The Annotated African American Folktales

by Henry Louis Gates

  Nevertheless, a considerable number of tales has been recorded. Many are animal tales; of these all are not strictly fables, which convey an ostensible moral, though some are. Whereas the more efficient Fox, crafty and cruel, hypocritical and scheming, amused the European peasantry, the American Negro slave took Brer Rabbit for hero. The harmless scary creature he invested with a second nature, and made him a practical joker with a streak of cruelty, a daring hunter of devilment, a braggart, a pert wit, a glutton, a lady’s man, a wily trickster, knowing most of the answers, and retaining of his true characteristics only his speed on the getaway. Animals noted for greater strength and ferocity are his meat. Brer Fox has degenerated from crafty Reynard into something of a fool, though still a worthy opponent, but Brer Wolf and Brer Bear are numskulls. Commentators have long considered these tales of cunning overcoming strength, of the weakling out-smarting the bully, as a compensatory mechanism, a kind of oblique revenge, the wish fulfillment of an ironic people who could see few ways out of oppression.7 It might be pointed out that none of the hero-animals in Africa are quite so helpless as the American rabbit. It is unlikely that the slaves did not see pertinence to their own experiences in these tales. Outsmarting was one of the few devices left them. So they made heroes out of the physically powerless who by good sense and quick wit overcame animals of brute strength who were not right bright. “You ain’t got no cause to be bigger in de body, but you sho’ is got cause to be bigger in de brain.”

  With his pardonable fondness for the creature, Joel Chandler Harris placed Brer Rabbit in the limelight. He is less focused on in other collections, though still the star performer. The theme of weakness overcoming strength through cunning remains uppermost. Brer Squirrel escapes from Brer Fox by reminding him to say grace; when the fox closes his eyes, the squirrel is treetop high. Brer Goat foils Brer Wolf, never trusting him from that day to this. Brer Rooster outeats Brer Elephant: “it ain’t de man wid de bigges’ belly what kin eat de longest.” Animals and birds of everyday observation swell the company: the officious yard dog, the fierce bulldog, the hound, another fall-guy for the rabbit; the horse, the mule, the jackass, the bull, the stupid ox; the deer, the raccoon, possum and squirrel; the frog, the crawfish, and many kinds of snakes; the turkey buzzard, the partridge, the blue-jay, the marsh-hen; the mosquito, the hornet, the gnat.

  Many tales drive home a point about mankind based on the animals’ observed traits. The gnat, riding the bull’s horn, says: “I gwine now. Ain’t you glad you don’t have to tote me puntop yo’ horn no more?” The bull answers: “I never know when you come, and I ain’t gonna miss you when you gone.” The possum tells the raccoon that he can’t fight because he is ticklish and has to laugh when in the clutch of his enemy, but the raccoon sees through the rationalization. With his belly full, running in the pasture, Brer Mule dreams that his father was a race-horse, but harnessed to a heavy cart and hungry, he recalls that his father was only a jackass. The ox rebukes the axle wheels for groaning; he is the one pulling the load, though he refuses to cry out. “Some men holler if briar scratch his foot, and some men lock their jaws if a knife is sticking in their heart.”8

  Ingenious explanations of animal characteristics and behavior occur in many tales. You never see a blue-jay on Friday because that is the day for his weekly trip to hell; the woodpecker’s head is red because Noah caught him pecking holes in the ark and whipped his head with a hammer; the possum’s tail is bare because, wanting music on the ark, Ham used the hairs to string a banjo; the alligator’s mouth is all out of whack because the dog, God’s apprentice helper, was either careless or cruel while wielding the knife in the week of creation, making the alligator and dog eternal foes; the porpoise’s tail is set crossways because with his tail straight up and down the porpoise was too fast, he outsped the sun; Sis Nanny Goat, self sacrificing, allowed all of the other animals to get their tails first, hence, “Kind heart give Sis Nanny Goat a short tail”; the wasp is so short-patienced because he thinks everybody is laughing at his tiny stomach (he can’t laugh himself because he would “bust spang in two”).

  Though performing other functions in the Old World, animal tales are often considered by American Negroes as “stories for the young uns.” Animal stories were by no means the only stock, even in slavery. More realistic tales made direct use of unallegorized human experience. In coastal Georgia the folk still remember the tale of the Eboes who, hating slavery, marched singing into the tidal river and were drowned. The name of Ebo’s Landing gives historic color to the tradition. The same folk tell also of the magic hoe that worked itself, and of the flying Africans who changed into birds and soared away to their homeland rather than take the overseer’s whipping. Modelled on tales in African folklore, in the New World they take on the quality of dreams of escape.

  More widespread in Negro folklore are the tales of the trickster Jack or John. In slavery days he outwits not only the devil but Ole Marster, Ole Miss, and the “patterollers.” More recently his competitors have been the grasping landlord, the browbeating tough, and the highhanded sheriff, deputy, and policeman. Sometimes Jack, like Brer Rabbit, comes to grief himself, but oftener he outsmarts the opposition or makes his dare and is long gone. Jack schemes to get out of a whipping or to obtain freedom. Sometimes he is in cahoots with a sharp witted master to take advantage of gullible neighbors. Sometimes the repartee is sharp; a master tells that he dreamt of a heaven set aside for Negroes and found it to be run-down and generally messed-up; Jack retorts with his dream of white folk’s heaven, all gleaming and glittering, with streets of gold, but without a solitary person in the place! The tellers aim at comedy, often richly satiric; the hardships of slavery are casually mentioned as if taken for granted by teller and audience; but Ole Marster and Ole Miss and the slaves themselves are ribbed with gusto, with toughminded humor. Pretentiousness and boasting ride for a fall; sentimentality is pricked; all the characters, white and black, master and slave, come “under the same gourd-vine,” all are “made out of meat.”

  A favorite object of lampooning, familiar in general folklore, was the old maid, the master’s sister. One of the fanciful plots has her turning into a squinch owl, her long-drawn wails voicing her yearning for a husband, but other tales satirize her bossiness and silliness in down-to-earth situations. The Irish were also satirized. Comparative newcomers with their own brogues and dirty jobs, the Irish were characterized as big dunces. Here, of course, the American Negro shares an Anglo-Saxon tradition. The “po’ buckra,” the “poor white trash,” the “cracker,” came in for contempt and hostility in Negro tales, but the stories about them were not often funny.

  Exaggeration in the hearty tradition of American tall talk is pervasive. In Zora Hurston’s recording, mosquitoes sing like alligators, eat up the cow and then ring the bell for the calf. The plague of the boll-weevil is graphically symbolized: “Old Man Boll Weevil whipped little Willie Boll Weevil ’cause he couldn’t carry two rows at a time.” Land is so rich that the next morning after a mule is buried, “he had done sprouted li’l jackasses”; it is so poor that “it took nine partridges to holler Bob White” or needed “ten sacks of fertilizer before a church congregation could raise a tune on it.” A snail is sent for a doctor. After seven years his sick wife heard a scuffling at the door and cries out her relief. The snail says, “Don’t try to rush me—ah’ ain’t gone yet.” He had taken all that time to get to the door. Weather is so hot “till two cakes of ice left the icehouse and went down the streets and fainted.”9

  Quite common are the “why” stories; jocular explanation of the creation of the world, the position of woman, the origin of the races. One teller informed Zora Hurston: “And dats why de man makes and de woman takes. You men is still braggin’ about yo’ strength and de women is sitting on de keys [to kitchen, bedroom, and cradle] and lettin’ you blow off ’til she git ready to put de bridle on you.” But another informant explains why “de sister in black works harder than anybody else in the world. De
white man tells de nigger to work and he takes and tells his wife.”10

  Mythological tales explain the origin of the ocean, where the hurricane comes from, why the wind and waters are at war, why the moon’s face is smutty. Others enlarge material from the Bible. Ingenuity is especially exercised on filling in gaps in the creation story. Up in heaven a newcomer tells of the havoc of the Johnstown flood to a bored listener who turns out to be Noah. Peter is humanized more than the other apostles: famished, he brings a huge rock to the Lord to turn into bread and is nonplussed when he hears the pronouncement: “And upon this rock will I found my church.” Religion is treated freely, even irreverently, but not to the degree of Roark Bradford’s Ol’ Man Adam an’ His Chillun, which is synthetic, not genuine folk-stuff.

  Tales about the origin of the races leave little room for chauvinism about a chosen people. The slaves knew at first hand that the black man had a hard road to travel and they tell of the mistakes of creation with sardonic fatalism. Uncle Remus tells how all men were once Negroes, “en ’cordin’ ter all de counts w’at I years fokes ’uz gittin’ long ’bout ez well in dem days as dey is now.” One of Zora Hurston’s informants told her that “God made de world and de white folks made work.” Another said that the Negro outraced the white man and took the larger of two bundles that God had let down in the road. But the smaller bundle had a writing-pen and ink in it, while the larger bundle had a pick and shovel and hoe and plow and cop-axe in it. “So ever since then de nigger been out in de hot sun, usin’ his tools and de white man been sittin’ up figgerin’, ought’s a ought, figger’s a figger; all for de white man, none for de nigger.”11

  Irony has been in the stories from the earliest recorded versions, but recent collectors have found it less veiled. Zora Hurston retells the yarn of the dogs’ convention where a law was passed not to run rabbits any more. But Brer Rabbit stayed cautious: “All de dogs ain’t been to no convention and anyhow some of dese fool dogs ain’t got no better sense than to run all over dat law and break it up. De rabbit didn’t go to school much and he didn’t learn but three letters and that trust no mistake. Run every time de bush shake.”12 She tells another of the slave who saved his master’s children from drowning. Old Master sets him free. As he walks off, old master calls to him: “John, de children love yuh.” . . . “John, I love yuh.” . . . “And Missy like yuh!” . . . “But ’member, John, youse a nigger.” John kept right on stepping to Canada, answering his master “every time he called ’im, but he consumed on with his bag.”

  The age-old tale of the deceptive bargain gets added point down in the Brazos Bottom. Brer Rabbit, father of a large, hungry family, is sharecropping for Brer Bear who has him in his power. Brer Rabbit is forced to promise Brer Bear everything that grows above the ground. But that year he planted potatoes. The second year, Brer Bear settles for root crops, but Brer Rabbit planted oats. The third year, Brer Bear claimed both tops and roots, leaving Brer Rabbit only the middles. As a fine climax, Brer Rabbit planted corn. Another old tale of the goose that the fox threatened to kill for swimming on “his” lake, now ends with Sis Goose taking her just cause to court. “When dey got dere, de sheriff, he was a fox, and de judge, he was a fox, and de attorneys, dey was foxes, and all de jurymen, dey was foxes, too. An’ dey tried ole sis goose, and dey convicted her and dey executed her, and dey picked her bones.”13

  There is similar edge in numerous jokes about sharecropping and the law. Landlords who “figure with a crooked pencil” are derided. One sharecropper held back a couple of bales from the reckoning. When told, after elaborate figuring, that he had come out even, he expressed his happiness that he could sell his extra bales. The landlord then cursed him to hell and back, telling him that he had to do all that hard figuring over again. When another sharecropper was told that his return was zero after making a bumper crop, he shut up like a clam. The landlord, distrusting his silence, insisted that he tell him what he was thinking. The sharecropper finally said: “I was just thinking, Mister Charlie, that the next time I say ‘Giddap’ to a mule again, he’s gonna be setting on my lap.” Yarnspinners weep in mimicry of the landlord who, in the early days of the New Deal, had to give government checks to his tenants, crying: “After all I’ve done for you, you so ungrateful that you cashed those checks.”

  Negroes borrow, of course, from the teeming storehouse of American jokes. Jokes about Negroes are of three types. The first includes those told by whites generally to whites (the kind collected by Irvin Cobb, for instance, and the stand-bys for after-dinner speakers, with such black face minstrelsy props as watermelon, chicken, razors, excessive fright, murder of the English language, etc.). Some of these may be found among Negroes who will belittle their own for a laugh as quickly as any other people will, but they are not the most popular. The white man’s mark on a Negro joke often does not help it. A second type is told by Negroes to whites to gain a point. Sometimes verging on sarcasm, they use the license of the court fool. Then there are jokes strictly for a Negro audience, what John Dollard calls “part of the arsenal of reprisal against white people.”14

  Often too, the joke lays bare what the tellers consider a racial weakness and the outsider must not be let into the family secrets, as it were. Sometimes it pleads the racial cause. Jokes ridicule the myth of “separate but equal”; a Negro gets off free in traffic court by telling the judge that he saw whites drive on the green light so he knew the red light was for him. Hat-in-hand Negroes and workers too zealous on the job are satirized. During the war the jokes, or more truly anecdotes, took on a grimmer tone. One folk hero became the soldier who after being badgered on a bus, faced his tormentors and said, “Well, if I am going to die for democracy, I might as well die for some of it down here in Georgia.” One repeated line concerned an epitaph: “Here lies a black man killed by a yellow man while fighting to save democracy for the white man.” Many of these anecdotes are bitter; some, dealing with sadistic sheriffs and mobs are gruesome; yet they produce laughter, a sort of laughter out of hell. But they are shared by educated as well as uneducated and though passed along by word of mouth, they take us somewhat afield from the folk.

  NOTES

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  1.That is, as a rural people, living in a kind of isolation, without easy contact with the outside world. Sometimes they are cut off from progress geographically (especially the sea-islanders or swamp dwellers or the people on back-county plantations). But even rural Negroes with better communication and transportation facilities are socially isolated by segregation and lack of educational and economic advantages. Unlettered, folk Negroes have a local culture transmitted orally rather than by the printed page.

  2.Roark Bradford, Ol’ Man Adam an’ His Chillun (New York, 1928), p. xiv.

  3.Melville Herskovits, The Myth of the Negro Past (New York, 1941), p. 275.

  4.Stith Thompson, The Folk Tale (New York, 1947), pp. 225ff.

  5.Ibid., pp. 284–286.

  6.Samuel Gaillard Stoney and Gertrude Mathews Shelby, Black Genesis (New York, 1930), p. 21.

  7.For a very suggestive essay on this point, F. Bernard Wolfe, “Uncle Remus and the Malevolent Rabbit,” in Commentary, July, 1949 (Vol. 8, No. 1), 31–41.

  8.The quoted lines in the above paragraph are taken from Ambrose E. Gonzales, With Æsop Along the Black Border (Columbia [South Carolina]: The State Company, 1924), passim.

  9.The quoted lines in the above paragraph are taken from Zora Neale Hurston, Mules and Men (Philadelphia, 1935), passim.

  10.Ibid., passim.

  11.Ibid., pp. 101–102.

  12.Ibid., p. 147.

  13.A. W. Eddins, “Brazos Bottom Philosophy,” Publications of the Texas Folk Lore Society, No. II, 1923, edited by J. Frank Dobie. Austin, Texas: Texas Folk-Lore Society, pp. 50–51.

  14.John Dollard, Caste and Class in Southern Town (New Haven, 1937), p. 308.

  POETS AND PHILOSOPHERS REMEMBER STORIES

  Meditations on
African American Lore

  There are two lasting gifts we can give our children—one is roots, the other is wings.

  —ANONYMOUS

  Folklore is the boiled-down juice of human living. It does not belong to any special time, place, nor people. No country is so primitive that it has no lore, and no country has yet become so civilized that no folklore is being made within its boundaries.

  ZORA NEALE HURSTON, Go Gator and Muddy the Water: Writings by Zora Neale Hurston from the Federal Writers’ Project (New York: W. W. Norton, 1999), 69