African American Folktales Read online

  Also by Roger D. Abrahams

  African Folktales

  Singing the Master: The Emergence of African American Culture in the Plantation South

  Copyright © 1985 by Roger D. Abrahams

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Pantheon Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York. Originally published as Afro-American Folktales by Pantheon Books in 1985.

  Since this copyright page cannot accommodate all permissions acknowledgments, they appear on this page-this page.

  Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data

  African American folktales : stories from black traditions in the new world/selected and edited by Roger D. Abrahams.

  p. cm.

  Originally published: Afro-American folktales. © 1985. (Pantheon fairy tale and folklore library). Includes bibliographical references.

  eISBN: 978-0-307-80318-4

  1. Afro-Americans—Folklore. 2. Tales—United States. 3. Blacks—Caribbean—Folklore. 4. Tales—Caribbean. I. Abrahams, Roger D. II. Title. III. Series: Pantheon fairy tale and folklore library.

  GR111.A47A38 1999 398.2’089’96073—dc21 98-42200

  v3.1

  To the great scholar-warriors in

  the Transatlantic campaign,

  William A. Bascom and Richard M. Dorson

  Now you are going to hear lies above suspicion.

  —Zora Neale Hurston

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  Other Books by This Author

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  PREFACE

  INTRODUCTION

  PART I. Getting Things Started: How the World Got Put Together That Way

  1. Never Seen His Equal

  2. The Man Makes and the Woman Takes

  3. Bringing Men and Women Together

  4. The Fight over Life

  5. The Wind and the Water Fighting

  6. The Word the Devil Made Up

  7. The Knee-High Man Tries to Get Sizable

  8. Pig’s Long Nose and Greedy Mouth

  9. Getting Common Sense

  10. Hankering for a Long Tail

  11. The Devil’s Doing

  12. The John Crows Lose Their Hair

  13. Tadpole Loses His Tail

  14. The Owl Never Sleeps at Night

  15. Why Hens Are Afraid of Owls

  16. The Gifts of Dipper and Cowhide

  17. Buh Nansi Scares Buh Lion

  18. Testing the Good Lord

  19. Mr. Possum Loves Peace

  20. Get Back, Get Back

  21. No Justice on Earth

  PART II. Minding Somebody Else’s Business and Sometimes Making It Your Own

  22. Meeting the King of the World

  23. Mr. Bamancoo Gets Dropped

  24. The Tug-of-War between Elephant and Whale

  25. Tiger Becomes a Biding Horse

  26. The Telltale Pepper Bush

  27. Making the Stone Smoke

  28. The Latest Song

  29. The Signifying Monkey

  30. The Singing Bones

  31. A Boarhog for a Husband

  32. The Woman Who Was a Bird

  33. My Mother Killed Me, My Father Ate Me

  PART III. Getting a Comeuppance: How (and How Not) to Act Stories

  34. What Makes Brer Wasp Have a Short Patience

  35. Between the Fiddler and the Dancer

  36. Being Greedy Chokes Anansi

  37. The Doings and Undoings of the Dogoshes

  38. Spreading Fingers for Friendship

  39. Don’t Shoot Me, Dyer, Don’t Shoot Me

  40. Little Eight John

  41. The Poor Man and the Snake

  42. The Little Bird Grows

  43. Tricking All the Kings

  44. The Feast on the Mountain and the Feast under the Water

  45. Hide Anger until Tomorrow

  46. Buying Two Empty Hands

  47. Cutta Cord-La

  48. Brer Bear’s Grapevine

  49. A Foolish Mother

  50. Old Granny Grinny Granny

  51. You Never Know What Trouble Is until It Finds You

  52. He Pays for the Provisions

  53. The Cunning Cockroach

  54. Little Boy-Bear Nurses the Alligator Children

  55. The Girl Made of Butter

  56. Poppa Stole the Deacon’s Bull

  57. The Trouble with Helping Out

  58. The Rooster Goes Away in a Huff

  PART IV. How Clever Can You Get? Tales of Trickery and Its Consequences

  59. Why They Name the Stories for Anansi

  60. Brother Rabbit Takes a Walk

  61. The Lion in the Well

  62. A License to Steal

  63. The Race between Toad and Donkey

  64. Crawling into the Elephant’s Belly

  65. A Strange Way to Sleep

  66. Goobers Gone, Rabbit Gone

  67. Assaulting All the Senses

  68. Brer Rabbit’s Riddle

  69. The Horned Animals’ Party

  70. Anansi Plays Dead

  71. Anansi Climbs the Wall

  72. Dancing to the River

  73. “Trouble” Coming Down the Road

  74. No Chicken Tonight

  PART V. The Strong Ones and the Clever: Contests and Confrontations

  75. Golden Breasts, Diamond Navel, Chain of Gold

  76. The Flying Contest

  77. Loggerhead

  78. Trying to Get the Goldstone

  79. Stackolee

  80. Escaping, Slowly

  81. Turning into Nóuna—Nothing

  82. The Old Bull and the Young One

  83. Fasting for the Hand of the Queen’s Daughter

  84. Weak in the Day and Strong at Night

  85. Jack Beats the Devil

  86. Three Killed Florrie, Florrie Killed Ten

  PART VI. Getting Around Old Master (Most of the Time)

  87. They Both Had Dead Horses

  88. You Talk Too Much, Anyhow

  89. Making the Eyes Run

  90. Making a Wagon from a Wheelbarrow

  91. The One-Legged Turkey

  92. John Outruns the Lord

  93. A Flying Fool

  94. Horses Stay Outside

  95. The Sinking of the Titanic

  96. Competition for Laziness

  97. John Outwits Mr. Berkeley

  98. Black Jack and White Jack

  99. Philanewyork

  100. The Barn Is Burning

  PART VII. In the End, Nonsense

  101. Big-Gut, Big-Head, Stringy-Leg

  102. A Chain of Won’ts

  103. Animal Talk

  104. A Comic Conversation

  105. A Smoking Story

  106. The Things That Talked

  107. Endings

  APPENDIX: Sources, Annotations, and Index of Tales

  BIBLIOGRAPHY

  PERMISSIONS ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  About the Author

  PREFACE

  These tales have come from many parts of the New World where Afro-American communities were established during plantation times or after emancipation in the nineteenth century. I have included stories from throughout the huge area where plantations were worked, from coastal South and Central America to the Caribbean and, of course, the American South. Although most of the communities from which the stories were collected are within the English-speaking sphere of influence—where an anglophonic Creole is spoken—I have not resisted dipping into the rich patois of Haiti, Guadaloupe, and Louisiana whenever I found representative materials that had already been translate
d into English.

  A few texts are taken from early travel reports and plantation journals —the oldest is from 1815—but most come from documents produced when the most extensive collecting was carried out, beginning in 1881 with the first of Joel Chandler Harris’s Uncle Remus collections and proceeding through the 1920s. For more contemporary texts, I have used mostly materials that I recorded in the United States and the Caribbean. In almost all cases, the titles to the stories are my inventions, my attempt to give the reader a hint about the subject and tone of the story to come.

  A number of Afro-Americans have collected these stories, but most collecting has been carried out by whites. In retrospect, this does not seem as important as the fact that, with the exception of Zora Neale Hurston’s great book Mules and Men and a very few others, tale gathering was carried out by individuals who did not live in the communities in which the tales had been maintained. Today, the major differences in quality seem to arise from whether the tales were collected as they were usually performed, by collectors doing their recording as part of a documentation of group life, or by those who were just passing through, trying to get as many stories and songs and riddles as possible in whatever time they had been able to give to their fieldwork.

  Following the Harris tradition of rendering tales in dialect, not only through the use of vernacular forms of speech but also by making orthographic modifications of standard English spellings and diacritical markings, most of the collections culled from were originally printed in a style that the contemporary reader would find difficult to read. Moreover, such texts are replete with reminders of the ugliest side of stereotyping. There are thus two very good reasons for making the changes in language and tone that the reader will encounter herein.

  In the hands of some collectors, including Harris, the spelling and the cadences of the vernacular used in these early gatherings add up to an honest and reasonable attempt to record local speech variations. But the retellings of the tales by Harris and his followers gave them a kind of literary shape and finish that are never found in actual oral renditions. This serves up to us stories told from beginning to end, and without the repetitions, mistakes, and hesitations that characterize oral tellings; it does not record the performance as accurately as one finds in most collections that come from folklorists who have had the benefit of tape-recorded and transcribed “texts.” Moreover, we simply cannot get beyond the racist resonances that the Uncle Remus-style tellings continue to carry, precisely because the stories are rendered in the dialects of slavery times. I have attempted to take some of this stigma away by using contemporary spellings, and by changing some of the vernacular turns of phrase that would have been familiar to the nineteenth-century reader but that have lost their currency—and thus their pungency—today.

  In one regard, however, the Harris style does reflect the storytelling context nicely. He presents the stories as told to a group of young children, thus providing a setting for the tales and personalizing them. He puts them in the mouths of storytellers who may be interrupted, questioned, asked to apply the tales to local situations and happenings. In such reminiscences we still do not have versions of the tales as told by blacks to one another in a regular and familiar setting. This point is significant, for in such situations the narrator can assume that nearly everybody knows the stories and therefore need not follow the rule that they must be told from beginning to end. The version we are given always assumes that the fictional hearer has not heard the story before.

  The “dialect” itself commonly draws, willy-nilly, from a lingua franca that had developed along coastal Africa; it had a Portuguese as well as local African vocabulary, and with a sound system and grammar developed in this Old World trade setting. Thus, when they came to the New World, the slaves already had a means of communication that transcended the problems of forging a community from so many different cultural and linguistic groups in the Old World. Once in the New World, the speakers of this West African Creole began to draw strongly on the vocabulary of the Europeans who had brought them to the New World, and even more, on the language of the plantocrats. Thus we find in areas colonized by France a francophonic Creole or patois, such as that spoken in Haiti, Martinique, and some places in Louisiana; Papiamentu, spoken in Curacao and Aruba and other Dutch possessions and using vocabulary from Spanish, Portuguese, and English as well as Dutch; and English Creole of various sorts, the best known being Gullah in the Sea Islands off South Carolina and Georgia and Jamaican Creole. Most of the stories in this book were recorded in one or another Creole. To most non-Creole-speaking readers, these renderings in their original form are at best extremely difficult to understand.

  Making it even more difficult for readers, jocular storytelling may be judged by how quickly and fluently the talk of the characters can be rendered and how many ranges of voice the taleteller can draw upon. The trickster himself is often portrayed as having a lisp; other animal characters have their own characteristic way of producing their talk, so that a master storyteller may scream, laugh, shout, rasp, whisper, and imitate in some equally stretched manner the way an animal, devil, witch, or ghost might talk.

  I have recast these stories in the standard vernacular of the American “common reader” while attempting to maintain the cadences of the personal style of the storyteller and its local tradition of telling. A number of reporters, like Harris and Zora Neale Hurston, developed literary storytelling styles that were very much their own yet that developed directly out of the vernacular. Where I draw on the work of such literary figures, I stay as close as possible to the style in which they couched their tales, recognizing that I cannot also include the surrounding details that they provided, which gave the relationships between the storyteller as a character and his hearers. Other collectors, such as Arthur Huff Fauset, Elsie Clews Parsons, and J. Mason Brewer, simply wrote down tales as close as possible to what they heard. I have tried to maintain the spirit of the storytelling.

  The process of transcribing and translating tales from their oral form to a readable written one inevitably reshapes the material; I have employed many changes to convey better an oral style in a literate format. As a folklorist, I am conscious of the impact of some of these changes, simply because the professional idea is to “transcribe faithfully” what our “informants” performed. In traditional cultures the entertainment and instruction of the community are carried out face to face. This seems a simple fact, but its implications are so subtle—and the process itself has been so imperfectly understood—that it seems useful to survey briefly the characteristics of oral storytelling as a way of highlighting some of the changes that I have made.

  In oral renderings, the actions being described are usually simply chained together with the use of and or well, markers of addition rather than causation. I constantly found myself wanting to substitute a then, a thus, a meanwhile, thus introducing a kind of cause-effect language that the oral performer does not seem to use nearly as much. Similarly, a storyteller tends to be much more repetitive than his literary counter-part; repeating something reminds the hearer of where the story is and where it is going, for, unlike the reader, the listener can hardly go back to a previous page. Conventional phrases are used, over and over again, to describe the same characters and situations, and the storyteller does not hesitate to repeat phrases, sentences, and even whole scenes both as signposts for the audience and as devices that call attention to the abilities of the storyteller. In my revisions I eliminated much redundancy and repetition, since this is precisely what a reader neither expects nor appreciates. Where such a stylistic device is used to build dramatic interest in the progress of the story, I have left in most of the repeated material.

  Almost impossible to capture on the written page is the importance of the audience in the creation and re-creation of the story. Those in the audience expect to be both surprised and delighted by the doings described in the story, but they do not commonly expect to encounter new ways of telling the story, nor
do they want novel and unconventional situations brought into the act. Thus the reader often finds that the tales adhere to conventional story patterns. In this regard, aesthetic delight arises in the deployment of a variety of stylistic effects in the telling, such as in the sound effects employed, the change of pace of the delivery, the use of different cadences and sound levels, and so on. One device that is available to the local storyteller and that generally falls flat for the distant reader is the use of topical references within the story, especially those that note, explicitly or by allusion, how the details of the story reflect the idiosyncrasies of someone in the community. Sometimes, in fact, the story parallels a real situation so fully that the story, whenever it is told, is associated with a person whether or not he or she is present at the telling. The performer may also suddenly see a new relationship between the story and someone in the audience, and will draw on this parallel as a means of making the story more interesting to the audience. As stories are told face to face, there is a strong sense of participation in the telling by those in the audience even when, as in some traditions, they remain attentive during the telling. Again, this dimension of the stories is of little interest to readers removed from the scene.

  In traditional communities, one seldom encounters just one story told at a time. Instead, tales are told in sessions, and often on an occasion that marks the passage of the month, the year, even a life. One story follows another, generally because in some way it has been suggested by the first. And, just as we often find in joke telling, there is a kind of competition, leading not to winning or losing but to a constant building of energies and a refinement of presentational techniques. This competitive interaction is important in Afro-American performances of all sorts (I think of jamming in jazz, cutting in tap dancing, and rapping and capping in street-corner speech), and it is occasionally to be observed within the action of the story, as in “The Signifying Monkey.” But where the competitive element arises between storytellers, it seldom finds its way into the text of the tale.

  Even when the lore records the way things were at the beginning or in some definable period (for instance, during slavery times), it is important that the storyteller convey a sense that the events within the story are dynamic and ongoing, that they describe and comment on life as it is lived today. Indeed, with Afro-American tales, this sense of immediacy is of ten conveyed by Creole language forms. Creole verbs do not carry the same kind of time markers that, say, English or French tenses do; rather, the verbs have a continuing-present feeling to them. Thus, characters often are reported to speak, not with the form “he said” or “she asked,” but in verbs that have a sense of ongoingness, such as “he say” or “she ax”—a problem made even more complicated by the use of one pronoun, e, meaning “he,” “she,” or “it.” In my recastings of the stories, I have translated all action into the past tense because that is our conventional storytelling verb form, trusting that the vigor of the action and vitality of the expression will carry the essential message of ongoingness.