The Annotated African American Folktales

by Henry Louis Gates

  Br’er Possum and Br’er Tortoise, accomplices in duplicity and violence, stand in sharp contrast to Little Cless and Granny, who showers the boy with affection and seeks to pass on stories from times past, justifying them as mere fables about the origins of animal practices and craft.

  The Brownies’ Book, May 1921.

  YADA: A TRUE AFRICAN STORY

  Frederica Bado Brown

  Kamala hi, Kamala hi,

  Yru bah yah, yru,

  Kamala wa na gbo ti,

  Te ya ya ya!

  Te—ya—ya—ya! ! !

  As the last sound died away over the sleepy African village, little Yada rose from her position in the doorway of the hut and went out into the night. She was to meet her small playmates at the banana grove near the village when the toot of the horn of the High Priest told them that he had offered up the sacrifices for the night. Little girls and boys were not allowed out of doors during the ceremony.

  This was to be her last evening with her friends, for tomorrow the big brown man that lived in the queer circular hut across the road from her house, was to claim her for his wife.

  Yada had thought about this thing, in fact she had thought of it lots more than little African girls are supposed to think about anything at all. Somehow it did seem to her that since she had to marry that her parents would have picked out some one more suited to her. She inwardly rebelled, but finally she decided that she need not think any longer, tonight she was going to have her fun, she was going to enjoy this last opportunity for all too soon her childhood was to be taken away from her.

  Yet on the way to the grove many things again came into her mind. Did not this man have six wives already? What could possibly be her position in his home? She would certainly have to be the burden-bearer of the household.

  What was it that the missionary lady had told them that day she came to the town to read about the funny Jesus-man that loved everyone? That made her think—could she—? But of course that was too silly for her to think of doing. She had never heard of a little African girl rebelling and running away from her fate. But it was nice to think of it even though she knew she could not do it. She could never find her way to the missionary lady, but if she did would they try to get her back and beat her as they had done that time when she refused to bow to the great idol in the temple?

  Te—ya—ya—ya! ! !

  No, she could not do it tonight for the children were having such a nice time and she wanted to join them in their play, but maybe in the morning she could if—in the meantime she must go and play and act as if nothing was happening inside of her, for no one must suspect anything.

  Wasn’t that funny last night when she had made faces in the dark at the big brown man? He couldn’t see very well, but he was sort of nice anyway. He would be lots nicer if he didn’t try to be nice. Last night he had brought her some bracelets for her legs, they were very beautiful, they jangled when she walked and all the other girls would be envious of her. She wished that she could take them with her tomorrow, but maybe since she was leaving him she had better not take either that, or the heads and the engagement straw that he had put in her hair, when her parents consented for her to marry him.

  The hoot of the owl told her that she would have to hurry as it was getting late. Already her mother was standing in the doorway calling to her.

  “Yada, what a strange child you are! Why don’t you hurry and meet the children? They are all playing without you,” said her mother.

  “Yes, mother, I am going now,” said Yada.

  The next morning as soon as her mother left the hut for the farm and Yada knew that her father had gone to the men’s Palaver or Council she stole away in the direction of the big woods.

  Fear clutched at her heart, but she remembered that the missionary lady had said that the great God would take care of all the little ones and she was one of those surely. Anyway she would have a whole day’s walk ahead of anyone who might follow to take her back to the village.

  She thought of the stories that her mother had told of the spirits that lived in the trees, the grass, and the flowers and so she began to talk aloud to them so that they might help her in her journey. She tried to walk around the grass and to keep from plucking the flowers so as not to offend the spirits. She knew all about them. Everything had a spirit and she had only to be real good and they would not harm her. Probably they would forgive her the disgrace that she was bringing on her family, for the whole village would point to them in scorn as people who had failed to keep their promise. Oh well she couldn’t help that now she was too far away to turn back, it was too late now to do that; she was going on to the end.

  Pretty soon the sun was so hot that it made Yada thirsty and she stopped to look for some water. She found a nice clear spring and she stooped and drank, then she got out her little lunch of cassava and fish and ate. A deer or two came out of the woods to drink, but they became frightened on seeing her and ran away. She was not afraid though for she had seen many wild animals when she went on hunting trips with her father and the men. She nestled down in the hollow place of the tree and thought of home, oh dear she was afraid that she was going to sleep, she hoped that she wasn’t, as that would just spoil everything, but how was a little girl going to keep awake—maybe her mother was worrying.

  The Brownies’ Book, May 1921.

  When Yada awoke she found herself on her own little mat in her own little hut and all her own dear folks standing over her. There were mother and father, and the old medicine man of the village who drove away the evil spirits that caused sickness. Maybe she was sick and he was going to stick the red hot needle into her to drive away the pain. It must be nearly time to begin putting on the clay for the marriage ceremony.

  But what was that her father was saying to the medicine man? She could just make out. The Big Brown Man-had-been-found-dead-and-he-guess-that-Yada-was-free. Why the spirits had helped her, hadn’t they? She was so happy now over the idea of her rescue, she believed that she would go out in the banana grove and play with the children. They were playing the same little game that they had played last night when she joined them, for she could hear one little girl’s voice as it led the others in shouting:

  Kamala hi, Kamala hi,

  Yru bah yah, yru,

  Kamala wa na gbo ti,

  Te ya ya ya!

  Te ya ya ya! ! !

  Yada’s story provides an interesting mélange of cultural values, with native customs, missionary preachings, medicine men, and High Priests. The placement of the story in The Brownies’ Book comes as something of a surprise, but the editors for the magazine were anything but predictable in their choice of subject matter.

  PART IX

  ZORA NEALE HURSTON COLLECTS AFRICAN AMERICAN FOLKLORE

  “How can any deny themselves the pleasure of my company! It’s beyond me,” Zora Neale Hurston once declared (Wall 1995, 829). That was not a question but an expression of bewilderment. Growing up in Eatonville, Florida, the fifth in a family of eight children, Hurston lost her mother—the woman who urged her to “jump at de sun”—when she was just thirteen years old. “Bare and boney of comfort and love,” she left a home life fractured by the addition of a stepmother who deeply resented her. She made her way into the world, working a series of menial jobs, restarting school, and finally landing at Howard University. She went on to Barnard College, where she was the only African American student (“I am a dark rock surged upon, overswept by a creamy sea,” she recalled of her time there [Wall 1995, 828]). After earning a BA in anthropology, she went on to two years of postgraduate work at Columbia University with Franz Boas, the preeminent anthropologist of his time.

  Scholar, storyteller, and literary luminary, Hurston was precocious as a child, adventurous as an adolescent, and fearless as an adult. Living a life of unusual mobility, she was, as a writer, to double-duty bound, committed to preserving stories from times past even as she used the sorcery of words to create her own narratives. But why t
he passion for collecting from someone who was so expert in making things up and writing them down? In retrospect, the answer seems obvious. Stories fired her imagination at a young age. She read them on her own, but she also heard them on the front porch of Joe Clark’s Eatonville store, where adults engaged in “double talk” during “lying sessions” (Wall 1995, 600). There must have come a time when she wondered why the stories told on the porch—tales in which “God, Devil, Brer Rabbit, Brer Fox, Sis Cat, Brer Bear, Lion, Tiger, Buzzard, and all the wood folk walked and talked like natural men”—never made it onto the printed page.

  Zora Neale Hurston at a recording site in Belle Glade, Florida, in 1935. Lomax Collection, Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress.

  The stories Zora Neale Hurston encountered as a child in books were uplifting yet also oddly disabling. “I was exalted by [the myth of Pluto and Persephone],” she wrote. Yet reading gave her “great anguish,” she later conceded. “My soul was with the gods and my body in the village” (Wall 1995, 583). At the same time, a love of reading became Hurston’s passport to educational opportunity. When the fifth-grader read out loud in class for two white visitors, they rewarded her with a roll of shiny new pennies and boxes of books (among them Norse tales and the Grimms’ fairy tales) along with dresses and other clothing. “I acted as if books would run away,” she confessed. At Barnard, Hurston used fairy-tale metaphors to describe the lack of magic in her own life and to capture the sluggish pace of her progress: “Oh, if you knew my dreams! . . . How I constantly live in fancy in seven league boots, taking mighty strides across the world.” Desperately feeling the need for wings, she found herself forever riding “on tortoise back” (Boyd 2003, 111).

  Happily, home-grown tales somehow lacked the dispiriting effects of myth and fairy tale. “Life took on a bigger perimeter by expanding on these things,” she recollected. “I picked up glints and gleams out of what I heard and stored it away to turn it to my own uses.” Yet there was a downside there too, for when the young Hurston made up her own stories (one in which fish greeted her as she walked across the waters of a lake), her grandmother responded to her confabulations with a face that looked “like open-faced hell.” Only the protective intervention of her mother (“she’s just playing”) prevented the child from receiving a “handful of peach hickories on her back-side” (Boyd 2003, 40).

  Hurston, like many of her contemporaries, including the young Richard Wright, faced a culture of silencing, the legacy of a world in which it had always been wise to keep your mouth shut and your thoughts to yourself. Hurston referred once to the “muteness of slavery,” a time before the “black mouth” could become “vocal” (Wall 1995, 905). Letting your imagination run wild was risky business, and expressiveness was rarely affirmed.

  The porch of Joe Clark’s store in Eatonville, Florida. By permission of Temple University Press. © 2005 by Temple University. All rights reserved.

  There is a palpable sense of relief in the first sentence of Mules and Men, when Hurston’s desire to connect with the world she abandoned and to collect the stories she heard as a child is validated. “I was very glad when somebody told me, ‘You may go and collect Negro folklore.’ ” It feels odd to us today to think that Zora Neale Hurston required official approval from an academic authority for her mission, yet her words are also a sober reminder that it took a real act of will to put together Mules and Men. Constantly forced to scrape together living expenses and dependent on the demands of academic mentors (Boas complained that Hurston’s approach was too journalistic), benefactors, and publishers, Hurston kept her dignity even as she never lost her defiant edge.

  Mules and Men is divided into two parts, with the first containing about seventy tales and the second, called “Hoodoo,” collecting conjure tales as well as information about the origins and rituals of the mystical practice. Hurston serves as visible narrator throughout, providing context, commentary, and information about the performative aspects of telling and healing. The yoking of the two activities reveals the hidden differences and consonances between them, with the one dominated by men, the other by women. Hoodoo practices serve multiple purposes, but in the main they focus on healing, securing power over adversaries, and creating love potions or spells. If there is a more powerful dose of magic in them, it is in part because African American folktales told in the Deep South had a gritty realism and cynical wisdom that often dispensed with magic as the source of solutions.

  Hurston’s informants for the folktales were for the most part “menfolk” who gathered in social spaces to swap stories or tell what they called “big old lies.” Rather than observing them from the margins and using a “scientific” method to collect the tales, Hurston became part of the conversation, actively engaging in the exchanges, participant as well as witness, being open all the while about what she was up to. One of her informants was skeptical about her project: “Who you reckon want to read all them old-time tales about Brer Rabbit and Brer Bear?” Hurston was telling “de biggest lie first thing” when she asserted that others would pay attention to these yarns. “We want to set them down before it’s too late. . . . Before everybody forgets all of ’em” (Wall 1995, 14), Hurston replied, with language that echoes the anxieties of many folklorists and ethnographers working in an age of transition from oral storytelling to print cultures.

  Hurston’s determination to collect African American folktales, whether authorized or not, shines through in her meditations on the decision to head south. Did she really need the blessing of Franz Boas? Possibly not, for she tells us: “I want to collect like a new broom” (Kaplan 2002, 116). She also reports: “I am using the vacuum method, grabbing everything I see” (Kaplan 2002, 129). These are odd metaphors, to be sure, signaling intense physical and emotional engagement with the task at hand, and at the same time linking the writing down of the tales with women’s work, with the myriad oppressive domestic chores that can wear you down. At the same time, Hurston recognizes that collecting also implies appropriation and violation. Sweeping and vacuuming up, she may also be engaging in an operation that implies eradicating even as it attempts to preserve.

  More than Boas’s approval, Hurston needed financial resources, and she found help in a wealthy New York patron, Charlotte Osgood Mason, an eccentric woman who had supported Langston Hughes, Alain Locke, Aaron Douglas, and other members of the Harlem Renaissance. Unlike Boas, whose concept of cultural relativism discredited theories about racial superiority, Mason reveled in the possibility of cultural renewal through the vital emotional and sensual power of “primitive” races. She charged Hurston with the task of collecting “all information possible, both written and oral, concerning the music, poetry, folk-lore, literature, hoodoo, conjure, manifestations of art and kindred subjects relating to and existing among North American Negroes” (Kaplan 2002, xxvi). The support was invaluable, but the price for it was high. Not only was Hurston obliged to turn over all her findings to Mason, she also had to accept edits from her white patron. “She says the dirty words must be toned down,” Hurston wrote with an almost audible sigh. Yet she also added, “Of course I knew that. But first I wanted to collect them as they are” (xxvii).

  Zora Neale Hurston sits with Rochelle French and Gabriel Brown on a porch in Eatonville, Florida. The photograph, taken by Alan Lomax in 1935, shows her listening to stories and songs. Lomax Collection, Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress.

  Hurston was both insider and outsider, a Southerner returning home with the map of Dixie “on her tongue,” as she put it, but also an educated woman from up North who planned to train “the spyglass of Anthropology” on her informants. Betwixt and between, she found herself positioned as an outsider in her own hometown: “Very little was said directly to me and when I tried to be friendly there was a noticeable disposition to fend me off.” In what she saw as a “rich field for folk-lore,” there was Zora Neale Hurston, “starving to death in the midst of plenty” (Mules and Men, 60). How did she s
olve the problem? By hinting that she was neither detective nor revenue officer (as her shiny gray Chevrolet implied) but rather a “fugitive from justice”—a fabrication that enabled her to listen to what one informant called “lies above suspicion.”

  Being an outsider had its advantages. Hurston grew up with the capers of Brer Rabbit as well as with the wisdom of Squinch Owl, but those stories fit her like “a tight chemise”: “I couldn’t see it for wearing it.” It was only when she left home that she could see herself “like somebody else and stand off and look at my garment.” She was now the Columbia-trained anthropologist (Mules and Men, 1).

  Collecting African American folklore posed special challenges. It was “not as easy to collect as it sounds,” Hurston observed. “The best source is where there are the least outside influences, and these people, being usually under-privileged, are the shyest.” She captured the exact nature of the challenges in words that remind us of her own ambiguous status as outsider and insider, alternating between “the Negro” and “we” in her description of what she famously called “feather bed resistance”:

  And the Negro, in spite of his open faced laughter, his seeming acquiescence, is particularly evasive. You see we are a polite people and we do not say to our questioners, “Get out of here!” We smile and tell him or her something that satisfies the white person because, knowing so little about us, he doesn’t know what he is missing. The Indian resists curiosity by a stony silence. The Negro offers a feather bed resistance, that is, we let the probe enter, but it never comes out. It gets smothered under a lot of laughter and pleasantries. (Mules and Men, 2–3)

  J. R. R. Tolkien once referred to the “Cauldron of Story,” and Hurston had her own metaphor, one that emphasized the nourishing aspects of tales. The stories we tell are passed around on “a great, big, old serving-platter.” “Whatever is on the plate,” she added, “must come out of the platter, but each plate has a flavor of its own because the people take the universal stuff and season it to suit themselves on the plate. And this local flavor is what is known as originality” (Wall 1995, 875). For Hurston, folklore is like the fabled table that sets itself. You can help yourself from the platter, but it will never empty, no matter how large the appetite.