The Annotated African American Folktales

by Henry Louis Gates

  Roger D. Abrahams’s Deep Down in the Jungle: Negro Narrative Folklore from the Streets of Philadelphia (1964),65 Bruce Jackson’s The Negro and His Folklore in Nineteenth-Century Periodicals (1967), Richard M. Dorson’s American Negro Folktales (1967),66 and John Mason Brewer’s American Negro Folklore (1968)67 were each major interventions in the Black Arts period, providing access to examples of the black vernacular traditions that would heavily inform the shape of black literature for decades to come. Jackson’s Get Your Ass in the Water and Swim Like Me: African American Narrative Poetry from Oral Tradition (1974),68 made folklore history by becoming the first text to include an audio disc allowing us to hear the words of his informants, a brilliant innovation. Abrahams’s work, and Jackson’s collection, provided the raw material for my own theory of African American literary criticism, The Signifying Monkey (1988).69 Harold Courlander’s A Treasury of Afro-American Folklore (1976),70 Daryl Cumber Dance’s Shuckin’ and Jivin’: Folklore from Contemporary Black Americans (1978),71 and Dance’s more recent From My People: 400 Years of African American Folklore: An Anthology (2002)72 are among the most important collections of African American folklore published in recent decades.

  What would you think of whole groups of Negroes who had never heard of Brer Rabbit? Or of stories about Monkey and Baboon, Elephant, and all the other animals?

  —ARTHUR HUFF FAUSET, Folklore from Nova Scotia

  In an essay published in 1965, titled “Why I Returned,” Arna Bontemps points to the place of African American folklore as a trope and as a placeholder in a larger battle that had raged within the black middle class about “roots,” origins, vernacular culture, modernism, cultural identity, and social mobility since the politics of respectability debates that, as we have seen, surfaced in the 1890s and continued through the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s and well beyond. (The 1926 essay exchange in The Nation between Langston Hughes in “The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain”73 and George Schuyler in “The Negro Art Hokum”74 is a classic example of the debate over the form and content of African American literature.) Bontemps is quite eloquent about the way that diametrically opposed opinions about the life or death of black vernacular culture could manifest themselves at the dinner table and divide families into two distinct camps:

  In their opposing attitudes towards roots my father and my great-uncle made me aware of a conflict in which every educated American Negro, and some who are not educated, must somehow take sides. By implication at least, one group advocates embracing the riches of the folk heritage; their opposites demand a clean break with the past and all it represents. Had I not gone home summers and hob-nobbed with folk-type Negroes, I would have finished college without knowing that any Negro other than Paul Laurence Dunbar ever wrote a poem. I would have come out imagining that the story of the Negro could be told in two short paragraphs: a statement about jungle people in Africa and an equally brief account of the slavery issue in American history.75

  In other words, to paraphrase James Weldon Johnson’s famous critique of dialect poetry, published in 1922, before he and Langston Hughes and Sterling A. Brown revitalized “dialect” as a resonant and linguistically complex poetic diction, black vernacular cultural forms, especially Negro folklore, in Negro middle-class popular opinion, were trapped between two stereotypical polar oppositions: the jungle and the slave cabin. And both, for different reasons, as we have seen, were—with few but notable exceptions—negative. As James Weldon Johnson put it in 1912, in his novel Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man, referring to the spirituals: “As yet, the Negroes themselves do not fully appreciate these old slave songs. The educated classes are rather ashamed of them and prefer to sing hymns from books. This feeling is natural: they are still too close to the conditions under which the songs were produced: but the day will come when this slave music will be the most treasured heritage of the American Negro.”76 As went the spirituals, so went other vernacular forms, forged—ironically—in the creative crucible of the hell of enslavement.

  As far as the black middle class was concerned, all of the black vernacular cultural forms were of a piece: Negro folklore—like the spirituals, like ragtime and the blues, like work songs and the oral tradition of “lying” or tale-telling, like the use of black English or “dialect” in poetry and musical forms—was the linguistic remnant of slavery. And slavery, for many African Americans in the embrace of the politics of respectability at the turn of the century, was best left behind. And so was Africa, the stereotypical portrayals of which had understandably been absorbed uncritically by many African Americans, having had very little, if any, exposure to images of Africa and Africans that were anything other than a negation of “progress,” the West, and of “civilization” itself. No, slavery and its cultural artifacts had to be left behind in the residue of history back on the plantation, just as African culture had to be left behind in the jungle. That, as exaggerated as it may sound to us today in an era of recuperation of both the slave past and the African past, summarizes much of the black middle class’s attitude to both, as Bontemps frankly confesses. In contrast to the folklorists of the late nineteenth century, who saw themselves as participants in racial uplift efforts dedicated to overcoming the culture of slavery, folklorists of the Harlem Renaissance, such as Fauset and Hurston, dedicated their work to the recovery and preservation of an authentic African and African American inheritance. “Thus,” writes Lee D. Baker in Anthropology and the Racial Politics of Culture, “the New Negro rationale for collecting folklore in the 1920s was virtually the opposite of the HFS [Hampton Folk-Lore Society] rationale in the 1890s. This one tale was first used to articulate the uplift project, and two decades later it was used to bolster the heritage project.”77

  The game-changer for the fate of black folklore was, for good and for ill, Joel Chandler Harris and his popular sidekick, Uncle Remus. It is safe to say that Uncle Remus remains the most popular black literary character in all of American history. And Joel Chandler Harris’s enormous commercial success, if not the way he drew upon and transformed black folktales in his short stories, could not help but draw comment from black writers and readers, and tempt some to try to replicate what he had done, but from within, or out of, what we might think of as a “black aesthetic.” No one was more successful at recuperating the Negro folk tradition from “the plantation tradition” than Charles W. Chesnutt, whose stories subverted the tendency among some white folklorists to romanticize antebellum life in the South and render the relations between masters and their slaves in metaphors of consanguinity such as “aunties” and “uncles” (a tendency so persistent that, when I was an undergraduate at Yale in the early 1970s, students nicknamed a history course on the Old South “Moonbeams and Magnolia Blossoms”).

  Chesnutt burst onto the American literary scene with the publication of his first short story, “The Goophered Grapevine,” in The Atlantic Monthly, in August 1887,78 the first black author to appear in those pages, eleven years after Joel Chandler Harris had introduced Uncle Remus to the American reading public in the pages of The Atlanta Constitution and seven years after Uncle Remus: His Songs and His Sayings was published as a book. Chesnutt was very aware of the relationship of his fictional black character, Julius McAdoo, to Uncle Remus—and of his own relationship to Harris—a relationship of repetition and reversal, or signifying. Uncle Julius is a trickster figure whose Remus-like demeanor fools the white male Northerner who narrates the stories, stories that offer quite realistic depictions of the brutalities of the “slave regime,” as Frederick Douglass called it, as well as revelations of ingenious uses of “conjuration” to rescue slaves from those brutalities. Chesnutt collected seven of his stories and published them as The Conjure Woman in 1899, to great critical acclaim, if not great financial success.79 Chesnutt was keenly aware of the stakes of his aesthetic project; as he wrote in a fascinating essay, “Superstitions and Folk-lore of the South” (1901), he “embodied into a number of stories” the “old-time belief in wha
t was known as ‘conjuration’ or ‘goopher,’ ” a set of practices “brought over from the dark continent by the dark people,” the African slaves, and “certain features [of which] suggest a distant affinity with Voodooism, or snake worship, a cult which seems to have been indigenous,” he concludes erroneously, “to tropical America.”80 Here, quite deftly and at once, Chesnutt has staked a claim for the cultural continuities between continental African and New World African cultures, and valorized the slave experience that fused them together: “In the old plantation days they flourished vigorously, though discouraged by the ‘great house,’ and their potency was well established among the blacks and the poorer whites.”81 (Chesnutt also wrote about Harris as late as 1931, in his important essay, “Post-Bellum Pre-Harlem.”)82

  If the ghost of enslavement haunted attitudes among the black middle class about black folklore and its related idiomatic forms, the shadows of Joel Chandler Harris (whom the philosopher Alain Locke damned as “a kindly amanuensis for the illiterate Negro peasant”)83 and his equally kindly, and irrepressibly amiable conceit, Uncle Remus, fell over Chesnutt’s work (as his silent second text) and over subsequent estimations of the nature and function of African American folklore in general. As Sterling A. Brown put it in 1950, four years after the release of Disney’s classic Song of the South (in which James Baskett, as Remus, consoles a lonely little white boy, played by Bobby Driscoll, with tales of that wily trickster, Brer Rabbit): “For a long time Uncle Remus and his Brer Rabbit tales stood for the Negro folk and their lore. One thing made clear by the resurrection of Uncle Remus in Walt Disney’s Song of the South is the degree to which he belonged to white people rather than to the Negro folk.”84 On the other hand, however, Brown is quick to point to the importance of Harris to the preservation of black folklore: “Whether familiarity has bred contempt, or whether there has been too great a sensitivity toward folk expression, Negroes have lagged behind whites in the gathering of folk tales. Without Joel Chandler Harris, it is likely that the Uncle Remus stories, which now belong with the minor masterpieces of American literature, would have been lost.”85 In 1950, Brown lamented the fact that “educated Negroes by and large have not been greatly interested,”86 despite having concluded in 1941 that “awareness of the importance of a study of the folk is increasing among Negroes, but still slowly.”87 Whether it was the slave experience itself, or its romantic recuperation by apologists for slavery during the post-Reconstruction period—or some combination—Brown honestly reflected on the deeply ambivalent attitudes that middle class African Americans felt toward Southern black folklore just five years before Rosa Parks and the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King would launch the modern Civil Rights Movement at what had been the symbolic heart of cotton country, Montgomery, Alabama, named the first capital of the Confederate States of America both because of its historic role in cotton production and its location as a major Gulf Coast mercantile port—in other words, at a symbolic center of slave experience and hence the birthplace of Southern Negro folklore itself, rather than in the North, which had long been the home of political activities designed to ameliorate the plight of African Americans, and a growing class of middle class Negroes wary of the merits of preserving or celebrating the culture of the enslaved as depicted in Joel Chandler Harris’s writings and in Disney’s Song of the South.

  But the problem with Harris was as much ideological as it was literary: his representation of slavery, through Remus, was part of the larger attempt to reclaim slavery as a golden age in the history of American race relations, a process that unfolded precisely as the effects, insofar as this was possible, of Reconstruction were being rolled back, and Jim Crow segregation was being foisted upon American race relations. In this dreadful process, Negro folklore had been summoned, dressed in the clothes and voiced in the words of the ever-loyal, always-faithful, grateful servant, Uncle Remus, something of a distant family member in blackface, but one never invited to spend the night in the Big House. As Brown puts it, “Harris shows Uncle Remus telling the stories for the entertainment of his little white master, and Uncle Remus too often conforms to the [romantic] plantation tradition. Finally, the Uncle Remus stories are considered children’s classics,” when in fact these were tales that adults told to other adults as well as to children. “The stark and almost cynical qualities of genuine folklore, especially that of rural Negroes, are deleted in favor of gentility and sentiment. A whole school of reminiscent writers gave stories as told by faithful uncles and aunties. But their purpose was more to cast a golden glow over the antebellum South than to set forth authentic Negro folklore.”88

  But, Brown argues, by no means should we allow the denuding of the essence of Negro folklore by apologists for slavery, such as Harris, to deter us from collecting and nourishing the folk tradition. For in these tales, just as in the spirituals, is embedded the first expression of the aesthetic foundation of African American culture:

  Whether laughing at the mishaps of his master or of a fellow slave; whether siding with Brer Rabbit while he checkmates stronger opponents with cunning and deceit, or with the Tar-Baby while he foils Brer Rabbit; whether telling about John Henry defeating the steam drill, or Railroad Bill outshooting the sheriff and his deputies, oral telling of tales has been a favorite occupation of American Negroes. Down by the big gate, at the store or cotton gin, at the end of the row at lunch time, in poolroom, barbershop, fraternal lodge, college dormitory, railroad depot, railroad coach, the Negro has told his tall tales and anecdotes, now sidesplitting, now ironic, now tragic. Though it is an art not likely to die out, it certainly deserves more serious attention than it has received.89

  For we should never allow ourselves to underestimate the aesthetic merit of black folklore and not fully appreciate its enormous potential as the basis of a great tradition of canonical literature: “Whatever may be the future of the folk Negro,” Brown wrote in 1953, “American literature as well as American music is the richer because of his expression. Just as Huckleberry Finn and Tom Sawyer were fascinated by the immense lore of their friend Jim, American authors have been drawn to Negro folk life and character.” Moreover, “folk Negroes have themselves bequeathed a wealth of moving song, both religious and secular, of pithy folk-say and entertaining and wise folk-tales. They have settled characters in the gallery of American heroes; resourceful Brer Rabbit and Old Jack, and indomitable John Henry. They have told their own story so well that all men should be able to hear it and understand.”90

  In the same pioneering essay, published on the eve of America’s entry into World War II, Brown hails the role of Zora Neale Hurston in retrieving Negro folklore from those who would denude it. “The first substantial collection of folk tales by a Negro scholar,” he writes, perhaps unaware of Arthur Huff Fauset’s work but certainly aware of the noble efforts undertaken at Hampton in the last decade of the nineteenth century, “is Mules and Men by Zora Neale Hurston. Miss Hurston is a trained anthropologist, who brings a great zest to both the collecting and the rendering of the ‘big old lies’ of her native South.”91 In a way, Brown is the link between Zora Neale Hurston and an entire “school” of African American modernists and postmodernists whose work is constructed, in various ways, on the bedrock of black folklore and other vernacular forms, especially the way black people have spoken, and continue to speak, African American versions of American English. I’m thinking especially of Ralph Ellison and Albert Murray, Alice Walker and Toni Morrison, though the list of superb writers in this branch of the African American tradition is long and distinguished, and would have to include Ishmael Reed, Toni Cade Bambara, Leon Forrest, and a host of other brilliant authors. In other words, an entire branch, or school, of African American literature unfolded from the fiction of Zora Neale Hurston and the poetry of Langston Hughes and Sterling A. Brown, themselves indebted to the literary experimentation with black vernacular traditions in the work of James Weldon Johnson, especially God’s Trombones (1927) and Jean Toomer’s modernistic novel, Cane
(1923).

  I think, in part because of Hurston’s efforts to collect Negro folklore, in part because of her experiments with folklore in her novels, both Richard Wright and Ralph Ellison (despite having mischievously panned Their Eyes Were Watching God in separate book reviews) articulated the fundamental importance of black folklore to defining—and mining—a genuine “black aesthetic,” a theoretical position that Toni Morrison would also so luxuriously embrace and embody in her fiction. Writing in 1937 from within a Marxist aesthetic but struggling to reconcile it with a nascent cultural nationalism, Richard Wright had this to say: “Negro folklore contains, in a measure that puts to shame more deliberate forms of Negro expression, the collective sense of Negro life in America. Let those who shy at the nationalist implications of Negro life look at this body of folklore, living and powerful, which rose out of a unified sense of common life and a common fate. Here are those vital beginnings of a recognition of value in life as it is lived, a recognition that marks the emergence of a new culture in the shell of the old. And at the moment this process starts, at the moment when a people begin to realize a meaning in their suffering, the civilization that engenders that suffering is doomed.”92

  However, Wright, whose literary naturalism was at odds both with Hurston’s lyrical modernism and Ellison’s fiction, which sits on the border of modernism and postmodernism, didn’t manage to draw upon the vibrancy of the folk tradition in his fictions. Ellison, on the other hand, successfully did, and refers to the power and importance of black folklore again and again in his critical writings, nowhere more powerfully than in this statement in 1967:

  We have been exiled in our own land and, as for our efforts at writing, we have been little better than silent because we have not been cunning. I find this rather astounding because I feel that Negro American folklore is very powerful, wonderful, and universal. And it became so by expressing a people who were assertive, eclectic, and irreverent before all the oral and written literature that came within its grasp. It took what it needed to express its sense of life and rejected what it could not use . . . What we have achieved in folklore has seldom been achieved in the novel, the short story, or poetry. In the folklore we tell what Negro experience really is. We back away from the chaos of experience and from ourselves, and we depict the humor as well as the horror of living. We project Negro life in a metaphysical perspective and we have seen it with a complexity of vision that seldom gets into our writing.93