A number of stories had been performed at a wake that I was attending in Richland Park, St. Vincent, when an old lady, Nora Bristol, broke into the already tumultuous proceedings, yelling out, “See-ah” (meaning “look here” or “look there” or even “watch out”). A number of people looked her way but gave no vocal response. Again she shouted in her ancient growl, “See-ah.” This time, two or three people responded, “See-ah,” almost intoning the words. She then growl-sang, “See-ah, Nanny,” to which everyone in the room responded, now singing:
See-ah, Nanny, see-ah.
She took the audience one step further, singing in ringing tones:
See-ah, Nanny, see-ah.
Knowing by now that the others would repeat what she had sung, at this point she got up and began to do a little shuffle-dance, knees slightly bent and body turning slightly to the left as the singing began in earnest:
See-ah, Nanny, see-ah
See-ah, Nanny, see-ah
Me Mammy Nanny coming (for to)
See-ah, Nanny, see-ah.
This song and dance lasted at least five minutes and managed to involve, in one way or the other, most of the people in the room and many of those right outside the windows, in the yard of the recently deceased man. Then she suddenly yelled out, “Oh no, that is not my mother’s voice up in the cotton on the mountain.” Again, the insistently repetitive song and dance started up, and lasted for another few minutes. At some point in the middle of a line, someone else called out, “Crick!” This is the common West Indian way of calling attention to the story. “Well then,” Nora now said, “this woman had this only daughter, and whenever she left the house to go to the fields, she always told her daughter, if anyone came and called out to her, that she should tell them that she [her mother] had gone to the mountain [and therefore she could not open the door.]”
But the force of the singing and dancing was still coursing through the group, and they broke into the story, singing over and over:
See-ah, Nanny, see-ah
See-ah, Nanny, see-ah
See me, Mammy Nanny coming (for to)
See-ah, Nanny, see-ah.
Again, after a minute or so, she yelled, “Crick-crack!” now getting the traditional response from the others: “Rockland come.” And she went on: “Then Nanny [the little girl’s name] was surprised [by the witch-woman who had successfully imitated her mother’s voice]. She went into the first bedroom, Nanny wasn’t there. She went past the stairs and into the second bedroom, she couldn’t find Nanny. She went downstairs, no Nanny. [Clearly Nanny had seen her mistake and run away.] She went back onto the mountain, and called out:
See-ah, Nanny, see-ah
See-ah, Nanny, see-ah.”
Naturally, the song was again picked up by the entire group and carried on in three repetitions. This time, the singing came to a halt of its own, for the group was waiting for an indication of where the story was being taken. “No Nanny,” she called to the mountain and she called to the cotton field:
See-ah, Nanny, see-ah
See-ah, Nanny, see-ah.
Clearly, Nora and her audience were more interested in singing and dancing than telling the story. Though I knew the language fairly well, I could not understand how the plot was being developed, for she had provided none of the clues to which I was accustomed. She proceeded to give a bit more dialogue, and to act out some more of the chase. But the tale was brought to a close, not through a profound ending to the action, but almost without warning, by a deus ex machina trick: “Her husband came down with his cutlass and ax and all and cut down all the trees, and gave that old lady a whoppu! and I came right here to tell all of you this story!”
Throughout the telling, this immensely animated lady leaped about as if she were wound up like a spring, pointing her crooked finger in the face of all the little girls listening, chuckling to herself about these ridiculous doings even while she sang at the top of her lungs, danced around, and brought other people onto the floor with her. Her performance was roundly enjoyed, not least because of her age and reputation, and because she was breaking the usual rules of decorum and obviously enjoying doing so. To be sure, such singing and dancing and other animating acts are the norm in West Indian performances at wakes, but few women—and especially, few older women—are willing to so perform. Far from being judged harshly for garbling the plot, she was applauded for her abundant energies and her ability to bring everyone into the performance.
Many storytellers attempt to gain everyone’s attention by starting a song with which everyone will begin to sing; or by shouting out the conventional opening, “Crick-crack!” Often, of course, this ploy will not work, as more than one person will attempt to grab the audience’s attention. There may also simply be too many other things going on at that moment for even the best of the storytellers to gain center stage.
A number of other features of storytelling in such communities underscore how narration is open to interruption and digression, preventing tales from being told beginning to end. Scenes are not necessarily recalled in chronological sequence; I have recorded a great many stories that seem to begin in the middle or even at the end, only to go back to some scene that occurs earlier in the string of actions that make up the “plot,” as we think of it conventionally. The tales, after all, are made up of commonplace episodes and characters, recognizable to the audience, and can therefore be played around with. The story may be stopped at any time, and on occasion, may be started again some time later, even after another story or two has been told, or after some other songs have been launched. In some cases, the sequence of episodes is fixed, and the effect of the story relies on a building of drama in a specific way. Naturally enough, these are the stories that have tended to be written down and put into folktale collections. But, equally often, the stories are picked up and put down almost serendipitously, and the narrator may string together conventional episodes in any of a number of combinations, a practice that led one early observer to regard them as “pointless, disjointed, mutilated fragments … [which often] break off just when the interest has reached its highest point.”23
Nothing demonstrates the string-of-beads effect more than those stories, reported from a number of places in Afro-America, that begin or end with a song that seems to have little to connect it to the plot. For instance, the story “Assaulting All the Senses,” from Surinam, concerns killing a tiger by getting him to drink monkey urine, yet ends with a song that apparently bears no relation to the story’s action.
The use of such non sequiturs has been reported from one end of the sphere of Afro-American culture to the other. Daniel Crowley, for instance, in his many intimate descriptions of tellings, tales, and tellers, includes interruptions to the narrative flow caused by audience questions and comments, parenthetical remarks (including jokes and elaborate “I was there”-type exaggerations by the narrator), and the inevitable breaking out in song.
In an even more radically punctuated tale tradition, described and summarized by Richard and Sally Price among the Saramaka of Surinam, speakers introduce whole stories, little comic testimonial speeches about the truth of the story and veracity of its teller, and songs that are by convention attached to another story, in addition to the usual running commentary on the effectiveness of the tale or the truths implied in its message.
To the uninstructed ear or eye the usual tale from this tradition often seems formless and directionless, wittily or eerily animated but without the strong sense of whole-plottedness to which we are accustomed. I am sure that if we were able to go back to the original oral versions of many of our most common literary folktales, we would be surprised at their rambling character, their repetitiveness, and the number of parenthetical remarks introduced that sometimes develop into large-scale digressions. Storytelling, especially when it occurs at a wake (or some other celebration of life-transition), provides a context within which a number of other types of performance are encouraged, including riddles, games, and singing and d
ancing. When we read it, the song can also serve, as we have seen, as one character’s “signature” or as a way of moving the story along. Listen to “The Old Bull and the Young One” and hear a father and son, locked in mortal combat over the control of the herd, sing of their powers to each other. The song can convey vital information, as in “My Mother Killed Me, My Father Ate Me” and “The Singing Bones,” the verses revealing murderous wrongdoing. The song provides a comic point or even the punch line in stories like “The Latest Song” or “Poppa Stole the Deacon’s Bull,” which turn on self-incrimination. Similarly, in stories in which an animal transforms himself to human form to court and carry away the king’s beautiful daughter, the change is sometimes accomplished through singing a magical song. When it is heard by the observing Old Witch Boy, the song becomes the key to the boy’s ability to unmask the animal’s disguise.
Since Trickster is often a marvelous fiddler, singer, or dancer in tales like “Making the Stone Smoke” or “Dancing to the River,” the song and dance become a way of pulling off the trick around which the story revolves. In “Brer Rabbit’s Riddle,” Rabbit’s singing and dancing abilities themselves become a matter of comment by both the narrator and the other characters.
Finally, a number of stories are told almost totally in song, such as “Don’t Shoot Me, Dyer, Don’t Shoot Me”; each development in the story is paralleled by a change in the song text. Hardly a simple embellishment, the song often determines the way in which the plot is developed.
In such involved performances the narrator becomes almost a character in the action—introducing personal remarks parenthetically (for instance, about how some character in the story is like someone in the audience or the community). The vibrancy of the narrator’s role is made all the more interesting by the personalized “I” of conventional openings and endings. The taleteller can not only shout out the song or a characteristic speech (“Please don’t throw me in the briar patch!”) but can also introduce other first-person remarks, especially in the joking formulaic endings, such as you find in “Golden Breasts, Diamond Navel, Chain of Gold”: “And so I myself ate at the wedding feast and they shot me with a cannon, till I sat down here.”24 This is another example of Daniel Crowley’s aptly named “double lies”—a lie (prevarication) on top of a lie (story), which underscores the fictional quality of the tale while sustaining the reality of the speaker. A similar device is the “signature” ending that comes in many of the contemporary stories told in verse, such as “Stackolee”:
I was born in the backwoods, for my pet my father raised a bear,
I got two sets of jawbone teeth, and an extra layer of hair.…
Bringing together first- and third-person narrative techniques sometimes animates an entire story, such as the routine, included in this book as “A Chain of Won’ts,” or the following comic monologue of interlocking requests that Elsie Clews Parsons reports from Nevis in the West Indies:
I went down to Hilding Gilding, I met an old lady stooping. I asked for a glass of water. She said I must ask her daughter. Her daughter said, “Go to the well!” The well said, “Go to the cistern.” The cistern said, “Go to the kettle.” The kettle said, “Go to the bucket.” The bucket said, “Go to the goblet.” The goblet said, “Go to the glass.” The glass said, “Drink up and leave me alone.”25
VIII
One of the special delights of folktales of any sort is seeing how things of this world can be put together and taken apart, constructed and exploded without any need for logical explanation. Perhaps pointing this out verges on the obvious—that folktales operate in their own worlds, ones that depart from the everyday but in predictable directions. We can therefore give ourselves up to these alternative worlds without care—or even in the spirit of celebration and affirmation. Reading traditional tales becomes one of many activities in contemporary American culture that we classify as play, a term that encompasses all those encapsulated experiences that have their own rules, boundaries, and sets of expectations that ask us, albeit only for the moments of play, to give the leaders of the revels their due by willingly suspending disbelief in what is going on. Or, to put it more positively, to the extent that we give ourselves up to these experiences we willingly lend our energies to a process that promises us no payoff except the pleasure of the experience: for the fun of it all, or in terms consonant to many of the tales, “for the hell of it!”
A great many of the stories are actually told in the face of death, at wakes. They carry the special burden of taking community life apart and putting it back together again, through reaffirmation, through that special feeling of communitas.26
The stories represent the spirited voices of the night directed at the surrounding dark, and in the case of those told at wakes, they are expected to fill that void, at least for the first nine nights. If these seem like childish stories, that is not because they are juvenile in theme but because they are so direct and so vital, so essentially useful in the exuberance of their lies.
To introduce the particular worlds of these stories to you, I have chosen sections that describe what seems to be the major thematic development of the tales therein. For instance, the first group of stories dramatize how the world is put together, how well ordered it is, and how egotistical individuals become when they are discovered attempting to alter this order. It is especially concerned with the establishment of power relationships, relating power to one or another capacity given an animal or human; these stories are often concerned with the usefulness of testing this arrangement.
In the succeeding sections, the central conflicts are between respectable and riotous behavior. For instance, how-to-behave stories are balanced by how-not-to-behave stories! A great number of tales center on ingenious tricks that work, balanced by others in which our hero-scamp (or some other reprehensible type) gets caught. One whole section is given over to stories about the actual power confrontations that occur between blacks and whites in situations in which the former are exploited and forced into subordination—and insubordination—by the latter. Clearly, making such distinctions is strictly arbitrary, for the same characters, situations, even the same tricks may be found in many different sections. Moreover, the final segment is given over to little performance routines, fixed-phrase texts of the “for want of a nail the shoe was lost” sort, routines that, though they tell a story, do so with totally nonsensical means. Here too I base the distinction between these and tales in other sections on emphasis, for many of the other sections contain lies just as nonsensical as the ones found in this last grouping.
Just as this introduction began with an illustrative anecdote, let me so end it, with one that encapsulates a great deal of the vitality and the value placed on both wit and resilience in these tales. A story—“Some Are Up and Some Are Down”—widely told among blacks in the American South relates how Brer Rabbit and Brer Terrapin were feeling the drought one summer and complaining about how hard it had become to find water to drink. They decided they would pool their talents and make a search together, but Brer Rabbit just bounded off into the woods. He found an old house, and there was an old cistern at the house that operated on the two-bucket principle—when one bucket was up, the other was down. Rabbit just couldn’t resist; he jumped into the empty bucket, and down it went right into the pool. Well, he drank his fill, but then he found that he couldn’t get up.
Along came Brer Terrapin looking for his “friend.” He heard a big racket going on in the middle of the woods. He ran to where the noise was coming from, and he saw the other bucket and the cistern below it. So he yelled down and asked if that was Brer Rabbit in there making all that commotion. Rabbit was glad to hear his voice, of course, and he yelled back up that, yes, it was him down there and he found all of this cool water. Didn’t Brer Terrapin want to have a good long drink and swim? Terrapin thought that sounded like a good idea, so he asked Rabbit how he had gotten down there. Rabbit told him just to jump in that old bucket and it would bring him down. Mea
nwhile, Rabbit was getting set by getting back into the first bucket. So Brer Terrapin got in the bucket, and it went right to the bottom and brought Brer Rabbit back up to the top. After Terrapin had had his drink and had swum for a while, he yelled up to Rabbit and told him to bring him back up. Brer Rabbit naturally declined this privilege, and told Terrapin so. Terrapin said, “Are you going to go off and leave me down here in this well!” To which Rabbit replied, “You know, that’s the way the world is going these days: some are up and some are down, and I don’t think that’s going to change much!”27
Notes
1. Jean Price-Mars, Thus Spoke the Uncle, tr. Magdaline W. Shannon (Washington, D.C.: Three Continents Press, 1983), 15–16.
2. Robert Farris Thompson, The Flash of the Spirit (New York: Random House, 1983), 18.
3. Henry-Louis Gates’s recent survey of the rhetorical strategies of the term is useful here: “On ‘The Blackness of Blackness’: A Critique of the Sign and Signifying Monkey,” Critical Inquiry 9 (1983): 685–723.
4. Reported in Langston Hughes and Arna Bontemps, The Book of Negro Folklore (New York: Dodd, Mead, 1949), 13.
5. Richard Price, Saramaka Social Structure (Rio Piedras: Institute of Caribbean Studies of the University of Puerto Rico, 1975), 18.
African American Folktales Page 6