African American Folktales

by Roger Abrahams

  A by-product of the minstrel show were books of songs and stories delivered in “black dialect,” sometimes written by minstrel performers or producers and sometimes by local wags—journalists and parlor raconteurs who developed a repertoire of such pieces primarily for reputation enhancement rather than to make money. In fact, these folios, which were generally produced on local presses, were often put togther by judges, doctors, professors, and other genteel types out of stories to which they had gotten a good response from their friends and acquaintances over the years.

  These subliterary productions are strange documents from a folklorist’s perspective because they often contain traditional tales that appear in independent sources, clearly tales told among blacks for different purposes. For instance, one kind of story that is very often found among both white and black raconteurs turns on a clash of wits between a master and one of his slaves, usually focusing on, and ending with, an amusing turn-off phrase uttered by the slave: the Master-John tales, as they are widely called.

  One of these widely reported tales concerns a remarkable hunting experience recounted by the planter. The planter brags to a friend that he has shot a deer in the head and a hoof simultaneously. He then turns to the slave who had been with him to verify this wondrous deed. The slave quickly confirms what his master has reported, cunningly explaining that the deer had been scratching his ear when Old Master got the shot off. As soon as the friend leaves, the slave asks his master not to get his lies so far apart next time: “Please don’t scatter them so, because I had mighty hard work to bring them together.”10

  One would readily assume that this story, told in the southern milieu, reflected the ambiguous relationship between master and slave. As with so many such tales, it is reported from white and black raconteurs; when told by whites, it was a joke on themselves. But as William Bascom has shown, this tale of the remarkable shot is given in a number of African collections11 (but none from Europe), and so we may assume that the story was brought to the United States by the slaves themselves. They adapted it to local circumstances—ones in which lying is countenanced on both sides of the racial line.

  An even more commonly collected story in Africa relates the story of the skull who speaks to a hunter one day and then refuses to speak when the hunter brings his king (or master) to hear this amazing feat. This results in the hunter’s head being chopped off. When the skull asks the dead one why he is there, the hunter’s head replies, “Talking brought me here!” This story has also been widely collected in Afro-American communities in the New World, primarily the United States, and again often as a Master-John story. In one version a snake refuses to talk to Old Master and embarrasses John, and when asked why, is told, “John, you let me down. I spoke only with you, and you had to go and tell a white man!”12 Both stories, then, are African stories that have been adapted to a format that addresses specifically American conditions.

  The ironies that emerge from such stories today place the contemporary reader in a much better position to understand the amount of actual social information stored in the tales. Until now, the relationship between Master and John, or between Massa King and his minions, was neither recognized nor understood by readers outside the black community. What these stories reveal is a tremendously complicated relationship between the blacks who found themselves enslaved and those whites who affected their lives. The frustration and helplessness felt throughout Afro-America by blacks about whites is registered in these stories, but so is a kind of benign resignation that whites are eccentric people who do strange things all the time. Not least of these anomalous actions is the contradictory actions and attitudes of the plantocrat, especially with regard to issues of trust, industry, and civility. Repeatedly, Old Master is shown to be lazy himself, even while he accuses John of contrived inactivity; similarly, these stories are filled with trickery on the part of the whites combined with their encouragement of their slaves to display wiliness or cunning—all of this behavior in the face of the white stereotype of blacks as untrustworthy. These stories, then, are about the strange inconsistency of Old Master as much as anything else.

  In the tales about Massa King, another kind of white eccentricity is discussed. Not only do whites do strange things, such as keeping their beautiful daughters locked up in glass cages or creating situations in which arbitrary contests are held for the rights to the kingdom, but the powerful whites allow this anomalous behavior to be made public business. In “The Singing Bones,” for instance, the initiating idea of the tale—that a father would ask his son and daughter to compete for his affections by gathering the most beautiful bouquet of flowers—is discussed by those who tell the tale as an example of the really strange things that go on in “white man’s yard.” Similarly, in “Three Killed Florrie, Florrie Killed Ten,” the idea of Massa King’s establishing a contest for his beautiful daughter’s hand receives no little comment from storytellers or members of their audience about how you just can’t account for how people in power like that are going to act.

  Though many of these tales are derived in some way from the Old World repertoire, their reinterpretation in the light of the New World social situation is important to bear in mind. For it is both the continuities and the changes that occur in these stories as they are transmitted that allow us to regard them as useful devices for understanding the dynamic of the life of Afro-Americans in this alien environment.

  IV

  In 1877, in the first journalistic notice of Afro-American tales in the United States, William Owens observed: “Anyone who will take the trouble [to look at the] predominate traits of negro character … and the predominate traits of African folk-lore” will discover a kind of “fitness of each to each.”13 In making this observation, Owens was not arguing with any forcefulness that African folklore had been retained by the slaves as much as averring that certain traits of blacks went deeper than any historical disruption could affect. Moreover, by arguing in this fashion, Owens gave the impression that the materials he was presenting were authentic.

  It was precisely this question of authenticity that led a fledgling newspaperman, Joel Chandler Harris, to mount a counterattack. Harris saw the Owens piece in an advance copy of Lippincott’s and found it “remarkable, more for what it omits … than what it contains.” The problem, as Harris saw it, was that Owens did not demonstrate a true intimacy with the material because he failed to present it in appropriate speech patterns and manner of presentation. Harris seems especially to have been upset by the lack of respect paid to the tellers of the tales, as well as to the tradition they represented. Harris was to verify the authenticity of any story he published, even going to great lengths to distinguish between those that came from pure Afro-American sources and those that came from storytellers who had intermarried with Indians.

  The principal means of verification used by Harris was to correspond with other southerners brought up under the scrutiny of tale-telling blacks, rather than conduct interviews with the informants themselves. This we may attribute as much to Harris’s enormously shy character and his embarrassment over his inability to talk without a stutter as his unwillingness to interact with blacks. His books, through their enormous success with white readers, publicized the existence of these fascinating Afro-American stories throughout the English-speaking world and led to a great many other collections, some of which provide us with stories as they were performed within the black communities among blacks themselves.

  The “signature” of the Harris-style plantation story was, of course, the tale of Brer Rabbit’s romantic interaction with the female figure made of tar, and the disastrous consequences that occurred when he felt that he was being spurned by her failure to respond to his sweet words. Ironically, Owens’s version of this encounter was closer to the way in which the tale is commonly told in Africa than was Harris’s rendition. Owens’s account begins with the common African storytelling scene in which members of the community feel the need to dig a well for all to use. Th
e trouble arises when Brer Rabbit refuses to help and then characteristically not only avails himself of the water but muddies it for everybody else’s use. The tar-baby is then devised as a technique to snare the culprit—and Brer Rabbit finds himself in his familiar fix.

  Both Harris and Owens seem to have realized that the tar-baby provided only one opportunity for this trickster to test his wits in working out an escape from his predicament. Though many think of the story as fixed in sequence, as in the Harris reporting, the trick by which the vexatious and malingering Rabbit is caught is found in many other stories, including some that are quite different in plot development. Consider, for instance, the story included here, “Tricking All the Kings,” in which the tar-baby capture is instigated by Master King in his effort to ensnare Anansi the Spider (a trickster found in stories throughout the West Indies and in the coastal areas of South and Central America where Afro-American communities exist) because Spider has been stealing water from his well. Anansi is caught and escapes by being thrown by his captors, not into the briar patch, but into the sea. There he encounters Buh Shark; he convinces him to make a great catch of fish for them to eat on the shore. There Anansi encounters the voracious Lion; Anansi knows that Lion is going to want to share in the feast and will end up eating most of the catch. Through a further trick, then, Anansi tricks Lion into allowing himself to be tied to a tree. Anansi consumes the fish, while Lion can only look on and pull at the rope that is constraining him.

  Strangely enough, the earliest record of such a tale from the New World comes to us from Jamaica. I say “strangely enough” because there the slaves and masters came into less contact than in the more family-style agricultural enterprise that typified the southern United States. Unlike most southern planters, the West Indian did not generally regard himself as rooted permanently to his land and its product. He built less stately homes, saving his money for investment back in England. In addition, the ratio of blacks to whites was far greater in the West Indies, and so there was considerably less interaction between them. Not that there was no interest about black “manners and morals,” as West Indians phrased it in their journals. Indeed, virtually every account of West Indian life included some information about how the Africans and their descendants lived. But not many noted the stories that were being told, primarily because of the amount of time and energy it took to sit and record such information.

  The earliest record of taletelling in Afro-America is found in the Journal of a West Indian Proprietor, written by the gothic novelist Matthew Gregory Lewis, best remembered for his work The Monk. Lewis inherited a Jamaican estate in the early nineteenth century and visited it for the better part of 1815–16, keeping a journal that was not published until 1834. He brought to his journal an interest in personal interactions, especially dialogue, as well as the more general European concern with questions of slavery and the culture-bearing capabilities of the Africans. Consequently, he recorded a number of detailed scenes of slave life that went beyond simple master-slave interactions, including the observation: “The negroes are also very fond of what they call Nancy stories, part of which is related and part sung.”

  Lewis proceeds to relate four stories of the sort that one still finds in the West Indies, alternating between narrating the action in his own style and giving the dialogue in the manner of the slaves. One of these concerns the fortunes of a young girl, Sarah Winyan, who is lured away to the bush by a black dog named Tiger, a trick easily pulled off as she was feeling rejected and despised by her stepmother to the point that she constantly sang of her despair:

  Ho-day, poor me, O!

  Poor me, Sarah Winyan, O!

  They call me neger, neger!

  They call me Sarah Winyan, O!

  The dog entices her to follow him because he has the special bewitching powers of obeah. But she has misgivings all the while, and continues to sing her song as she goes ever deeper into the bush; finally, she is heard by her brothers, who rescue her and subdue Tiger.14

  This story and others given by Lewis are still widely told throughout the black world on both sides of the Atlantic. While the animal differs in the various renderings, as does the age and station of the young girl (often, she is presented as the king’s beautiful daughter), the pattern of seduction and rescue has remained remarkably stable. It is represented in this collection by “A Boarhog for a Husband.”

  Unfortunately for us, not all types of African traditional tales survived the transatlantic passage to the New World with their vigor and moral range intact. While some of the myths of the West Coast cultures, such as Yoruba and Fon, are to be encountered within the vital context of the great syncretic religious system of Vodun, Santería, Shango, and Candomble in Haiti, Brazil, Cuba, and a few other areas, in most of Afro-America neither myths nor other details of African religious practices were maintained in any full and systematic manner. Moreover, the grand bardic forms of epic and other kinds of praise singing, the elaborate recitations of genealogies, and with a few important exceptions, the chants accompanying the casting of cowry shells—all these forms were lost. Of the bardic forms that persist, the elaborate boasts and curses, including many in verse form, are still found in song (for example, the early calypso), and in verse in the elaborate toasts told on street corners and saloons in urban areas, in prisons, and in juke joints throughout the American South. The epic accounts of great heroes and leaders of the people have been replaced by hero stories in prose, song, or the jingling verse of the narrative toasts featuring radical individualists, great fighters and outlaws, such as “Stackolee” and Shine in “The Sinking of the Titanic.” Even the dilemma tales, so characteristic of African situations of moral disputation, seldom made their way to this side of the ocean, indicating that most of the political and philosophical dimensions of African story were lost to us in the Middle Passage.

  What did survive in this hostile environment? Above all, the importance of storytelling remained in the lives of the slaves and their descendants. Told at night, for entertainment as well as instruction, in the traditional African style in which the entire community might be involved in the telling, these stories as performances provided entertainment by which the community could celebrate its identity as a group simply by singing, dancing, and, most important, laughing together. The stories are filled with action designed, it seems, just to get something stirred up—both in the world described in the stories and in the community of performers. Contrast this with the intent of the usual Indo-European fairytale, where action is initiated by an individual seeking to better herself or himself and advance to the point of happily-ever-aftering. We also fail to find the style of story, so common in Euro-American traditions, that conveys the message that moral violations must be punished. The African and Afro-American stories more commonly chronicle how a trickster or a hero uses his wits to get something he wants—or how he is frustrated by the acts of someone as clever or with as great powers as himself. Together, they demonstrate a wholeness in this folk literature, an integrity of theme, a consistency of style and pattern that owes much to its African origins, even while it breathes with a life of its own. And while we owe the publication of stories with this perspective to the literary initiative and sense of authenticity of Joel Chandler Harris, we can look back from our contemporary perspective and see that he was able to glimpse only a small portion of a cultural record far richer, more varied, and much more uproarious than he recognized.

  V

  A majority of the tales in the black repertoire depict the antics of Trickster and his foolish behavior, which is to be laughed at and learned from. So dominant are such stories, in fact, that all stories performed in tale-telling sessions tend to be called by the name of the primary trickster of the area: Brer Rabbit tales in the southern United States, Anansi stories in the West Indies. Moreover, as one may see in “Why They Name the Stories for Anansi,” there are tales to explain just why this should be, stories that turn on the superior ability of Trickster in impro
vising actions, in reacting quickly, and in prevaricating.

  Taletellers treat these characters as familiar members of a family, referring to them by a number of pet names that might change from one moment to the next. This is especially true for Trickster; Spider may, in a single story, be called Anansi, Buh Nansi, and Compé Anansi (meaning something like companion or pal). The name is also written as Nancy, Anancy, and even Aunt Nancy. Moreover, word play brings the name close to “nonsense” and to “nasty,” both important themes in Trickster’s behavior. Other characters receive similar treatment. The godlike King is variously called Master King. Marsa King, Marster, and Mister King; Old Master, in the Master-John tales, is referred to as Master, Marster, Ol’ Marster, and so on.

  There is a long history of conjecture about why such stories should have achieved a place of honor—conjecture largely indulged by white scholars who have sought to give at least the dignity of fighting back passively to these exploited people. These observers have tended to interpret the stories simply as records of oppression, or what Lawrence Levine calls “strategies for survival.”15 These strategies focused on learning how to play a number of roles, especially the stereotypical ones assigned by those in power, both before and after emancipation. These roles were all guided by the ironic perspective and tactics discussed above as signifying, even if that meant seeming to play the monkey, or to find a way of prevaricating to save your neck, or just to save the trouble of going through explanations that you knew were not going to be believed or trusted.