We have been exiled in our own land and, as for our efforts at writing, we have been little better than silent because we have not been cunning. I find this rather astounding because I feel that Negro American folklore is very powerful, wonderful, and universal. And it became so by expressing a people who were assertive, eclectic, and irreverent before all the oral and written literature that came within its grasp. It took what it needed to express its sense of life and rejected what it could not use.
What we’ve achieved in folklore has seldom been achieved in the novel, the short story, or poetry. In the folklore we tell what Negro experience really is. We back away from the chaos of experience and from ourselves, and we depict the humor as well as the horror of living. We project Negro life in a metaphysical perspective and we have seen it with a complexity of vision that seldom gets into our writing.
RALPH ELLISON, “A Very Stern Discipline,” Harper’s, March 1967, 80.
I use folklore in my work not because I am Negro, but because writers like Eliot and Joyce made me conscious of the literary value of my folk inheritance. My cultural background, like that of most Americans, is dual (my middle name, sadly enough, is Waldo).
I knew the trickster Ulysses just as early as I knew the wily rabbit of Negro American lore, and I could easily imagine myself a pint-sized Ulysses but hardly a rabbit, no matter how human and resourceful or Negro. . . .
My point is that the Negro American writer is also an heir of the human experience which is literature, and this might well be more important to him than his living folk tradition. For me, at least, in the discontinuous, swiftly changing and diverse American culture, the stability of the Negro American folk tradition became precious as a result of an act of literary discovery.
RALPH ELLISON, “Change the Joke and Slip the Yoke,” in Shadow and Act (New York: Random House, 1964), 58
There are things that I try to incorporate into my fiction that are directly and deliberately related to what I regard as the major characteristics of Black art, wherever it is. One of which is the ability to be both print and oral literature: to combine those two aspects so that the stories can be read in silence, of course, but one should be able to hear them as well. It should try deliberately to make you stand up and make you feel something profoundly in the same way that a Black preacher requires his congregation to speak, to join him in the sermon, to behave in a certain way, to stand up and to weep and to cry and to accede or to change and to modify—to expand on the sermon that is being delivered.
TONI MORRISON, “Rootedness: The Ancestor as Foundation,” in Black Women Writers (1950–1980): A Critical Evaluation, ed. Mari Evans (New York: Anchor Press, Doubleday, 1984), 340–41
A little boy read numerous stories in his children’s books about various life and death struggles between a man and a lion. But no matter how ferociously the lion fought, each time the man emerged victorious. This puzzled the boy, so he asked his father, “Why is it, Daddy, that in all these stories the man always beats the lion, when everybody knows that the lion is the toughest cat in all the jungle?”
The father answered, “Son, these stories will always end that way until the lion learns how to write.”
JOHN OLIVER, “Black Man’s Burden,” in From My People: 400 Years of African American Folklore, ed. Daryl Cumber Dance (New York: W. W. Norton, 2002), xxxiv
After his father died, and his mother went off to the north to find work, it was the old woman, pious and accepting, who had told him the old stories, raised him in the Church, and interpreted for him the ways of the world. He remembered her story of how God had put two boxes into the world, one big and the other small. The first Negro and the first white man had seen the boxes at the same time and run towards them, but the Negro arrived first and greedily appropriated for himself the larger box. Unfortunately this box contained a plough, a hoe, a cop-axe, and a mule, while the smaller box contained a pen, paper, and a ledger book. “An’ thass why,” the old woman would conclude, her face serious, “the Nigger been aworkin’ evah since, an’ the white man he reckon up the crop.”
MIKE THELWELL, “Bright an’ Mownin’ Star,” The Massachusetts Review 8 (1966), 6–7
The key to a tale is to be found in who tells it.
JAMES BALDWIN, No Name in the Street (New York: Random House, 1972), 45
People will argue that this anecdote has not been verified. But the fact that it has taken shape and survived through the years is an unmistakable indication that it addresses a tension, explicit or latent, but real. Its persistence underscores the fact that the black world subscribes to it. In other words, when a story survives in folklore, it expresses in some way a region of the “local soul.”
FRANTZ FANON, Black Skin, White Masks, trans. Richard Philcox (New York: Grove Press, 2008), 45–46
These narratives from the southern states instruct us that talk functions in African American communities . . . as a means of having fun, getting serious, establishing credibility and consensus, securing identity, negotiating survival, keeping hope alive, suffering and celebrating the power language bestows.
JOHN EDGAR WIDEMAN, Foreword, Zora Neale Hurston, Every Tongue Got to Confess (New York: HarperCollins, 2002), xx
My lasting memories of my grandmother are of her telling me stories. I know that she told folktales and fairy tales from many parts of the world. I cried when she told Andersen’s “Little Match Girl”—it was so beautiful and so sad. But my favorites, and I’m sure they were hers as well, were the Brer Rabbit stories. I howled with laughter when Brer Rabbit asked the Tar Baby “and how does your symptoms seashuate?” . . . Her mother had told her the stories and she told them to me with love and affection as she sat in her favorite rocking chair in the middle of a large, old-fashioned kitchen. It was a way for her to entertain me as she watched her cooking. . . . Small, helpless Brer Rabbit always defeated his adversaries—the large animals—with his wit, humor, and wisdom. In my smallness I related to the clever little hare who could always get out of the most difficult situations with his sharp wit.
AUGUSTA BAKER, Introduction, Julius Lester, The Tales of Uncle Remus: The Adventures of Brer Rabbit (New York: Dial Books, 1987), vii
It would be misleading, however, to leave the impression that all of the process of writing was so solemn. For in fact there was a great deal of fun along the way. I knew that I was composing a work of fiction, a work of literary art and one that would allow me to take advantage of the novel’s capacity for telling the truth while actually telling a “lie,” which is the Afro-American folk term for an improvised story. Having worked in barbershops where that form of oral art flourished, I knew that I could draw upon the rich culture of the folk tale as well as that of the novel, and that being uncertain of my skill I would have to improvise upon my materials in the manner of a jazz musician putting a musical theme through a wild star-burst of metamorphosis.
RALPH ELLISON, Invisible Man (New York: Random House, 1952), xxii
Brer Wolf am might cunnin’,
Brer Fox am mighty sly,
Brer Terrapin an’ Possum—kinder small;
Brer Lion’s mighty vicious,
Brer B’ar he’s sorter ’spicious,
Brer Rabbit, you’s de cutes’ of ’em all.
JAMES WELDON JOHNSON, Fifty Years and Other Poems (Boston: Cornhill, 1917), 7
My grandmother used to tell me Annancy stories every night. All the stories had songs and she would sing a song over and over again, until I knew it and fell asleep singing it to myself. These were my favorite lullabies. At school my friends and I would swap Annancy stories during recess and lunch time, but before telling a story, each child had to mash (kill) an ant, or else something terrible might happen to her mother: the poor woman might turn into a bankra-basket!
WALTER JEKYLL, ed., Jamaican Song and Story: Annancy Stories, Digging Sings, Ring Tunes, and Dancing Tunes (Mineola, NY: Dover, 1966), ix
My aunt Anna, my mother’s sister, lived with us. She was as devote
d to us children as was my mother herself, and we were equally devoted to her in return. She taught us our lessons while we were little. She and my mother used to entertain us by the hour with tales of life on the Georgia plantations, of hunting fox, deer, and wildcat; of the long-tailed driving horses, Boone and Crockett, and of the riding horses, one of which was named Buena Vista in a fit of patriotic exaltation during the Mexican War; and of the queer goings-on in the Negro quarters. She knew all the “Bre’r Rabbit” stories, and I was brought up on them. One of my uncles, Robert Roosevelt, was much struck with them, and took them down from her dictation, publishing them in Harper’s, where they fell flat. This was a good many years before a genius arose who in “Uncle Remus” made the stories immortal.
THEODORE ROOSEVELT, An Autobiography (New York: Macmillan, 1913), 15
My mom died suddenly a few years back, and it kind of sent me on this journey of wanting to understand how I got to this place of writing all of these books and winning awards, and being recognized as “A Writer.” You know, who got me here? How did I get here, given the various circumstances of my life? Once my mom died, I realized the people I loved were quickly becoming ancestors. They were dying, they were getting old, they were losing memory. And with them went these stories. Growing up African American, in a culture that’s steeped in the tradition of telling stories orally, I knew that I had to speak to the people. I had to hear these stories.
JACQUELINE WOODSON, http:blogs.wsj.com/speakeasy/2014/11/21/author-jacqueline-woodson-on-memories-verse-and-the-national-book-award/
In their opposing attitudes towards roots my father and my great-uncle made me aware of a conflict in which every educated American Negro, and some who are not educated, must somehow take sides. By implication at least, one group advocates embracing the riches of the folk heritage; their opposites demand a clean break with the past and all it represents. Had I not gone home summers and hobnobbed with folk-type Negroes, I would have finished college without knowing that any Negro other than Paul Laurence Dunbar ever wrote a poem. I would have come out imagining that the story of the Negro could be told in two short paragraphs: a statement about jungle people in Africa and an equally brief account of the slavery issue in American history. The reserves of human vitality that enabled the race to survive the worst of both these experiences while at the same time making contributions to western culture remained a dark secret with my teachers, if they considered the matter at all. I was given no inkling by them, and my white classmates who needed to know such things as much as I did if we were to maintain a healthy regard for each other, in the future, were similarly denied.
ARNA BONTEMPS, “Why I Returned,” in The Old South: “A Summer Tragedy” and Other Stories of the Thirties (New York: Dodd, Mead, 1973), 73
As yet, the Negroes themselves do not fully appreciate these old slave songs. The educated classes are rather ashamed of them and prefer to sing hymns from books. This feeling is natural: they are still too close to the conditions under which the songs were produced: but the day will come when this slave music will be the most treasured heritage of the American Negro.
JAMES WELDON JOHNSON, The Autobiography of an Ex–Colored Man (Boston: Sherman, French & Co., 1912), 178
That old spontaneity out of which formerly there gushed an outpouring of the kind of stories which made Joel Chandler Harris famous seems to be lacking. There is a reticence and apology about telling stories of Rabbit and Fox which suggest sophistication and even shame. Only among children do these stories develop freely.
ARTHUR HUFF FAUSET, “Negro Folk Tales from the South (Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana),” Journal of American Folk-Lore 40 (1927), 213
I heard the Dahomeyans singing. Instantly the idea flashed into my mind: “It is a heritage.” . . . The Dahomeyan sings the music of his native Africa; the American negro spends this silver heritage of melody, but adds to it the bitter ring of grief for wrongs and adversities which only he has known. . . . If my hypothesis be correct, the man who asks where the negro got all those strange tunes of his songs is answered. They have been handed down to him from the matted jungles and sunburned deserts of Africa, from the reed huts of the Nile.
PAUL LAURENCE DUNBAR, In His Own Voice: Dramatic and Other Uncollected Works (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2002), 184
Finally, I acknowledge immense debt to the griots of Africa—where today it is rightly said that when a griot dies, it is as if a library has burned to the ground. The griots symbolize how all human ancestry goes back to some place, and some time, when there was no writing. Then, the memories and the mouths of ancient elders was the only way that early histories of mankind got passed along . . . for all of us today to know who we are.
ALEX HALEY, Acknowledgments, Roots (New York: Vanguard, 1974), viii
Storytelling—not just me telling stories, but exchanging them, learning other people’s stories—is a way for me to get inside a culture. How people listen to my stories, too, is as important as the stories I collect from others; the questions they ask are clues to their thoughts, their culture . . . Storytelling, more than anything else, is a dialogue, and through dialogue you can discover what needs to be told. Minorities, especially, need to tell their stories, because if they’re not heard, they’re not part of the national consciousness. They don’t exist.
KWAME DAWES, quoted in Pamela Petro, Sitting Up with the Dead: A Storied Journey through the American South (New York: HarperCollins, Flamingo, 2001), 133
The history of the American Negro is a most intimate part of American History. Through the very process of slavery came the building of the United States. Negro folklore, evolving within a larger culture which regarded it as inferior, was an especially courageous expression. It announced the Negro’s willingness to trust his own experience, his own sensibilities as to the definition of reality, rather than allow his masters to define crucial matters for him. His experience is that of America and the West, and is as rich a body of experience as one would find anywhere. We can view it narrowly as something exotic, folksy, or “low down” or we may identify ourselves with it and recognize it as an important segment of the larger American experience—not lying at the bottom of it, but intertwined, diffused in its very texture.
RALPH ELLISON, “The Art of Fiction,” Paris Review 8 (1955), 54
The need is great to perfect the art of storytelling, to keep alive this fund of stories that forms a body of learning of black culture and a tradition that is, truly, American. It is imperative to pass these gifts on as parts of a living heritage to those who are yet to come, for these will be the armor with which a seeker after truth may find roots, beauty, and a meaning to life. . . . “Please tell us a story from the book that’s inside you.”
I have said that these songs passed through a period when the front ranks of the Negro race would have been willing to let them die. Immediately following Emancipation those ranks revolted against everything connected with slavery, and among those things were the Spirituals. It became a sign of not being progressive or educated to sing them. This was a natural reaction, but, nevertheless, a sadly foolish one. It was left for the older generation to keep them alive by singing them at prayer meetings, class meetings, experience meetings, and revivals. . . . Today this is all changed. There is hardly a choir among the largest and richest colored churches that does not make a specialty of singing the Spirituals. This reawakening of the Negro to the value and beauty of the Spirituals was the beginning of an entirely new phase of race consciousness. It marked a change in the attitude of the Negro himself toward his own art material; the turning of his gaze inward upon his own cultural resource.
JAMES WELDON JOHNSON AND J. ROSAMOND JOHNSON, The Book of American Negro Spirituals (New York: Viking, 1954), 49
By ascribing actions to semi-mythical actors, Negroes were able to overcome the external and internal censorship that their hostile surroundings imposed upon them. The white master could believe that the rabbit stories his slaves told were mere f
igments of a childish imagination, that they were primarily humorous anecdotes depicting the “roaring comedy of animal life.” Blacks knew better. The trickster’s exploits, which overturned the neat hierarchy of the world in which he was forced to live, became their exploits; the justice he achieved, their justice; the strategies he employed, their strategies. From his adventures they obtained relief; from his triumphs they learned hope.
LAWRENCE W. LEVINE, Black Culture and Black Consciousness: Afro-American Folk Thought from Slavery to Freedom (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), 113–14
Through their folklore, black slaves affirmed their humanity and left a lasting imprint on American culture. No study of the institutional aspects of American slavery can be complete, nor can the larger dimensions of slave personality and style be adequately explored, as long as historians continue to avoid the realm in which, as Du Bois has said, “the soul of the black slave spoke to man.”
STERLING STUCKEY, “Through the Prism of Folklore: The Black Ethos in Slavery,” in Going through the Storm: The Influence of African American Art in History (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994), 17
Close reading, so called, can become a bad habit, possibly a vice, where simple appreciation is concerned, but never does it start more quarrels than when the folk are involved. So let it be said quickly that Negro folklore, like almost any other kind, can be traced in its origins to a dim past when it drew on a common cultural heritage, which most of the folk of the world appear to have shared. In any case, the telling of tales is a time honored custom in Africa. By what steps the FABLES OF AESOP (Ethiop) became the animal stories of West Africa, of the West Indies, and of the slave states of the U.S.A. is a lively question but not to the point here. What does concern us is that the slaves brought with them to the New World their ancient habit of story telling as pastime, together with a rich bestiary.
ARNA BONTEMPS, Introduction, Book of Negro Folklore (New York: Dodd, Mead, 1958), viii
This book has to do with my early beginning. For it starts way back when, with my being the kind of child I was. I was the child who listened closely to grown-up women talking. To this day, I remember how my grandmother, my aunts and great-aunts and elder cousins looked when they talked. I’ve never forgotten how they moved their hands and gestured with their arms. The sounds of their voices and much of what they said stays with me.
The Annotated African American Folktales Page 71
