The Annotated African American Folktales

by Henry Louis Gates

  From that day to this I have had no more to say in favor of human slavery.

  JOHN CASPER BRANNER, “A Mere Matter of the Feelings,” How and Why Stories (New York: Henry Holt, 1921), 3–7

  The Creole Storyteller is a fine example of this paradoxical situation: the master knows of his tales and allows him to tell them, and sometimes even listens to them himself, so the Storyteller must take care to use language that is opaque, devious—its significance broken up into a thousand sibylline fragments. His narrative turns around long digressions that are humorous, erotic, often even esoteric. His dialogue with his audience is unceasing, punctuated with onomatopoeias and sound effects intended not only to hold his listeners’ attention but also to help camouflage any dangerously subversive content. . . . The Storyteller’s object is almost to obscure as he reveals. To form and inform through the hypnotic power of the voice, the mystery of the spoken word.

  PATRICK CHAMOISEAU, Creole Folktales (New York: New Press, 1994), xiii

  It is only in his music, which Americans are able to admire because a protective sentimentality limits their understanding of it, that the Negro in America has been able to tell his story. It is a story which otherwise has yet to be told and which no American is prepared to hear. As is the inevitable result of things unsaid, we find ourselves until today oppressed with a dangerous and reverberating silence; and the story is told, compulsively, in symbols and signs, in hieroglyphs; it is revealed in Negro speech and in that of the white majority and in their different frames of reference.

  JAMES BALDWIN, Notes of a Native Son (Boston: Beacon, 1955), 24

  As a form that emerged from a fluid, improvisatory tradition, the African-American tale helped forge a simultaneous sense of racial solidarity and American identity. Usually, the tales were told to exclusively African-American audiences. These storytelling performances created a community of speech, interpretation, and response among the slaves and, later on, among freemen and women. Ironically, the dehumanizing conditions of slavery, its prohibitions against literacy, against African language and ritual, reinforced the communal values of the oral tradition. Variations on the old African animal stories and the new American tales of Jack the slave and his master fed what Sterling Brown calls the “abiding deep well of Negro folk experience.” At the same time there was a progressive, to-be-continued feeling about many of the tales, which opened the potential for action implied by the call-and-response pattern.

  JOHN F. CALLAHAN, In the African-American Grain: The Pursuit of Voice in Twentieth-Century Black Fiction (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1988), 26

  There is . . . a culture of the Negro which is his and has been addressed to him; a culture which has, for good or ill, helped to clarify his consciousness and create emotional attitudes which are conducive to action. This culture has stemmed mainly from two sources (1) the Negro church; and (2) the folklore of the Negro people. . . .

  It was, however, in a folklore moulded out of rigorous and inhuman conditions of life that the Negro achieved his most indigenous and complete expression. Blues, spirituals, and folktales recounted from mouth to mouth; the whispered words of a black mother to her black daughter on the ways of men; the confidential wisdom of a black father to his black son; the swapping of sex experiences on street corners from boy to boy in the deepest vernacular; work songs sung under blazing suns—all these formed the channels through which the racial wisdom flowed.

  One would have thought that Negro writers in the last century of striving at expression would have continued and deepened this folk tradition, would have tried to create a more intimate and yet a more profoundly social system of artistic communication between them and their people. But that illusion that they could escape through individual achievement the harsh lot of their race swung Negro writers away from any such path. Two separate cultures sprang up; one for the Negro masses, unwritten and unrecognized; and the other for the sons and daughters of a rising Negro bourgeoisie, parasitic and mannered. . . .

  In the absence of fixed and nourishing forms of culture, the Negro has a folklore which embodies the memories and hopes of his struggle for freedom. Not yet caught in paint or stone, and as yet but feebly depicted in the poem and novel, the Negroes’ most powerful images of hope and despair still remain in the fluid state of daily speech. How many John Henrys have lived and died on the lips of these black people? How many mythical heroes in embryo have been allowed to perish for lack of husbanding by alert intelligence?

  Negro folklore contains, in a measure that puts to shame more deliberate forms of Negro expression, the collective sense of Negro life in America. Let those who shy at the nationalist implications of Negro life look at this body of folk-lore, living and powerful, which rose out of a unified sense of common life, and a common fate. Here are those vital beginnings of a recognition of value in life as it is lived, a recognition that marks the emergence of a new culture in the shell of the old. And at the moment this process starts, at the moment when a people begin to realize a meaning in their suffering, the civilization that engenders that suffering is doomed.

  RICHARD WRIGHT, “Blueprint for Negro Writing,” New Challenge 11 (1937), 270–71

  I find that if I am going to write something, I can very often tell where it comes from, in terms of both the traditions of the particular literary form and the traditions of the people around me. Someone should pay some attention to how the folk stories which are told about Negroes in one meeting might be told about Jews in another. There is a basic unity of the experience, despite all the other stuff. The whole problem about whether there is a Negro culture might be cleared up if we said that there were many idioms of American culture, including, certainly, a Negro idiom of American culture in the South. We can trace it in many, many ways. We can trace it in terms of speech idioms, in terms of manners, in terms of dress, in terms of cuisine, and so on. But it is American, and it has existed a long time. It has refinements and crudities. It has all the aspects of a cultural reality.

  RALPH ELLISON, “Remarks at the Academy of Arts and Sciences Conference on the Negro American, 1965,” in Abraham Chapman, ed. New Black Voices (New York: New American Library, 1972), 404

  My thesis, which rests on an examination of folk songs and tales, is that slaves were able to fashion a life style and set of values—an ethos—which prevented them from being imprisoned altogether by the definitions which the larger society sought to impose. The ethos was an amalgam of Africanisms and New World elements which helped slaves, in Guy Johnson’s words, “feel their way along the course of American slavery, enabling them to endure. . . .” As Sterling Brown, that wise student of Afro-American culture, has remarked, the values expressed in folklore acted as a “wellspring to which slaves” trapped in the wasteland of American slavery “could return in times of doubt to be refreshed.” In short, I shall contend that the process of dehumanization was not nearly as pervasive as Stanley Elkins would have us believe; that a very large number of slaves, guided by this ethos, were able to maintain their essential humanity. I make this contention because folklore, in its natural setting, is, of, by and for those who create and respond to it, depending for its survival upon the accuracy with which it speaks to needs and reflects sentiments. I therefore consider it safe to assume that the attitudes of a very large number of slaves are represented by the themes of folklore.

  STERLING STUCKEY, Going through the Storm: The Influence of African American Art in History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), 4

  In order for a people to develop a highly political and revolutionary consciousness, they must hold a high regard for themselves. They must know that they came from somewhere, in order to believe themselves capable of going somewhere; they must have a past before they can create a future for themselves. A people need legends, heroes, myths. Deny them these and you have won half the battle against them.

  The French needed legendary figures like Joan of Arc in order to develop a national consciousness, without which any
revolution is impossible. So we black folk need Saint Harriet of the Eastern Shore. We must build a literature of heroes, myths, and legends. The lives of Harriet Tubman, Frederick Douglass, Nat Turner, Sojourner Truth, are as formidable as George Washington’s, and are based on a much more substantial reality. Our people, young and old, need such heroes desperately. Slavemasters Washington and Jefferson do not belong to our children. We need our own myths and legends to regain our lost self-esteem, our regard for each other as people capable of working together to move the mountains that stand before us. We need such a heritage in order to really believe that we shall prevail.

  JOHN OLIVER KILLENS, Black Man’s Burden (New York: Trident Press, 1965), 45–46

  Silhouette illustration from The Tree Named John by John Sale (1929).

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  Tale-Telling Sites:At Home and in Common Spaces

  Improvisation is the hallmark of expressive culture, and the scenes that follow capture sites of storytelling, in parlors and on porches, at markets and in festive spaces. What Trudier Harris has called the “power of the porch” enabled the passing on of wisdom through stories, with “good narrators” and “good listeners” participating in an interactive process. Good old lies provided the provocation for talk, and these images give us a sense of where and how community building took place, not just through the story but also through the “talk” generated by it. The images gathered here offer a partial view of the protected spaces where tales and talk circulated.

  Nineteenth-century printed illustrations based on line drawings, such as “Sabbath” and “Coon Hunt,” were produced in great numbers for magazines and newspapers with particular political positions, audience expectations, and technical requirements. The illustrators themselves were largely middle-class white artists relying on generic ideas about blacks and their activities. Photography, by contrast, coming into its own just when African Americans had become free citizens, seemed to offer special opportunities for authentic representation of black subjects. Frederick Douglass, who wrote extensively about photography, described its practitioners as engaging in a “wild scramble,” with the rapid growth of commercial studios eager to create cabinet cards, stereoviews, and postcards for a growing market. The majority of the twentieth-century images included here were produced for the Farm Security Administration, originally the Resettlement Administration, a federal program established in the 1930s to combat rural poverty as part of Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s New Deal. As freelancers working for the FSA Information Division, FSA photographers produced images documenting the conditions of agricultural and industrial workers in rural areas of the American South and West. This rich resource offers detailed, if limited, visual information about life in the United States in the first half of the twentieth century.

  This cover illustration for The American Anti-Slavery Almanac shows an emancipated family, with women and children reading from the Bible, presumably a passage about Joseph and his brothers from Genesis 42:21, in which the brothers reflect on their feelings of guilt about betraying Joseph. The quotation might be relevant to the practice of slavery in general and to the sense of remorse brought on by an inability to liberate enslaved brethren. Reading from the Bible is a social practice that existed side by side with storytelling, with sacred texts on the one hand and irreverent improvisations on the other.

  Engravings by P. H. Reason were included in Henry Bibb’s Narrative of the Life and Adventures of Henry Bibb, an American Slave, Written by Himself, 1849. “The Sabbath among Slaves” depicts various activities, ranging from napping to fistfights.

  This scene of celebration on New Year’s Day in Florida in 1886 shows the front porch as a festive site for making music for a multigenerational group. Stereograph Cards, Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress.

  Plantation slave quarters in Port Royal, South Carolina (1862). Civil War Glass Negative Collection, Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress.

  In this illustration from a travelogue published in 1875, domestic animals roam the front yard to a cabin in the postbellum South, with the front porch as a site for what appears to be a woman with her grandchild. The woman’s hand is raised in a classic gesture used in scenes of storytelling. Edward King, The Great South: A Record of Journeys (Hartford, CT: American Publishing Company, 1875).

  This depiction of storytelling around the campfire after a hunt, published in Harper’s Weekly in 1872, emphasizes the magnetic appeal of the tales—even the hounds seem to be hanging on the words of the teller.

  Abolitionist Mary Livermore provided a detailed description of a “corn shucking” in her memoir about serving as a nurse during the Civil War, My Story of the War, published in 1897. Corn shucking bees signaled the beginning of the winter holiday season, when many enslaved plantation workers were permitted greater freedom than at other times of the year. Booker T. Washington remembered corn shucking as a festive event spanning a day and a night and attended by one or two hundred people, one of whom would lead the group in song.

  Cabins at the Hermitage slave plantation in Savannah, Georgia, where slaves were raised for market. The homes were made of brick because there was a brickworks operation on the plantation (1903). Stereograph Cards, Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress.

  Captioned “Cooking for the Family,” this image was made in the latter part of the nineteenth century. Robert N. Dennis Collection of Stereoscopic Views, The Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Division of Art, Prints and Photographs: Photography Collection, The New York Public Library.

  A log cabin with a covered porch is home to the women and children depicted (1890). Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library.

  The family of an African American lawyer gathers on the front porch of their home in Atlanta, Georgia (1899). African American Photographs Assembled for 1900 Paris Exposition, Prints and Photographs Division Washington, Library of Congress.

  Carl Carmer’s 1934 novel, Stars Fell on Alabama, illustrated by Cyrus Baldridge, was an unexpected bestseller. “Mostly a true book with some stretchers,” it represented life in Alabama by blending social realism with folklore and enchantment, and with candid depictions of Southern racism.

  A family gathers on the front porch of the Good Hope plantation in Mississippi (1939). Farm Security Administration, Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress.

  An African American family poses on the front porch of their home on land near Wadesboro, North Carolina (1938). Farm Security Administration, Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress.

  Nolan Pettway and some of his family members on their front porch in Gees Bend, Alabama (1939). Farm Security Administration, Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress.

  A domestic scene from a tenant home on the Marcella plantation in Mileston, Mississippi (1939). Farm Security Administration, Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress.

  A family on the porch of their home in Caswell, North Carolina (1940). Farm Security Administration, Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress.

  Agricultural workers at a migratory labor camp in Florida on their improvised porch in front of a metal shelter (1941). Farm Security Administration, Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress.

  A store near a cotton plantation in Mississippi where a porch provides a social space for men. Photographed by Marion Post Wolcott. Farm Security Administration, Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress.

  A group of berry pickers near Independence, Louisiana, assemble around a stove to keep warm on a chilly day (1939). Farm Security Administration, Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress.

  Rocks support the floor of a porch and unfinished timbers are used as pillars for this country store. Photographed by Dorothea Lange in Gordonton, North Carolina, in 1939. Ads for cigarettes, Coca-Cola, and scotch are reminders that the porch of the store is a site for leisure activities. Farm Security Ad
ministration, Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress.

  Professional storyteller Liliane Louis tells Haitian folktales at a festival in Miami, Florida, in 1988. State Archives of Florida / Saltzman.

  Augusta Braxston Baker, head of children’s services at the New York Public Library from 1961 to 1974, began each storytelling session by lighting a candle and finished with one of the children blowing it out. Photographed by Alexander Alland.

  The trio of men on the porch creates a conversational space animated further by the small dog at their feet and the child near the entrance to a store in Jeanerette, Louisiana, in 1938. Farm Security Administration, Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress.

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  Tale-Telling Sites: Places of Labor

  Images showing scenes of labor cannot mask the stamina required to carry on, even when they show unclouded blue skies and verdant fields. In the interstices, the pauses that marked a respite from exertions, there was often time for conversational exchange, sometimes in the form of story. Scip and Tad, in E. C. L. Adams’s Nigger to Nigger, for example, create poetry whenever they take a break, telling stories and expressing their innermost thoughts to each other.

  Slaves working the sweet potato fields on a southern plantation make the work look effortless and serene, although all of the tasks involved required repetitive labors under what was often a blazing summer sun (1862). Gladstone Collection of African American Photographs, Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress.