The Annotated African American Folktales

by Henry Louis Gates

  Cooper’s advocacy for the crucial importance of collecting Negro folklore may seem at odds with the movement for the “politics of respectability,” as the historian Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham has so brilliantly defined it,4 which emerged in the late nineteenth century as a call to eschew aspects of the slave past (manners, work habits, demeanor, comportment, certain cultural and religious forms and artifacts, and especially black vernacular spoken English), even as attempts were being made to preserve some selected components of the former slave’s cultural heritage. But, as anthropologist Lee D. Baker teaches us, Alice M. Bacon and other key figures in the rise of the Hampton Folklore Society believed that by collecting Negro folklore, they could measure the progress African Americans had achieved, with the aid of institutions like Hampton, since Emancipation, while also preserving the unique traces of a cultural legacy that reached back through enslavement to Africa: how far the freed people—the “Negro American”—had come “up from slavery,” in other words, and how they might be related to or different from “the American Negro.” “The educators and graduates of Hampton Normal and Agricultural Institute,” Baker writes in Anthropology and the Racial Politics of Culture (2010), “formed the society to salvage and record cultural practices of rural blacks to demonstrate that industrial education succeeded in fostering the so-called Christian civilization of its graduates—in part by using folklore to evaluate how much African heritage remained to be rooted out.”5 On one hand, then, a certain segment of the African American community saw Negro folklore, like dialect, as a discursive remnant of slavery, a cultural and a social embarrassment, best left behind in the mists of a deeply troubled past, along with the “moonbeam and magnolia” fantasies of slave and master relations on The Old Plantation in the antebellum South. On the other hand, Baker explains, Anna Julia Cooper’s comments revealed “that even at the formation of the first black folklore society, some African Americans understood that folklore could provide a positive interpretation of their African heritage or a scientific basis to identify and preserve their distinctive culture.”6

  At the same time, given that “most Hampton graduates did not question their desire to ascend to a civilized state, and even more perhaps loathed any association with Africa,” as Baker observes, Cooper’s speech at the Hampton Folklore Conference can be read as mocking the aspirations of the culturally “respectable.” In her words:

  And as the Queen of Sheba sunk under the stupendousness of Solomon’s greatness, the children of Africa in America are in danger of paralysis before the splendor of Anglo Saxon achievements. Anglo Saxon ideas, Anglo Saxon standards, Anglo Saxon art, Anglo Saxon literature, Anglo Saxon music—surely this must be to him the measure of perfection. The whispered little longings of his own soul for utterance must be all a mistake. The simple little croonings that rocked his own cradle must be forgotten and outgrown and only the lullabies after the approved style affected. Nothing else is grammatical, nothing else is orthodox. To write as a white man, to sing as a white man, to swagger as a white man, to bully as a white man—this is achievement, this is success.7

  Thus, we see that, as early as 1894, the conflict over aesthetics, cultural “authenticity,” the relation of American Negroes to their African cultural forebears—which would simmer through the Harlem Renaissance and perhaps reach its zenith in the late 1930s and early 1940s during the famous, heated debate between sociologist E. Franklin Frazier and anthropologist Melville J. Herskovits—was already inscribed in Cooper’s essay on the status of Negro folklore.

  Of note, Herskovits, in his essay, “The Negro’s Americanism,” published in Alain Locke’s The New Negro in 1925,8 initially maintained that the American Negro was sui generis, culturally; that there was no “Africa” remaining in African American cultural and social institutions, because the Middle Passage and slavery had effectively obliterated any remnants of Africa even in African American vernacular culture. But by 1930, he had begun to approach the matter with more nuance, positing what we might think of almost as a sliding scale of Africanism among black peoples in the New World, ranging from “the Bush Negroes of Suriname [sic] who exhibit a civilization which is most African,” to “a group where, to all intents and purposes, there is nothing of the African tradition left”—Negro Americans in the Northern United States—“who only differ from their white neighbors in the fact that they have pigmentation in their skin.” Herskovits argues that evidence for the relation between African and African American culture resides in “folklore, religion, and music.”9 By 1941, he had completely reversed his initial position, and most powerfully so, adopting the stance earlier articulated by his doctoral advisor at New York’s Columbia University, Franz Boas, whose disagreement with the seminal University of Chicago sociologist Robert E. Park over the presence of African survivals in African American culture was an important precursor to the Herskovits–Frazier debate (Frazier had studied with Park at Chicago before heading up the sociology department at Howard University in Washington, D.C.). In The Myth of the Negro Past (1941), Herskovits convincingly demonstrated that the American Negro was an extension of the African Negro, an African people in the New World,10 and along the way critiqued Frazier’s opposite conclusions published in The Negro Family in the United States (1939),11 conclusions quite similar to those expressed in Herskovits’s 1925 essay. The two would exchange searching critiques, implicitly and explicitly, in 1942 and 1943, and the debate would continue for many decades.

  This dispute over origins had political, as well as cultural implications. As Lee Baker explains, for Park and Frazier, the belief that American Negroes had no authentic culture corresponded to the viewpoint that problems in contemporary African American communities were, in Frazier’s phrase, a case of “incomplete assimilation of western culture.”12 Deprived of any cultural inheritance of their own and barred by discrimination from full entry into white America, Negroes were left, in Frazier’s view, with what Baker summarizes as a “pathological culture.”13 The solution, for Frazier and his followers, was to advance social welfare and antidiscrimination policies that would end the Negro’s “social isolation” and foster the race’s assimilation of normative (white) American practices and values. By contrast, those who took the Boasian approach saw in the African roots of Negro folk culture further proof of the inherent equality between the races: for them, an essential precondition for ending discrimination was for society to recognize the Negro as the author and inheritor of a valid, authentic culture. While both groups supported antidiscrimination efforts, Boasian anthropology promoted an attitude of cultural relativism, which was at odds with Park and Frazier’s emphasis on cultural pathologies. Though disagreements about the best approach to solving inequalities remain ever with us, the intellectual debate over the strength and endurance of black Americans’ African origins was eventually resolved in favor of cultural continuities, including in the fields of music, vocabulary, linguistic structures, speech patterns, and, of relevance to this volume, folklore, among others.

  That debate arose in part from the curious myth that slave ship captains and/or masters of plantations separated their captives from each other by language, in an attempt to prevent them from rebelling. This idea peppers sociolinguistic theory and histories of slavery, and it is very much an urban legend today. For example, Ronald Wardhaugh, in An Introduction to Sociolinguistics, drawing on the work of John Rickford and J. L. Dillard, states matter-of-factly that “slave owners deliberately chose slaves from different language backgrounds to discourage rebellion.”14 And the historian Herbert Aptheker, in his classic work, American Negro Slave Revolts (1943), noted that “language differences were also in this way introduced which tended to make uprisings and plots more difficult.”15 Aptheker footnotes an essay by Robert E. Park, “The Conflict and Fusion of Cultures with Special Reference to the Negro,” published in The Journal of Negro History in 1919,16 and E. Franklin Frazier’s same claim from The Negro Family in the United States (1939): “In contrast to the
situation in the West Indies, African traditions and practices did not take root and survive in the United States.”17 Frazier also footnotes Park’s essay, in which he says “as soon as they were landed in this country, slaves were immediately divided and shipped in small numbers, frequently no more than one or two at a time, to different plantations. This was the procedure with the very first Negroes brought to this country. It was found easier to deal with the slaves, if they were separated from their kinsmen.”18 Park goes on to say that subsequent generations of American-born slaves “had already forgotten or only dimly remembered their life in Africa. . . . Everything that marked [newly arrived slaves from Africa] was regarded as ridiculous and barbaric.” Moreover, “the memories of Africa which they brought with them were soon lost.”19 Park’s source? An anti-abolitionist book published in 1833 by Mrs. A. C. Carmichael, Domestic Manners and Social Condition of the White, Coloured and Negro Population of the West Indies,20 who maintained that “native Africans do not at all like it to be supposed that they retain the customs of their country; and consider themselves wonderfully civilized by their being transplanted from Africa to the West Indies. Creole negroes [those born in the West Indies, not in Africa] invariably consider themselves superior people, and lord it over the native Africans,” sentences that Park quotes verbatim for proof of his claim.21 And there you have it: the genealogy of a most specious claim, authorized by repetition in footnotes, migrating from sociology to anthropology, onto history, and then poured into debates about origins in the fledgling discourse of folklore studies.

  This argument, based on nothing but a slavery apologist’s claim, would be used as proof that African folktales and African American folktales could not possibly have anything to do with each other. The only problem with these claims is that they are not true. Historically, this sort of ethnic or linguistic separation did not happen, either on the slave ship or on the plantation. And simple reflection helps us to understand why it could not have happened.

  When I asked the distinguished historian of the slave trade, David Eltis, to comment on this myth about segregation on the slave ships, this is how he responded: “There’s absolutely no evidence of this happening . . . health, age, sex and availability [were] the only determinants of who got put on a slave ship. Thus from Bonny in the Niger Delta, one of the top three embarkation points on the West African coast, two thirds of the people were Igbo, and probably three-quarters could speak Igbo. Yet slave rebellions on these vessels were far fewer than on ships leaving Upper Guinea where the ethnolinguistic mix was far greater.” When I asked about the willful separation of African ethnicities on plantations, he said, “This doesn’t make sense either. First, after the early years of the slave trade, all slave colonies had majority creole populations,” creole meaning in this case a person born in the United States, not in Africa. “Second,” he continued, “most of the scholarly literature actually argues the very opposite. Many scholars state definitively that planters did have preferences for certain ethnicities. . . . There’s certainly no documentary evidence of buyers deliberately mixing language groups to avoid rebellion. The main point is that planters in the Americas only had the dimmest understanding of ethnolinguistic differences. They knew from which part of the African coast a slave ship left, but there’s no evidence that they partitioned off language groups within these regions.”22 As John Adams’s 1775 diary entry above makes clear, the slaves had developed what Booker T. Washington (and, much later, Marvin Gaye) would call the grapevine even before the American Revolution. So not only did the captured Africans bring their languages, their music, their gods, and many other salient features of their cultures along with them, they quickly learned to communicate with each other across language barriers not only on their own plantations and other sites of enslavement but across longer distances as well. And the telling and retelling of folktales from Africa, as well as those retold and, in the process, creatively reinvented from African and European sources, along with those invented on the spot, were crucial components of identity-formation and psychic survival under the harshest of circumstances, key aspects in the shaping of an “African American” culture, a culture built on both African and European Old World foundations, yet one original and new. The selections we have chosen for this anthology are examples of each of these three categories of invention, improvisation, and reinvention. Why and how the “originality” and “value” of the myths and tales through which enslaved human beings ordered their lives and amused themselves—like the history of black sacred music forms such as the Spirituals—would play such a key role over such a long period of time in the politics of aesthetics and social science is one of the most fascinating intellectual questions in the history of American race relations. At the heart of the matter was a complex of issues, including the battle over whether, when, and how African Americans could ever become fully integrated and equal “Americans,” on a par in every sphere as citizens with every other kind of citizen in the grand American Republic.

  Negro folklore, as Sterling A. Brown noted in 1950, was an important front in this battle, and had been since much earlier than most of us had imagined, as we can see in Anna Julia Cooper’s reflections, written about nine months before Frederick Douglass died and a little more than a year before Booker T. Washington (who surprisingly supported the efforts to collect and preserve Negro folklore at Hampton) delivered the speech that made him the prophet of social and political accommodation, and the epitome of the politics of respectability. The tension was “always already” there, as Jacques Derrida might put it, embedded in the larger discourse about what being a “black” American actually meant.

  In this context, it is quite fascinating to consider the argument that William Wells Newell made in the speech that preceded Anna Julia Cooper’s.23 Newell was for a time a professor of philosophy at Harvard but more importantly, for our purposes, founded the American Folklore Society in 1888. He had been invited to “bless” Hampton’s boldly original effort, perhaps with the encouragement of another Harvard professor, Nathaniel S. Shaler, a star pupil of Louis Agassiz, professor of zoology and geology at Harvard and founder of Harvard’s Museum of Comparative Zoology, whose extensive writings on polygenesis make him a key thinker in the history of scientific racism. In a Harvard career that stretched from 1864 to his death in 1906, Shaler helped to establish the university’s Graduate School of Applied Science and served as professor of paleontology and of geology, and as dean of the Lawrence Scientific School.

  Shaler had published an essay on “The Negro Problem” in The Atlantic Monthly in November 1884, best summed up in his conclusion that “the inherited qualities of the negroes to a great degree unfit them to carry the burden of our own civilization; . . . that there will naturally be a strong tendency, for many generations to come, for them to revert to their ancestral conditions. . . . They cannot as a race, for many generations, be brought to the level of our own people.”24 In many ways, this essay, and a second essay that Shaler published in The Atlantic Monthly in 1890,25 can be seen as something of a blueprint for the agenda for the role of industrial education within the larger scheme of American social segregation and political disenfranchisement that Booker T. Washington begin outlining in the first half of the 1890s, then articulated as a philosophy and social program in his famous Atlanta Exposition Speech delivered in September 1895. Despite these attitudes, difficult to describe in terms other than racialist, Alice Bacon herself claimed, when she announced the creation of Hampton’s Folk-Lore and Ethnology project, that “Prof. Shaler of Harvard, whose article published some years ago in the Atlantic Monthly, on Science and the African problem, originally suggested the idea to us.”26 Shaler’s influence indicates the complicated motivations behind the creation and activities of the Hampton Folklore Society, which, in the words of Lee Baker, combined “a desire for cultural preservation” with a “commitment to espionage and [the] exorcism” of a black cultural inheritance viewed as an obstacle to racial progress.27
/>
  Having Newell speak at Hampton in 1894 was a major coup, an act of legitimization for a black institution by the nascent but already authoritative American folklore establishment, at the height of the institutionalizations of Jim Crow racial segregation. Newell clearly understood what his presence meant and the stakes involved, and he embraced his task with relish.

  Newell saw the collection and analysis of American Negro folklore as a form of historic preservation, providing a conduit to the dual past of American slavery and the vast sea of African civilizations that lay far beyond the Atlantic Ocean, in the depths of a submerged antediluvian past—antediluvian in the sense of suggesting antiquity, but also in the sense of being antiquated or primitive. “Folk-lore, then, the mass of racial ideas and habits, is lost in this mental ocean [of the unity of races]; these special forms of life cease to have any continuing existence in fact. Should they therefore possess no further existence in memory? On the contrary. Man is memory,” Newell declaimed; “the more memory, the more humanity.”28

  Retrieving folklore, for Newell, was retrieving origins, and in the case of the American Negro, this meant the retrieval and the recuperation of Africa, the American Negro’s “home”—the complex legacies of their African origins—precisely when so many educated former slaves now seemed to want to leave “Africa”—and, in fact, the experience of enslavement itself—far behind, a process that, Newell is arguing, was necessary for the shaping of American Negroes’ status as full and eventually equal stakeholders in their American, and world, cultural citizenship: “I am speaking then, not with regards to the past, but the future, when I say it is of consequence for the American Negro to retain the recollection of his African origin, and of his American servitude.” Why? “For the sake of the honor of his race, he should have a clear picture of the mental condition out of which he has emerged: this picture is not now complete, nor will be made so without a record of the songs, tales, beliefs which belongs to the stage of culture through which he has passed.”29