The Annotated African American Folktales

by Henry Louis Gates

  Far too many African Americans, Newell continues, were embarrassed both by the slave past and the African past: “Too much in haste to appropriate the possessions of the whites, they are not aware that they are obtaining nothing as valuable as what they are surrendering,” he observed, specifically in the case of “Negro music in Southern States,” which “is a treasure of which any race in the world might be proud. . . . Unhappily, this quality is not sufficiently understood by the Negroes themselves.” As with music, so with tales, but “these compositions have their worth, of a somewhat different nature from that which I have claimed for the songs.” The fact that Negro folktales—and he points to “the tales of Uncle Remus,” “animal folk-tales, which in great part, make their hero the rabbit, [and] celebrate the victory of skill over brute force”—“are by no means solely the possession of Negroes; on the contrary, a good many are nearly cosmopolitan,” coming to America by way of multiple routes, including Africa. “Proceeding from some common center, they have traveled about the world, and that by several different routes, meeting in America by the way of Africa, by that of Europe, and it may be, also by that of Asia.” Thus, “the universal diffusion of many tales constitutes a striking counterpart to the great diversity of racial customs. We have thus the most striking exhibition of the substantial mental unity of the human race.” Moreover, and here he brings home his larger political point, this shared canon of texts demonstrates “not . . . original natural diversity, but [the role] of environment” in creating apparent racial differences, and in this “might be found the strongest possible hope for the future of your own race.”30

  African Americans, Newell concludes, are still very much African: “It is the opinion of one of the best qualified observers, not only that the Africans in their own land are in a certain degree in character similar, but that American Negroes still have a great affinity with the race from which they derived.” Contrary to Frederick Douglass’s famous claim that “genealogical trees did not flourish among slaves,”31 Newell argues that it is important for African Americans to embrace the study and practice of genealogy: “it will become customary for American Negroes to attend to their genealogical record, and endeavor to discover, so far as they may, from what particular African source their own family was derived.” And establishing this relationship back to Africa can have an enormous influence on the future of Africa: “America, through the American Negro, is destined to exert a mighty influence in the continent of Africa. . . . The United States is the star of hope to the African. What the Negro is becoming, as we hope, that the African and Africa must become.” Moreover, he says, this process will end the American Negro’s ambivalence or embarrassment about his relationship to Africa, because the discovery “in the so-called Dark Continent” of “Negro civilizations,” will be transformative, especially for “the educated Afro-American, who in becoming entirely an American, will be no more ashamed of the continent of his origin, than the Anglo-American is ashamed of England.” Understanding the history of “Negro mythology,” the term that Alice Bacon used in her call to arms in the Southern Workman for the collection of Negro folklore in December 1893 (a statement full of references to the Negro’s roots in Africa and the necessity of establishing continuities with those roots) and roots of the American Negro’s musical traditions, Newell maintains, on both sides of the Atlantic, can only help the emergent educated American Negro class achieve its most cherished goals of becoming genuinely equal Americans. In language expressing both the essentialism of the times and the condescending attitudes prevalent among whites and blacks about the former slaves still overwhelmingly living in the South, Newell concludes by revealing a most ironic, and most practical, social and political reason for the study of folklore: “all information which it can obtain relative to its antecedents, regarding its primitive and natural way of feeling, will be a weapon in its hand. We must know the truth about the plantation Negro, to deal with the plantation Negro; it is always the truth that makes [us] free.”32 The key to understanding, and to some extent controlling, the Negro, he argues, is knowing the “plantation Negro,” and one can best know this enigmatic entity through the cultural artifacts created by what we might think of as the enslaved Negro’s mind.

  To be sure, Alice Bacon and the students and alumni at Hampton weren’t the first to collect Negro folktales or to voice fascination with what we might think of as black vernacular structures of feeling, structures of thought. The songs the slaves sang, their melodies and harmonies, of course, but also the language of their lyrics (their poetic diction), proved to be of enormous interest to Americans early in the nineteenth century. As Bruce Jackson notes in his The Negro and His Folklore in Nineteenth-Century Periodicals,33 an article written by William B. Smith and published in The Farmer’s Register in 1838 describes a “beer-dance” performed by a group of slaves.34 In 1845, J. Kennard Jr. published an essay titled “Who Are Our National Poets?” in the Knickerbocker commenting on the originality and power of slave music: “These operas are full of negro life,” he writes; “there is hardly any thing which might not be learned of negro character, from a complete collection of these original works. A tour through the south, and a year or two of plantation life, would not fail to reward the diligent collector, and his future fame would be as certain as Homer’s.”35 Who are America’s “national poets?” Kennard answers “our negro slaves, to be sure.”36

  Ten years later, Y. S. Nathanson, writing in Putnam’s Monthly, observed in an essay on “Negro Minstrelsy: Ancient and Modern” that “every cotton-field teems with melody, and every slave hut, throughout the Southern country, has its little list of genuine ballads, which only need to be known, in order to be received to the heart of a nation.”37 Nathanson is at pains to distinguish between the white minstrel tradition and the Negro folk music tradition that these imitators were mocking: “Why need we groan and grumble under the inflictions of ignorant and self-conceited [white] song-writers,” he asks, and “the barefaced and impudent imposition” of white performers and adapters, when the original is, as it were, right beneath our feet”?38

  The Civil War and the all-too-short period of Reconstruction gave abolitionists and officials working with the Freedmen’s Bureau firsthand experience with former slaves and their cultural forms, leading within two years of the end of the war to the first anthology of slave songs, Slave Songs of the United States, edited by William Francis Allen, Charles Pickard Ware, and Lucy McKim Garrison, who was the daughter-in-law of the famous and fiery Boston abolitionist newspaper editor, William Lloyd Garrison. Quite fascinating for our purposes is this curious aside in the editors’ introduction: “It is often, indeed, no easy matter to persuade them to sing their old songs, even as a curiosity, such is the sense of dignity that has come with freedom. It is earnestly to be desired that some person, who has the opportunity, should make a collection of these now, before it is too late.”39 Even by 1867, as this statement reveals, the former slaves exhibited reticence about revealing an aspect of their culture which they wished to remain private, as it were; that they wished to keep their most precious cultural forms from being tampered with, maintaining through silences the integrity of these forms “within the Veil,” as W. E. B. Du Bois would put it in his Souls of Black Folk just thirty-six years later. (James Baldwin often addressed this matter of what I think of as cultural privacy, a submerged or veiled discourse, a double-voiced discourse, and the reasons why many black people fear unveiling it, as in this observation from The Fire Next Time [1963]: “The privacy of [the Negro’s] experience, which is only beginning to be recognized in language, and which is denied or ignored in official and popular speech—hence the Negro idiom—lends credibility to any system that pretends to clarify it.” 40 As Elsie Clews Parsons noted in 1923, “Southern Negroes feel that their stories belong to the part of life, that major part, which they do not share with their white neighbors.”)41 The editors’ statement also foreshadows the sense of urgency that we saw in Alice Bacon’s manife
sto of 1893 calling for the collection of Negro folklore before it is too late, before it disappears, before the elders of the culture take this form and others like it to the next world. The cultural clock was ticking, these writers argued with some desperation, and its tick-tock was heard as early as 1867.

  Bruce Jackson charts the transition from attention to black vernacular music to other black vernacular cultural forms, including folklore: “Later, during Reconstruction days, there are several ‘discovery’ articles—for the first time the Negro is regarded as a bearer of culture, and we are given accounts of his church services, his speech, his superstitions, and, finally, his stories.” 42 This is not the place for an analysis of these articles, but a partial list would include Thadden Norris’s “Negro Superstitions” published in Lippincott’s Magazine in 1870,43 which includes an early version of the canonical “Tar Baby” tale; Robert Lee J. Vance’s “Plantation Folklore,” in which Vance says that the earliest reference he could find to African American animal tales was published by an unnamed writer in the November 1868 and 1869 issues of Riverside Magazine for Young People;44 and the first story published by Abigail Mandana Holmes Christiansen, “De Wolf, De Rabbit, and de Tar Baby,” in the Springfield (Mass.) Daily Republican in 1874.45 Christensen published more articles in Northern journals throughout the 1870s and 1880s, finally collecting these in Afro-American Folk-lore: Told Round Cabin Fires on the Sea Islands in 1892, just a year before Alice Bacon launched Hampton’s massive effort to collect folktales. (Christensen, like Allen, Wade, and Garrison, had gathered material in the settlement of newly liberated slaves at Port Royal, and the tales of the Gullah people who lived in the sea islands along the coasts of South Carolina and Georgia proved to be a treasury of black vernacular forms. Christensen was keen to suggest continuities between these tales and their African origins: these “verbatim reports from numerous sable story-tellers of the Sea Islands,” she writes, were narrated by “some . . . whose ancestors, two generations back, brought parts of the legends from African forests.”)46

  Joel Chandler Harris introduced the public to his literary conceit, Uncle Remus, in two sketches published in the Atlanta Constitution in 1876, followed by Uncle Remus, His Songs and His Sayings in 1880,47 and Nights with Uncle Remus in 1883.48 Harris would publish a total of ten volumes of Uncle Remus stories. The influence of these stories, written in Harris’s version of black English vernacular speech, cannot be gainsaid: they were wildly popular and would influence a number of major American authors, including Mark Twain, Charles W. Chesnutt, and William Faulkner.

  In 1877, just a year after Harris introduced the American public to Uncle Remus, William Owens published “Folklore of the Southern Negroes” in Lippincott’s Magazine.49 Negro Myths of the Georgia Coast was published by Charles Colcock Jones Jr., a historian and a former slave-owner, in 1888. Jones pointed to “the swamp region of Georgia and the Carolinas, where the lingo of the rice-field and the sea-island negroes is sui generis,” as fecund fields from which to harvest new kinds of black folklore, because they “materially differ from those narrated by the sable dwellers in the interior,” the “Middle Georgia,” he says, that Harris had plowed.50

  That same year, 1888, the American Folklore Society was founded and, after extensive debate, and the advocacy of William Wells Newell and the anthropologist Franz Boas (who would influence both Elsie Clews Parsons and Zora Neale Hurston at Columbia), “the folklore of the Southern Negro” was deemed appropriate matter to be “included in the research agenda” of the Society, in fifth place on its list of priorities. And that is how Newell ended up delivering his important address at Hampton six years later, in the late spring of 1894, less than a year after Alice Mabel Bacon organized the Hampton Folk-lore Society, the same year in which Mary Alicia Owen published Voodoo Tales as Told Among the Negroes of the Southwest.51 Newell had been summoned to bless Hampton’s endeavor, to give it the legitimacy of a national organization’s research agenda. And with that blessing, the quest to collect Negro folklore was on.

  Donald J. Waters has masterfully edited and analyzed the best of the folklore collected at Hampton in his important book, Strange Ways and Sweet Dreams: Afro-American Folklore from the Hampton Institute (1983).52 Because of this effort, by the 1920s, collecting Negro folklore had become commonplace, though not without its controversies, controversies that, as we see in Sterling A. Brown’s epigraph above, continued long beyond the Harlem Renaissance. But the renaissance saw published several important volumes, including Thomas W. Talley’s Negro Folk Rhymes (Wise and Otherwise) in 1922 and Elsie Clews Parsons’s Folklore of the Sea Islands (1923).53 Clews was a champion for the collection of Negro folklore, commissioning and guest-editing fourteen issues of the Journal of American Folklore dedicated to African and African American folklore, in her capacity as the journal’s associate editor. In 1925, pioneering black anthropologist Arthur Huff Fauset published “Negro Folk Tales from the South (Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana)” in Alain Locke’s manifesto, The New Negro,54 followed in 1931 by Black Gods of the Metropolis.55

  Fauset’s essay in The New Negro stressed the need for the African American community to preserve a wider and more authentic variety of Negro folklore than the tales popularized—and in part, he argued, distorted—by Joel Chandler Harris. He also compiled a very important bibliography of folk materials for Locke’s anthology. Fauset published his essay in the middle of the Harlem Renaissance, the literary politics of which included warring ideas about the forms and content that most appropriately “represented” the race (a year later, in 1926, Du Bois invited writers to participate in a debate about these matters in an ongoing symposium in the pages of The Crisis, titled “The Negro in Art: How Shall He Be Portrayed?”). Fauset, keenly aware of the fact that the status of black folklore was a highly charged subject among black critics and writers, argued, first, that Negro folklore was “based upon the original folk tales of the African slaves,”56 itself a highly contentious claim, a position (as we shall see) fraught with danger for those who were dubious about the status of the cultures created by black people in Africa and who passionately argued that the submerged position of the American Negro in American society was the result of the harmful effects of slavery, having nothing at all to do with the supposedly “debased” place of Africa and Africans on the scale of world civilization. Further, they believed that associations with Africa effectively dragged the position of the American Negro downward: as Tanika JoAnn Beamon writes, “ ‘scientists’ in the past had invoked stereotypical notions of ‘primitive’ Africa as evidence of African American inferiority and as a rationale for social inequality and anti-black discrimination.”57

  Fauset went on to argue for the salient effects of valorizing Negro folklore, precisely at this crucial time when black writers were using culture, especially the verbal arts, written and oral, as prima facie evidence that black people were intellectually equal to white people and hence entitled to the full rights and privileges of American citizenship:

  The great storehouse from which they were gleaned, that treasury of folk lore which the American Negro inherited from his African forefathers, is little known. It rivals in amount as well as in quality that of any people on the face of the globe, and is not confined to stories of the Uncle Remus type, but includes a wide variety of story forms, legends, saga cycles, songs, proverbs and phantastic, almost mythical material. . . . It is not necessary to draw upon sentiment in order to realize the masterful quality of some of the Negro tales: it is simply necessary to read them. . . . The antiquity and the authentic folk lore ancestry of the Negro tale make it the proper subject for the scientific folk-lorist rather than the literary amateur [such as Joel Chandler Harris, whom he cites earlier]. It is the ethnologist, the philologist, and the student of primitive psychology that are most needed for its present investigation.58

  The last major collection of black folklore during the Harlem Renaissance was Edward C. L. Adams’s remarkable Nigger to Nigger.59 Adams
, a white physician from South Carolina, presented the words of his subjects without mediation, and included their thoughts on contemporary racial issues. All of these collections seem something of a prelude to the work of Zora Neale Hurston, who published an extended essay, “Hoodoo in America,” in the Journal of American Folklore in 1931,60 and whose collection, Mules and Men, published in 1935 at the height of the Great Depression,61 would henceforth define the genre. Hurston’s work, including several articles on folklore and her account of her anthropological fieldwork in Jamaica and Haiti in 1936 and 1937, Tell My Horse: Voodoo and Life in Haiti and Jamaica (1938),62 was heavily influenced by her work as a graduate student at Columbia under Franz Boas, who, before his student Melville Herskovits, was a leading proponent of the cultural legitimacy of the African American folk tradition. Hurston’s work would be rediscovered in the 1970s, leading both to her canonization in the American literary tradition and to a focus on vernacular language and forms, such as folktales and myths, in black aesthetic theory. Other major collections before the Black Arts era and the birth of Black Studies in the late 1960s include Benjamin Botkin’s Lay My Burden Down: A Folk History of Slavery (1945),63 and Langston Hughes and Arna Bontemps’s The Book of Negro Folklore (1958).64