief approaches to steal and when he sees the tar-figure he tries to engage him in conversation or tells him to get out of the way.

  5.Receiving no reply the animal-thief begins to attack, striking first with the right hand or paw.

  6.This sticks or is held fast and the animal then begins the dramatic monologue with the usual threats.

  7.The dramatic monologue and the attacks continue, and the thief is finally caught fast at four, five, or even six points.

  8.The next day the man or animal finds his thief well caught.

  9.Although frequently punished the animal-thief escapes alive.

  Espinosa enumerates the tale’s basic plot moves, yet he too falls into the trap of corralling all stories with the so-called stickfast motif into the tar baby tale type (1930, 129–209).

  The origins of “The Wonderful Tar-Baby Story” are deeply contested, in part because its central motif is often taken as the key element. One early study of the tale by the renowned folklorist Joseph Jacobs made the case—on the basis of the stickfast motif as well as the nineteenth-century faith in India as the original home of all folktales—for identifying South Asia as the source. Citing several accounts in the Jataka, a literary compilation of episodes from Buddha’s previous lives, Jacobs declared India as the tale’s point of origin. In one story, Buddha is trapped by a monster called “Sticky-Hair” and persuades the monster to liberate him, though without resorting to reverse psychology. He simply declares his immunity to fear of death (we all die one day anyway), and adds that the story he carries in his body will make mincemeat of anyone who tries to swallow him. Some other experts dispute Jacobs’s views and assert French origins, pointing to Reynard the Fox narratives, which could have migrated to the United States with French settlers in the Southern states as well as with slaves from Francophone countries in West Africa (Jacobs, 253–53; Brown 1978, 180–85; Varty 245–67).

  A look at African tales with rubber men, tar dolls, and other sticky figures offers compelling evidence that the tale crossed the Atlantic with slaves and was brilliantly mined to create new, socially relevant tales. African tales about sticky images turn on greed, theft, and trickery, and they often feature the unscrupulous Anansi, who is willing to let his children starve before he goes hungry. At times Anansi falls victim to the trap set for him, at times he is the one who ensnares. But what quickly becomes evident in reading accounts about tricksters and traps is the malleability of the tale, which can be used to teach almost anything. In “The Tale of Ntrekuma,” for example, Anansi’s public humiliation becomes the opportunity to broadcast the message that shame does not require suicidal action. Another variant of the story, however, tells about the origin of theft, born when a man caught by Anansi in the act of stealing was killed and chopped up into small pieces, which were then sown to create a multitude of thieves (shades of Cadmus and other mythological figures).

  In some tales, Anansi figures out how to elude his captor; in others, he must rely on his son’s ingenuity to liberate him. With each new narrative twist, the tale is reimagined, sometimes with a simple explanatory message, as in the story of Anansi and how spiders ended up in the rafters of houses. That straightforward lesson often masks deeper, less legible truths that require conversation to make sense out of them. “Why the Hare Runs Away,” collected from the Ewe-speaking peoples on the west coast of Africa is, on the face of things, an explanatory fable, but it also engages with matters of etiquette and social hierarchies, with a hare who is offended by an image that will not greet him and who subsequently barely escapes with his life from the confrontation with an inert mass of matter. The hare’s betrayal of community norms and the consequences for his action make the tale as much a revealing social fable as an explanatory tale telling us about why hares are so jumpy.

  Excavating the African past of the tar-baby story reveals much about its African American inflections. The African tales emerged from scenes of storytelling that we can no longer resurrect. But occasionally we come across evocative accounts from the United States, like the one described by the foklorist William J. Faulkner, who grew up with the stories in the South:

  I was a frequent visitor of Simon Brown’s during the years he lived in the “downstairs house” next to my family’s home. In the center of Simon’s house stood a huge brick chimney with two wide fireplaces, one on either side. Simon liked to spend his evenings there, in the warmth and glow of the fire. He’d sit in his homemade cane-bottom rocking chair and tell me stories of his life as a slave in Virginia . . . and how hard it was for our people to live. Or he’d tell me stories out of his imagination or the imagination of others he’d heard around the campfire in the slave quarters years ago. It was a time of great wonder for me. (9, 10)

  Simon Brown himself acknowledged that the trickster hero enacted folk wisdom for slaves living in the old South: “Like Brer Rabbit, we had to be deceitful and use our heads to stay alive.”

  If we will never know all the twists and turns taken by folktales told on long nights around the campfire and hearth, the rough truths encapsulated in them emerge to some extent from the written record. The first recorded version of the African American tar baby tale appeared in 1875 in Leslie’s Comic Almanac, published in New York (Nickels 364–69). It included both the tar-baby story and a tale about Brudder Wolf feigning death. The excerpt reprinted here includes only the first of the two legends, as they are called. Leslie’s prefatory comments suggest that he sees the stories as functioning much the same way as do fairy tales, and he evokes a saccharine scene of storytelling, with a fictitious granny conveying her wisdom to “little wooly heads.” The Negro legends are equated with “Little Red Riding Hood” and “Cinderella,” as if they belonged to the culture of childhood. Although Leslie concedes that the tales are all about “strategy,” he still positions them as harmless, told for amusement rather than instruction, and serving to pass the time more than anything else.

  Two years after Leslie published his tar-baby story, William Owens included several African American tales in Lippincott’s Magazine. Unlike Leslie, who gives a portrait—perhaps real, perhaps imagined—of tales being passed down to the next generation, Owens offers no romantic tableau and no cultural context whatsoever. It is as if he just happened on these tales and decided to write them down. Still, for him, the “fables” recorded furnished a kind of index to the “mental and moral characteristic” of a race. He discovers a near perfect fit between African American “character” and the personal traits of figures in African folklore. The notion of folklore as larger than life, filled with excess and exaggeration, seems to have escaped him. He cheerfully recites an inventory of racial stereotypes, without any awareness whatsoever of the possibility that “many a dark one” might deviate in any way from his model:

  Any one who will take the trouble to analyze the predominant traits of negro character, and to collate them with the predominant traits of African folk-lore will discern the fitness of each to each. On every side he [the reader] will discover evidences of a passion for music and dancing, for visiting and chatting, for fishing and snaring, indeed for any pleasure requiring little exertion of either mind or body; evidences also of a gentle, pliable and easy temper—of a quick and sincere sympathy with suffering wheresoever seen—of a very low standard of morals, combined with remarkable dexterity in satisfying themselves that it is right to do as they wish. Another trait, strong enough and universal enough to atone for many a dark one, is that, as a rule, there is nothing of the fierce and cruel in their nature, and it is scarcely possible for anything of this kind to be grafted permanently upon them. (748)

  Owens fails to realize that the inventory of leisure activities he supplies is not at all unique to one ra
ce, although few races had to endure collectively the long days of brute, backbreaking labor to which slaves and sharecroppers were subjected in the southern United States. Less shocking is the ease with which Owens overlooks the “fierce” and “cruel” elements in the stories he has collected, never mind his failure to understand that the stories might be encoded with messages about the social, moral, and economic conditions of slavery.

  Those were not Joel Chandler Harris’s objections to Owens’s stories when he read “Folk-Lore of the Southern Negroes.” What bothered him was that Owens had produced versions of the tales that did not at all resonate with his own memories of hearing the stories. Harris was sure that he personally had a hotline to African American folklore and that what he had witnessed as a boy was an authentic storytelling performance rather than a mediated literary production. His tales, told in dialect, would capture the true letter and spirit of the stories. “The Wonderful Tar-Baby Story” recounts Brer Rabbit’s capture, while “How Mr. Rabbit Was Too Sharp for Mr. Fox” gives us the famous briar-patch coda to the tale.

  In the decades following the publication of Owens’s “The Story of Buh Rabbit and the Tar Baby” and Harris’s “The Wonderful Tar-Baby Story,” the tale became the target of folkloric and anthropological speculations even as it inspired citation, imitation, and reinvention. Julia Collier Harris, the daughter of Joel Chandler Harris, recognized the story’s seductive power:

  Of all the “Uncle Remus” legends written during twenty-five years and gathered into five separate volumes, the “Tar-Baby” story is perhaps the best loved. Father received letters about this story from every quarter of the civilized world. Missionaries have translated it into the Bengali and African dialects; learned professors in France, England, Austria, and Germany have written, suggesting clues as to its source; it has been used to illustrate points in Parliamentary debates, and has been quoted from pulpits and in the halls of Congress. (Julia Collier Harris, 145)