Though this equation between the wily heroes of the tales and blacks was hardly instigated by him, Joel Chandler Harris’s argument that “the negro selects as his hero the weakest and most harmless of all animals and brings him out victorious” seems to have become almost an article of faith among commentators of many political persuasions. This position was taken for granted in spite of the fact that Rabbit gets his comeuppance in a number of stories. And this position was echoed by many who followed Harris in collecting and commenting on these tales. Mrs. Christensen, for instance, in the introduction to her rich collection of Sea Island tales in 1892 opines that “the Rabbit represents the colored man” inasmuch as “the negro, without education or wealth, could only hope to succeed by stratagem.” Octave Thanet maintains in the same year: “Brer Rabbit … personifies the revolt of his race. His successes are just the kind … his race have craved.”16 As Levine notes, the motives and moral attitudes of the protagonists of these tales are just too complex and too ambiguous to argue that the stories provide a simple substitute for the lack of power over their own lives. The slave—and Afro-Americans since Emancipation—could sympathize with, perhaps even identify with, the trickster in some of his stories; but what can we say of those stories in which the trickster is despicable and his dupe somewhat more admirable? Or how would this theory address those tales, such as “The Tug-of-War between Elephant and Whale” and “You Never Know What Trouble Is until It Finds You,” that pit one trickster against another? Rather than exhibit deflected power motives, these stories present the world as a contest between wit and strength. If there is any advice for real-life behavior in the stories, it is to remind us to be on guard constantly for others’ tricks, and at the same time to admire those who are able to win the contest by their wits. As in Africa, Trickster’s vitality and inventiveness are valued for their own sake.
VI
Many of the stories in this collection begin like familiar European fairytales with the beautiful young unmarried lady hidden away in the palace or the poor-but-ambitious young man who finds some reason to go traveling in search of wealth and position. But there the familiarity ends; the action takes off in quite a different direction in Afro-America. We have to pay careful attention to the reasons for this divergence if we are really to understand and interpret these tales seriously—a point that it took me some little time living and working in black communities to come to terms with.
My first career in folklore was as a folksinger and song collector, and I was fascinated on reaching the West Indies to find that so many of the older British ballads were performed as tales, in the West Indian style, of course, with a song introduced regularly into the narration. Thus, I encountered such standbys of the Anglo-American repertoire as “Little Mattie Groves,” “The Maid Freed from the Gallows,” and “The Two Sisters” (often called “Binnorie” in ballad anthologies). This last song is a ballad rendering of the international tale in which a murdered persona bones are fashioned into a musical instrument, which then sings a song that reveals the details of the killing and the identity of the murderer.17
The story, as I first heard it sung in the southern Appalachians, describes how two sisters are courted by the same knight, who picks “the young and the fair.” The darker sister then entices the other to the riverside, and pushes her in. She floats down to the milldam where a harper or fiddler takes the body and makes an instrument of its parts. The song of revelation ensues, leading to the hanging of the sister.
In the West Indies, the same story is widely told as a brother-sister rivalry, as in “The Singing Bones” in this volume. Massa King has a son and a daughter; he sets a contest for them to see which will gather the more beautiful bouquet. The girl, with her better eye for flowers, is obviously going to win. But she is struck over the head and killed by her brother, who then buries her beneath a willow tree and steals her flowers. A shepherd boy and his dog discover a bone from her skeleton. It looks like a flute to him, so he plays on it, and it sings the song that reveals the brother’s wrongdoings.
I came to the story through the ballad. When I first heard it, I interpreted it as a beautiful rendition of a conventional morality tale: envy leading to wrongdoing leading to punishment. Yet the discussion of the tale that took place in the communities in which I lived did not dwell on this dimension of the story; instead, they were amused by this strange and silly thing the king did—setting such a task for his children—for any sensible person would be able to tell that it would lead to a destructive fight. Moreover, it was regarded as one of those stories about Massa King and his doings and undoings that are, by their very character, strange because he is identified as white. Therefore, his family affairs are in many ways incomprehensible—but always interesting.
The “Singing Bones” story then seemed more and more nonsensical to me, closer to what is widely called “nigger business” in the anglophonic Caribbean—the playing out of family affairs that have gotten out of control, for they can no longer be kept at home or “within the yard.” Call it West Indian high gossip if you wish, but hardly illustrative of the simple message that villainy will be punished. The major change within the tale is the addition of the shepherd boy. Depicted as a black servant who unwittingly uncovers the foul deeds, he serves a much more important role than I realized when I first heard the story. In fact, it was only when I re-transcribed my tapes, ten to fifteen years later, that I could hear the ongoing commentary from the performer and audience.
In a great many of the tales found in this book, especially those that concern the doings of Massa King and his family, an almost invisible character enters the action in a similar fashion as the shepherd boy. In his more common rendering he is a “dark” figure: an “Old Witch Boy,” a dirty and diseased misfit, a mysterious member of the king’s family, someone who must live under the bed or in another cranny within the house. Tucked away like that, this character is all too easily overlooked by nonblack audience members. Like Trickster, he lives at the margins between the family and the wilds, and can be seen as something of a contaminating anomaly, and thus, like Trickster, the upsetter of order. Described variously as “dirty,” “smelly,” covered with ashes (like Cinderella), he is best known for his ugly foot, which is described, alternatively, as diseased, constantly surrounded by fleas and nits (as are all open sores in the tropics), or as a clubfoot. Like Anansi, he is known by a number of names, the most common being “The Chiggerfoot Boy” (referring to the diseased member) or “The Jiggerfoot Boy” (the local term for a clubfooted person). He is contrasted with the king’s beautiful daughter, ostensibly his sister.
In the usual story featuring this strange family, the daughter is courted by many of the best men in the land, but she rejects them all until one man comes riding by with whom she falls madly in love. Their courtship and marriage is therefore quickly achieved, and her new bridegroom carries her off with him to his home in the bush. The boy, through snooping or using one of his witching powers, is able to follow the couple and discover that his sister has married an animal or bush spirit that has been able to transform itself into human form. The boy also discovers how the transformation is brought about—it is commonly a song—and he persuades his father to accompany him to witness what he has discovered. The boy sings the song, the bridegroom is transformed, and the king then does what he must do.18
An important variation of this story type involves a transformed bridegroom who has achieved his change by borrowing various parts of the body to pass himself off as an appropriate suitor. After the marriage, as they return to his home, he must return what he has borrowed, whereby his new wife discovers his identity slowly and agonizingly.10
This pattern is especially notable in that it is so very different from the way in which European fairytales use the animal-human bridegroom theme. In the latter, the apparent animal, like the Frog Prince, is revealed in the end to be human—the very opposite of stories from the black world. Clearly the two traditions share motives an
d paraphernalia, but employ them to widely differing effects. If the European princess is rewarded for kissing a frog, are we to regard her Afro-American counterpart as punished for her finickiness in choosing a husband, or for her ill treatment of her diseased brother? Hardly. Instead, these tales betray an aesthetic fascination on the part of Afro-American storytellers with the transformative possibilities that can occur where the bush and human habitation abut, and where figures like Old Witch Boy (to say nothing of Trickster) are able to operate in the margins, playing the role of in-betweener to a fare-thee-well. The Chiggerfoot Boy, the shepherd, and their equivalents live between nature and culture and thus are able to see through the mask and costume of others. These figures break down all boundaries by roaming between the various worlds. There is no privacy, no family business to which they are not privy. And the moment of triumph for such a character is at that point when he can reveal the nefarious doings of others, though we seldom hear of his raising his status by pulling off such a trick.
The delight of these stories, then, lies in their dramatization of a disordering of society that opens us up to life itself. Though Massa King and his daughter are associated in the minds of many blacks with being both white and powerful, it would be difficult to argue that these stories embody any wish for the disintegration of the king’s family, any more than Trickster’s outrageous activities can be regarded as protorevolutionary. For in these stirred-up conflicts, no one wins and no one loses; in fact, winning and losing seem quite beside the point. Instead, such patterned disordering displays the sheer pleasure of getting the action going through some kind of boundary-breaking revelation. These tales recognize that actions have consequences; but, for the moment of storytelling, the principle of vitality seems more important than that of right and wrong.
This figure of the little, rejected boy with strange powers clearly places him in the same category as the classic tricksters of the Afro-American tradition: John the Slave and John the Fool, Brer Rabbit and Compé Anansi (the shape-shifting Spider), Bouki, Pigeon, Terrapin, and the many others who animate this collection. The centrality of such little creatures, who inhabit the nooks and crannies of the human community but who also maintain a kind of natural wildness, helps us both see the narrative patterns and figure out why these patterns seem so alien to the rest of the folktale literature. Their roles point up what seems a kind of plotlessness to the plotting, for the motives of Trickster and the other in-betweeners are never morally clear. Initiating action and keeping it moving is all one looks for in many of these stories.
Even when he is a principal actor, Trickster does not necessarily initiate the action; other animals may set up the trap to put an end to his rapacious ways with varying degrees of success. For instance, one of the more powerful animals lures Trickster into his house by clever means (or so it seems to him), thinking by this that he has captured him. Trickster, in response, figures out what has happened and devises an appropriate ruse to escape, sometimes also luring the instigator to his capture and demise. Indeed, the first published Uncle Remus story, called by Harris “Uncle Remus Initiates the Little Boy” (and included here as “No Chicken Tonight”), fits this pattern.
It is in the area of the repeated and overrepeated action that we can see how much variation is possible, even in portraying how successful Trickster is in his machinations. A great many stories tell of the thieving and sometimes even murderous activities that Anansi brings about, but because he tries a trick once too often, he is captured and usually flogged or executed. Typical here is “He Pays for the Provisions,” in which, during a famine, Anansi agrees to let Blacksnake give him a lash with his tail in exchange for every bag of food that he takes from Blacksnake, who has planned for just such an opportunity. Anansi devises a way to get another animal to substitute for himself. The lash kills the other animal, and so Anansi is able to provide meat for himself as well as potatoes. But he pulls the trick once too often; he finds one animal who has figured out why the others are disappearing—thus forcing Anansi to take his own beating. The pattern holds in an even wider range of stories, for it is not always the greedy trickster who is caught by repeating an action once too often. Even more often, Trickster finds a dupe who will imitate him and who winds up being held responsible not only for his own actions but for what Trickster has done before him.
VII
Daniel Crowley’s sturdy account of storytelling relates that “in the Bahamas tradition provides the narrator with a stock of theatrical devices with which to recreate a fresh story at every telling.” These devices include pointing at someone in the audience, making sudden turns and changes of pace in the telling, beating on a table for effect, or going into a dance or some other stylized movement. Of one narrator, Crowley notes: “He danced, changed his facial expressions, leered, sobbed, rubbed his eyes, expressed surprise, stabbed imaginary enemies,” all while keeping up “a barrage of talk.”20
One major way in which a good storyteller is judged in many groups in Africa is through his or her command of ideophones and other vocal effects. The older collections of Afro-American materials do not take such effects into account very often, given the difficulties in on-the-spot transcription, but they have been increasingly incorporated in tales collected since the wide-scale use of the tape recorder. (Wherever they occur in this book, I have put them in italics.) Similarly, many animals are given dialogue delivered in the “voice” of that animal.
The tradition of imitating animal speech is, in fact, so strong that collections from the earliest to the most recent have virtuoso pieces in which the story is almost totally told in sound effects. For instance, most Afro-American versions of the race between the tortoise and the hare (here given as “The Race between Toad and Donkey”) are moved along at each stop by songs that are imitations of the animal sound. In fact, the storytellers of repute in the West Indies have a little display “story” in which the animals converse with each other in their various voices:
Fowl cock say, “Marster, t’ief come.” Sheep say, “Nevah!” Guinea Fowl say, “You did it, you did it.” Duck say, “A-wa, a-wa, a-wa.” Turkey say, “It’s your habitual practice, it’s your habitual practice.” Hog say, “Good, good.”
For the less adept teller, these voice modifications and imitations become comic devices to build up dramatic interest in a traditional tale. Arthur Huff Fauset reports such a story from Alabama: A crow and a buzzard see an old mule lying in a field. Each regards the mule as a possible meal, but they are both too scared to find out whether he is dead or just asleep. The old buzzard begins to walk around and around the mule, and the crow, sitting in the tree above him, starts in on him; “Try him! Try him!” he crows forth. Buzzard gets annoyed at all this and starts to walk away, and then Crow starts, “Don’t! Don’t!” So when Buzzard gets away around by the mule’s tail, Crow starts in with this “Try Him!” stuff again, so Buzzard bites into the tail. And that’s when the mule gets up and really takes off. Now Crow starts in all over again: “Pull! Pull! Pull!” All that Buzzard can do is yell back, “How the devil can I pull when there’s more than my feet touching the ground?”21
I have not included many stories of this sort simply because they seem to “tell” better than they “read.” But the humorous device emerges again in contemporary joking. A number of recent collections contain routines that are directly in this tradition of building stories out of comic sound effects. For instance, in Daryl Dance’s recent collection, Shuckin’ and Jivin’, there are several such routines, including one called “Crap Game in the Barnyard” that has Rooster asking “What did they throw?” Duck quacking “Crapcrapcrapcrapcrapcrap!” and Old Gander honking “He’ll never make it, he’ll never make it.”22
Such sound effects certainly add to the theatrical qualities of tale-telling. But do not mistake this expressive range of vocal and gestural effects (especially sermonizing, speechmaking, and ritual activities) for the stereotypical artificial performance filled with overemotion and fren
zy. Suffice it to say that black vocal style demands that, on occasion, the voice be used not so much for informational as deliberate textural purposes; one may hear growls, squeaks, screams, rasp, falsetto (and false-bass) effects, among many others, and often in the same story.
Black style in both Old and New Worlds, in fact, encourages an overlap of voices and voice textures, an effect that to Westerners can seem over-emotional and even chaotic. This is as true of story performances as religious services. To the observer from another culture, the storytelling might seem to be as much a singing, dancing, and joking occasion as a recounting of a tale. This effect is all the more heightened when the story is “told” only in part, for the narrator relies on the audience members’ familiarity with the plot and draws them into the very telling of the tale. A song is often associated with a specific tale, and simply leading the group into that song may make it unnecessary to give any further plot details, freeing the narrator to concentrate on what he or she thinks more important or on additional textures.
Consider this example: As I discussed earlier, one of the most common story patterns calls for the planned concealment of a lovely young girl from the world. The “story” then focuses on how this situation is discovered and revealed, which then leads to the girl’s being spirited away by an animal in human form or some other “scary” figure. One episode often describes a conversation between a mother and daughter where the girl is told to lock the door when no one else is there, and not to let anyone into the house unless she hears a password or a special song. Even with such a conventional narrative situation, I heard a number of renderings of this story situation that I simply could not follow in terms of plot development. In one case, the story was begun with a song that I did not recognize, and the storyteller entered the telling (insofar as she told it at all) somewhere in the middle, knowing the rest of her audience was adequately clued in by the song.
African American Folktales Page 5