The Annotated African American Folktales

by Henry Louis Gates

They all began to laugh and grabbed up their hoes and started out.

  “Ain’t that funny?” Aunt Diskie laughed and hugged herself with secret laughter.21 “Us got all the advantage, and Old Massa think he got us tied!”

  The crowd broke out singing as they went off to work. The day didn’t seem hot like it had before. Their gift song came back into their memories in pieces, and they sang about glittering new robes, and harps, and the work flew.22

  IV

  So after a while, freedom came. Therefore High John de Conquer has not walked the winds of America for seventy-five years now. His people had their freedom, their laugh and their song. They have traded it to the other Americans for things they could use like education and property, and acceptance. High John knew that that was the way it would be, so he could retire with his secret smile into the soil of the South and wait.

  The thousands upon thousands of humble people who still believe in him, that is, in the power of love and laughter to win by their subtle power, do John reverence by getting the root of the plant in which he has taken up his secret dwelling, and “dressing” it with perfume, and keeping it on their person or in their houses in a secret place. It is there to help them overcome things they feel that they could not beat otherwise, and to bring them the laugh of the day. John will never forsake the weak and the helpless, nor fail to bring hope to the hopeless. That is why they believe, and so they do not worry. They go on and laugh and sing. Things are bound to come out right tomorrow. That is the secret of Negro song and laughter.

  So the brother in black offers to these United States the source of courage that endures, and laughter. High John de Conquer. If the news from overseas reads bad, and the nation inside seems like it is stuck in the Tar Baby, listen hard, and you will hear John de Conquer treading on his singing-drum. You will know then, no matter how bad things look now, it will be worse for those who seek to oppress us. Even if your hair comes yellow, and your eyes are blue, John de Conquer will be working for you just the same. From his secret place, he is working for all America now. We are all his kinfolks. Just be sure our cause is right, and then you can lean back and say, “John de Conquer would know what to do in a case like this, and then he would finish it off with a laugh.”

  White America, take a laugh out of our black mouths, and win! We give you High John de Conquer.

  Click here to advance to the next section of the text.

  1 nationally and culturally, we are as white as the next one: Hurston courted controversy, and this particular statement reminds us of how contentious her sentiments can be.

  2 in this terrible struggle: Hurston is referring here to the unifying effects of World War II and intimating that High John can function as a universal hope-bringer, a move that some might consider a betrayal of her cultural heritage.

  3 knew him in the flesh: The word becomes flesh, and John becomes something more than human, a charismatic leader who incarnates hope in the midst of despair, a beacon of freedom that lights up the world of hard labor and promises liberation.

  4 No parading drum: Hurston draws a contrast between drums used for displays of military might and the singing-drum used for communal purposes. The “drum-beat” is an acoustical means of connecting with an ancestral heritage.

  5 Old Cuffy: a generic slave’s name

  6 Old Massa couldn’t get the best of him: High John de Conquer becomes the spiritual father of the many slaves who use their wits to lighten their labors by besting Old Massa.

  7 a laugh and a song: For Hurston, redemption and liberation came through beauty, poetry, and song as much as through political action. Laughter enables the oppressed to rise up above their lot.

  8 the laugh-provoking Brer Rabbit: Among John’s many trickster disguises is Brer Rabbit.

  9 He who carries his heart in his sword must perish: The essay abounds with biblical allusions, among them: “They that take the sword shall perish with the sword” (Matthew 26:52).

  10 went back to Africa: Hurston presents John as an African cultural hero, a god connected to nature by the root that he leaves behind in his “American dwelling.”

  11 the Big Surrender: Aunt Shady Anne refers, not without a touch of irony (self-conscious or not), to the end of the Civil War as a time of “surrender” rather than victory.

  12 leave your old work-tired bodies: What John proposes is similar to the practices of witches, who slip off their skins and go out riding in the night.

  13 could see from the cool veranda: With poetic economy of means, Hurston reveals the cruelties of slavery, with masters comfortably lounging in the shade, keeping an eye on weary laborers during a brief respite from “chopping cotton.”

  14 reach inside yourselves: Imagination produces garments and songs of superlative beauty, but always with the poignant reminder that reality will not be transformed.

  15 great black crow: In Native American lore, Crow is the creature who brings daylight, and also the bird who, in bringing fire to humans, singes his shimmering rainbow feathers, turning “black as tar,” and loses his melodious voice.

  16 a pearly blue, like ten squillion big pearl jewels dissolved in running gold: Beauty is described with radiant luminosity, and squillion, which designates a large, indefinite number, enlarges and expands the visionary beauty of blues, gold, and pearly hues.

  17 golden fleece: A symbol of royal power and authority, the golden fleece came from a winged ram held in Colchis. Jason and the Argonauts set out on a quest for the fleece on the orders of Pelias, King of Iolcus in Greek mythology.

  18 married the Devil’s youngest daughter: Among the many tales about John the Conquer is a variant of a tale type known to folklorists as “a girl helps the hero to flee.” The story appears in its most popular form as the French “Jean, the Soldier, and Eulalie, the Devil’s Daughter.” Echoing the mythical account of Jason and Medea, it recounts tasks carried out by the hero with the help of a woman connected to the antagonist. John the Conquer and the Jack who marries the Devil’s daughter are folkloric cousins who count the Argonaut Jason as a distant ancestor.

  19 fit the words and feelings that you had: God’s gift of music and improvisational song provides an expressive medium, an outlet for words and feelings that are not allowed to be made manifest in the world of slavery.

  20 Don’t tell him nothing: The exhortation to remain silent about what is in your mind had a powerful afterlife long after slavery came to an end.

  21 secret laughter: Secret laughter may, of course, not go far toward undoing the harrowing physical effects of picking cotton from dawn to dusk under a hot sun.

  22 and the work flew: The irony of the ending could not have escaped listeners, with work flying by but the slaves moored to the ground, laboring with their hoes.

  STERLING A. BROWN, “NEGRO FOLK EXPRESSION”

  Phylon 11.4 (1950), 318-27

  Sterling A. Brown (1901–1989) was born in Washington, D.C., where his father, Sterling N. Brown, a former slave, worked as a minister and professor at Howard University. In 1932 Brown published his first book of poems, Southern Road, a collection that focused on the lives of poor blacks living in rural regions. Considered a part of the Harlem Renaissance, even though he spent most of his life in Washington, D.C., Brown’s students included Toni Morrison and Amiri Baraka. His rich repertoire of essays and poems meant that his literary influence extended well beyond the classroom.

  NEGRO FOLK EXPRESSION

  For a long time Uncle Remus and his Brer Rabbit tales stood for the Negro folk and their lore. One thing made clear by the resurrection of Uncle Remus in Walt Disney’s Song of the South is the degree to which he belonged to white people rather than to the Negro folk. A striking contrast to the favored house servant is such a folk character as Huddie Ledbetter, better known as Leadbelly, whose knowingness is stark rather than soft, and whose audience (certainly in his formative years) was his own kind of people, not the white quality. The bitter brew that Leadbelly concocted in the levee camps and jooks
and prisons differs from the sugary potions that Remus and the other “uncles” dispensed. Both Uncle Remus and Leadbelly portray sides of the Negro folk, but to round out the portraiture Bessie Smith, Josh White, the Gospel Singing Two Keys, and such big old liars as those heard by E. C. L. Adams in the Congaree swamps and by Zora Neale Hurston in Central Florida are also needed. In any consideration of American Negro folk expression it is important to realize that even before Joel Chandler Harris revealed the antics of Brer Rabbit to America, John Henry was swinging his hammer in the Big Bend Tunnel on the C. & O. Road.

  There is rich material on hand for a revaluation of the Negro folk. Out of penitentiaries in the deep South, John and Alan Lomax have brought the musical memories of singers with such names as Iron Head, Clear Rock, and Lightning. From what is more truly folk culture these men and others like John Hammond, Willis James, and John Work have brought hidden singers and songs. The Library of Congress Archives of Folk Music are crammed with solid stuff; the large recording companies are following the lead of small companies like Disc, Folkways and Circle in issuing albums of Negro folk music. Ten years after her tragic death in the Delta, Bessie Smith has been honored in a Town Hall Concert (even now I can hear her surprised cry: “Lord, Lord, Lord!”). And in Carnegie Hall Big Bill has sung blues from the sharecropping country, and Josh White has sung both mellow-blues and sardonic mockery, and Blind Sonny Terry has blown on his wild harmonica the joys of the fox hunt, of a high-balling train, and the wailing fear of a lost wanderer in a southern swamp. Folk singers of the spirituals, unknown yesterday, have their names placarded now; Harlemites pass around the name of Mahalia Jackson as they used to do that of Mamie Smith; and in the Harlem dance-halls where jazz bands “cut” each other on Saturday nights, spiritual singers battle each other on Sundays to cheering crowds. This commercializing will affect the genuineness of the stuff, but it is getting a hearing for folk material. And an audience for the authentic is growing.

  All of this is part of the generally awakened interest in American folk culture, indicated by the diligence and popularity of collectors, anthologists, musicologists, and interpreters. Before its demise the WPA Federal Projects laid in a fine backlog of American folkstuff and World War II, of course, quickened interest in the American past. Though the furore may have something of the faddish about it, American folklore stands to gain more from enthusiasm and careful study than from the earlier disdain and neglect. The Negro creators of an important segment of American folklore should no longer be subjected to the condescension of the “oh so quaint,” “so folksy,” school. Looking on Negro lore as exotic curiosa becomes almost impossible if the body of available material is thoughtfully considered. Outmoded now are those collectors who could or would find only ingratiating aunties and uncles, most of whose lore consisted in telling how good their white folks were.

  With the discarding of the old simplifications, the study of the Negro folk becomes complicated. The field of folklore in general is known to be a battle area, and the Negro front is one of the hottest sectors. One sharply contested point is the problem of definition of the folk; another that of origins. Allies are known to have fallen out and skirmished behind the lines over such minor matters as identifying John Hardy with John Henry. But this is not a battle piece. In general the vexed problems of origin are left for others, more competent in that area; strict delimitation of the concepts “folk,” “folk literature” and “folk music” is not the purpose here. This essay aims instead to tell what the “folk Negro” (as most students understand the term)1 has expressed in story and proverb and song. It is well known that folk culture among Negroes is breaking up. Some of the material (in discussing the blues, for instance) has been transplanted in the cities, but, though inexactly folk, it is used because its roots drew first sustenance from the folk culture.

  I: FOLK TALES AND APHORISMS

  Collectors, both scholarly and amateur, have long paid tribute to the richness of Negro folk expression. Enthusiasts like Roark Bradford and Zora Hurston overpraise Negro folk speech at the expense of the speech of white Americans. According to Bradford, “The most ignorant Negro can get more said with a half-dozen words than the average United States Senator can say in a two-hour speech.”2 But folk should be compared with folk; and considering the speech of white America to be barren and bleak does injustice to a large part of American folklore, to the gusto of the tall tale, for instance. The folk Negro’s imaginativeness and pith can easily be recognized; they stand in no need of dubious comparisons.

  In Africa the telling of tales is a time honored custom. The slaves brought the custom with them to the New World. According to the latest scholarship of Melville Herskovits, the body of tales they brought has been retained in relatively undisturbed fashion.3 These tales were not dangerous; they were a way to ease the time; they could entertain the master class, especially the children. So they were not weeded out as were many of the practices of sorcery, or discouraged as were the tribal languages. In the African cycles the heroes were the jackal or fox, the hare, the tortoise, and the spider. The last, a sort of hairy tarantula, is little used in the lore of the southern Negro, but is hero of the Anansi tales of Jamaica. The African fox, more like our jackal, has become the American fox; the African hare, “Cunnie Rabbit,” really a chevrotain, water deerlet, or gazelle, has become the American rabbit with the word cunnie Englished into cunning, and the African tortoise has become the American dry-land turtle or terrapin. In America, Brer Terrapin is a hero second only to Brer Rabbit whom he bests occasionally. Of the hero’s victims the African hyena has become the American wolf, and the American fox and bear have joined the losing side. African animals—lions, leopards, tigers, and monkeys—are still in the cast of characters.

  Close parallels to American Negro tales have been found extensively in Africa and the Caribbeans. Nevertheless, folklorists are wary of finding Africa the place of ultimate origin of all of the tales. Many of the basic plots are of great age and spread. Oddly enough, the three stories that Joel Chandler Harris considered unquestionably African, namely: “How the Rabbit Makes a Riding-horse of the Fox,” “Why the Alligator’s Back Is Rough,” and “The Tar Baby Story,” have close European counterparts, dating back hundreds of years. “The Tar Baby Story” has been traced to India through a study of nearly three hundred versions. According to Stith Thompson, it reached the Negroes and Indians of America by several paths, the main one being “from India to Africa, where it is a favorite and where it received some characteristic modifications before being taken by slaves to America.”4 In the Congo version a jackal is stuck to a tortoise covered with beeswax; among the Pueblo Indians a coyote catches a rabbit with a gum-covered wooden image.

  To indicate the problems facing source-hunters, one of the most popular European stories might be considered here. In the Reynard cycle, and reappearing in Grimm’s Fairy Tales, is the plot of the fox who played godfather in order to sneak away and eat food that he and the bear have stored in common. Asked the name of his godchildren (for he leaves three times) he answers Well Begun, Half Done and Done. Several collectors found the story in South Carolina, with Brer Rabbit cheating Brer Wolf, and the children variously named: “Fus’ Beginnin’,” “Half-Way” and “Scrapin’ de Bottom,” or “Buh Start-um,” “Buh Half-um” and “Buh Done-Um.” Easy attribution to American slaveowners, however, comes up sharp against the numerous African versions in one of which the rabbit fools his working partner, the antelope, with non-existent children named Uncompleted One, Half-completed One, and Completed One.

  All of this illustrates the underlying unity of Old World culture. Africa then, is not the starting place of all the favorite Negro tales, but was a way-station where they had an extended stop-over. The long association with Asiatic Moslems in East Africa and the penetration of European powers into West Africa beginning with the slave trade affected the native tradition of tale telling. According to Stith Thompson, “The African finds enjoyment in nearly every kind of
European folktale. He may do some queer things with them and change them around so that little more than a skeleton of the original remains and so that it takes the expert eye to discover that they are not actually native. On the other hand he may take the tale over completely with all its foreign trappings.” Nevertheless Thompson believes that “the great majority of their [African] tales have certainly had their origin on the soil of central or southern Africa.”5 Regardless of original source, whether in Europe or Africa, American Negro fables have been so modified with new beasts and local color added, different themes, and different experiences, that an almost new, certainly a quite different thing results. Such is the way of written literature where authors took “their own where they found it,” and such is even more the way of folktales.

  “Den Br’ Hoss, an’ Br’ Jack-ass, an’ Br’ Cow an’ all dem, crowd close roun’ Br’ Dog, for dem was like yard-chillen, dey is peaceable an’ sort o’ scary. An’ all de creeters what stan’ up for Br’ Gator scatter out wide away from dere, for dem was woods-chillen, rovin’ an’ wild.”6 Thus, according to a South Carolina tale, started the big row in the world between the tame and the wild creatures that is never going to stop.

  This illustrates the process. The basic incident, the war between domestic and wild animals, is widely used in folktales, from the Orient to the Reynard cycle. But the details, the “entrimmins,” according to Uncle Remus, the phrases “yard chillen,” and “woods chillen,” and the naming of their traits, give the flavor of the low country, where Samuel Stoney and Gertrude Shelby heard the above yarn.

  Public recognition of the wealth of American Negro stories came in the late eighties with the appearance of Joel Chandler Harris’s Uncle Remus Tales. A few animal tales had seen print earlier, but Harris was the first to give a substantial number. Soon he was besieged with correspondents who told him new tales or variants that they had heard from Negroes. Harris deserves the credit of a pioneer. He insisted that he gave the tales “uncooked,” but there is too much evidence of his alterations to accept his word. The tales are not genuine folktales, in the sense of by the folk for the folk, for they are told by an old Uncle to entertain Young Marster. In line with literary trends of the time, Harris made them more sentimental and genteel and less racy than the folk tell them; he gives much about Negro life and character, valuable for purposes of local color but likely to be taken for granted by the folk; and he uses the devices of a skillful short story writer. Simpler and starker tales, with fewer alterations, have been taken from their native habitat by collectors such as C. C. Jones, Jr. (a contemporary of Harris), Ambrose Gonzales, Elsie Clews Parsons, Guy Johnson, and A. W. Eddins. Negro collectors are few and far between; Charles W. Chesnutt fashioned skillful short stories out of folk beliefs in The Conjure Woman (1889); and Thomas Talley, pioneer folk-collector, Arthur Huff Fauset, Zora Neale Hurston and J. Mason Brewer have published collections. Stella Brewer Brooks has written the best study of Joel Chandler Harris as folklorist. But educated Negroes by and large have not been greatly interested. From Harris’s day to the present, collectors, being of different race or class or both, have been viewed by the folk with natural distrust.