We know that slaves “talked back,” even if only among themselves and that they defied the imperatives of silence imposed on them by slaveholders. Somehow, like High John de Conquer, talk not only survived but could also remain supple and strong. Narratives were told not just for the purpose of survival but as one small piece of a project for developing a cultural style, a style that enabled enslaved people to fashion their identities and strategize among themselves. Still, the imperative of silence had its own toxic consequences, and manifests itself today in the many ruptures, gaps, and discontinuities that stand in the way of reconstructing a comprehensive history of black Americans before 1865, one that includes a full portrait of folkloric activities.
The talking skull of African American lore reminds us that speech can have fatal consequences and that, in many cases, silence and muteness were logical responses to conditions of enslavement and servitude. Elective muteness can be found in many biographical accounts, fictional and real-life, in a postbellum era. Consider Maya Angelou, an eloquent poet and prolific writer who penned no fewer than seven autobiographies and who was also an abuse survivor who became a selective mute, choosing silence to manage her fears. For Angelou, however, silence was both “a symptom of pain” and a “means of overcoming it” through a period of hibernation from which she emerged with an arsenal of weapons that included words and their poetry.
We have many other inflections of the strategy as well. Read the first pages of Richard Wright’s Black Boy, and it becomes evident that cultures of silence invaded African American homes in sinister ways. When the eponymous boy’s mother speaks in a home that provides little comfort and reassurance, it is to silence: “You stop that yelling” and “You better be quiet” are the phrases that dominate her mode of communication with her sons. And the narrator quickly perpetuates this manner of speaking when he turns to his brother to say, “You shut up.”46
Yet there are fringe benefits to this repressive regime. The narrator responds to the obligatory muting by building a compensatory world of imaginative wonders. Recall the extraordinary scenes of coruscating beauty that register his responses to nature, among them: “There was the aching glory in masses of clouds burning gold and purple from an invisible sun.” 47 He converses with nature, and its expansive beauty becomes the prelude for the boy’s first encounters with print culture. It is telling that the young Richard receives his first dose of fairy tales, not from his kin, but from a book read to him on the front porch (the storied site at which tales were exchanged). A schoolteacher named Ella reads “Bluebeard and His Seven Wives” (a story about a wealthy serial murderer) to the boy, and the narrator is forever changed by it.
A fairy tale about secrets, forbidden chambers, and raised scimitars makes a direct hit: “I burned to learn to read novels and I tortured my mother into telling me the meaning of every strange word I saw, not because the word had any value, but because it was the gateway to a forbidden and enchanting land.” On his own the narrator abandons the punitive world of “Or else!” and enters the searing beauty of “What if?” Tellingly, his grandmother calls the story the “devil’s work” and snatches the book away, as if to protect the boy from the harm done by words and stories. What she fails to recognize is how the story opens up the full spectrum of human emotions, creating an alternate universe in which words build worlds that lay bare perils and possibilities.48
Wright describes for us how he received his first dose of true lies, the beautiful deceptions and counterfeit truths that do cultural work for us, creating belief systems and symbolic worlds that help us navigate our own. “Lying,” Kevin Young tells us, is also known as “storying.” It is “the artful dodge, faking it till you make it.”49 Recall Paul Laurence Dunbar’s verse about wearing the mask “that grins and lies” as well as Ralph Ellison’s description of himself as a “professional liar,” and it becomes evident that fabricating fiction is the best antidote to repressive regimes that aim to shut down talk and impose silence. The complicated distortions of fiction are paradoxically a way of getting at straight-up doses of reality.
STRAIGHT TALK: DIALECT, VERNACULAR, AND METAPHORS
This project, then, aims to reclaim, affirm, and reanimate African American folktales. Some had their origins in African cultures and migrated with slaves into the Americas. There they were redesigned in the context of plantation slavery to keep hope alive by enabling talk, talk about everything under the sun: cruelty and compassion, fears and desires, hope and despair. Fueled by all the cultural contradictions that animate storytelling and keep it alive with inventive energy, they are revelatory and sometimes even redemptive, opening up a theater of passions and impulses. There we find rough sketches of daily life as well as profound snapshots of the daydreams and nightmares that haunted a people enslaved.
No single volume—or standing library for that matter or even an ocean of free-floating tales—can capture even a small percentage of those stories, but this one will offer a representative sample and attempt to reconstruct some of the cultural surround that shaped African American lives over the centuries and enabled black people to survive the claustrophobic social, cultural, and psychological effects of slavery. “It is important that we talk to our old people before they become ancestors, and get their stories,” the novelist Jacqueline Woodson declared at the 2014 National Book Award ceremony.50 And it is equally important to scour the archive with the hope of restoring stories told over the centuries to canonized cultural memory.
Folklore is shamelessly opportunistic, snatching what is close at hand yet also preserving what was told or made long ago and far away. Drawing on multiple sources, whatever it can get its hands on, the bottom-up, grassroots process of collective storytelling is syncretic, assembling its poetry, wisdom, and beliefs by drawing on multiple sources. African American folklore is no different, and many of the tales in this volume show a deep kinship with tales, not just from Africa but also from India, China, and Europe.
Mediating everyday experience, real and imagined, folklore once gave its listeners straight talk, uninhibited primary process in some cases, carefully constructed narratives in others. Deploying what has been called “folkspeech” and “slanguage,” it offered uncensored accounts oriented toward adult audiences rather than toward the children we imagine today as auditors of stories about Brer Rabbit and Brer Fox.51 These stories developed a style of their own, with sophisticated code words and stylized language that created a template for how to tell a story to an audience eager for knowledge about the past and present as well as for things made up and never written down. They were stylized speech acts, not mere slices of recorded speech indistinguishable from the language of the hearth and home or the language of the field. Works of art and artifice, they were self-reflexive constructs, meditations on language as much as purveyors of social content and cultural wisdom.
As is already abundantly clear, there is mischief in these stories. Comforting in some ways, they are also irreverent, told in a scrappy, raw, impertinent manner that may not always seem appropriate for the young. Readers will encounter the terms Negro and nigger, black and colored, kaffir and Bushman, Afro-American and African American, terms that defined social and cultural identity over various eras and in different regions, at times proudly, at times defiantly, and at times with a queasy sense of discomfort.
Presenting a history of African American folklore means facing down the demons of slavery and anti-black racism that once haunted and still trouble the cultural production of a community. It requires an unflinching look at the evidence preserved by earlier generations and a determination to reveal exactly what the historical record contains. For that reason, the stories have been recorded as they were told, without editing or omitting words that take us out of our comfort zones and that may sound offensive to us today. As Thomas Washington Talley, an African American collector of folklore, put it: “May I be permitted to state that I realize that there are certain terms found in the record such as ‘Nigger,’ �
�Cracker’ etc. which are objectionable to us of today. I regret this. But in order to truthfully reproduce the Traditions I had to use the terms, and I know that all will agree that the world ought [to] have the truth.”52 Occasionally a tale has been adapted for the sake of clarity—as is the case with some African tales recorded more than a hundred years ago. In those cases, the original, no-frills translators remained so faithful to the letter that they lost the spirit of the tales and produced stories that flattened out on the page.
One of the challenges, then, of a volume like this one has to do with language. Many of the tales are encoded in a creolized dialect not readily accessible to readers today. They are often told in English-based languages—Gullah, Bahamian Creole, or Jamaican Patois—that require translation. Creole tongues took on some of the characteristics of a secret language, using words in unusual ways, sometimes reversing their meanings, letting them slide into their opposites, or signifying in ways so unusual that the narratives possessed a certain strategic opacity. In addition, there are ways in which the stories overdo stereotypes or indulge in outrageous racial slurs in order to undo those very stereotypes and racist ideologies. In the interest of authenticity and historical fidelity, we have remained faithful to the letter and spirit of the stories as they were recorded.
Africanized speech, the vernacular, and eye dialects (in which nonstandard spellings like de or wimmin are used) were the preferred modes of recording traditional tales that were told, spoken rather than read from a page. At one end of the spectrum of that vernacular speech, we find blackface minstrelsy and plantation speech with its deliberate mangling of Standard English. It is the idiom that the great novelist and poet James Weldon Johnson, executive secretary of the NAACP from 1920 to 1931, famously described as moving in only two registers: humor and pathos.53 And it is this idiom that both Wright and Ellison thought they were critiquing in their evaluation of Zora Neale Hurston’s use of black speech in Their Eyes Were Watching God. To use it is to evoke stereotypes about the language of slavery (which it was not), with all the invidious cultural associations of ignorance and inferiority left intact. Joel Chandler Harris’s tales will form Exhibit A for that particular inflection of black speech. At the other end, however, is a vibrant, self-conscious, creative, and robust idiom that preserves the immediacy of oral storytelling cultures and the lively improvisational style that animated them. In that vernacular—as poetic as it is powerful—we can begin to imagine an original, even if we have nothing more than a distant cousin.
Henry Louis Gates Jr. tells us that dialect can turn language against masters and against authority. A language related to English, but not necessarily subordinated to it, it could also be seen as a strategic idiom, one that created a barrier against outsiders and enabled the transmission of something akin to a secret code. Spoken at a different frequency (a “lower frequency” Ralph Ellison calls it), it could vary and improvise, distort and adorn, preserving cultural memory in a fluid medium not immediately accessible to those outside the group.54
Reading always requires collaboration, and its most powerful afterlife comes in the form of conversation. The stories in Annotated African American Folktales invite us to renew cultural memory and reimagine the past in ways untainted by sentimental wistfulness and counterfeit nostalgia. They may take us back in evocative ways, but less to stage and reenact than to memorialize the strength of ancestral voices and how they resonate in our culture today. Still, it is tempting to follow the advice of writers like John Edgar Wideman, who urges us to give in to the clarion call of imagination and to breathe the air of these stories as well as to investigate the cultural energy they transmit to us today:
Imagine the situations in which these speech acts occur, the participants’ multicolored voices and faces, the eloquence of nonverbal special effects employed to elaborate and transmit the text. Recall a front stoop, juke joint, funeral, wedding, barbershop, kitchen: the music, noise, communal energy and release. Forget for a while our learned habit of privileging the written over the oral, the mainstream language’s hegemony over its competitors when we think “literature.” Listen as well as read. Dream. Participate the way you do when you allow a song to transport you, all kinds of songs from hip-hop rap to Bach to Monk, each bearing its different history of sounds and silences.55
If we cannot always imagine the sites of storytelling, we can still dream as we read or as we listen to voices from times past.
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1 I borrow the concept of the archive and the repertoire from Diane Taylor’s The Archive and the Repertoire: Performing Cultural Memory in the Americas (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003). Ruth Finnegan provides a critique of the term folktale in her Oral Literature in Africa (Cambridge, UK: Open Book Publishers, 2012), 310–11. In oral literature, she emphasizes, “the verbal elaboration, the drama of the performance itself, everything in fact which makes it a truly aesthetic product comes from the contemporary teller and his audience and not from the remote past” (311). Her resistance to admitting the repertoire into the archive means that the repertoire will be forever lost.
2 http://unesdoc.unesco.org/images/0012/001205/120546E.pdf.
3 Richard H. Brodhead, ed., The Journals of Charles W. Chesnutt (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1993), 25.
4 Glenda Carpio, Laughing Fit to Kill: Black Humor in the Fictions of Slavery (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008).
5 Richard Wright, “The Literature of the Negro in the United States,” in White Man, Listen! (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1957), 105–6.
6 Terry Gross, All I Did Was Ask: Conversations with Writers, Actors, Musicians, and Artists (New York: Hachette, 2004), 27.
7 James Weldon Johnson, “The Dilemma of the Negro Author,” American Mercury 15 (December 1928), 477–481.
8 Robert B. Stepto and Michael S. Harper, “Study and Experience: An Interview with Ralph Ellison,” in Conversations with Ralph Ellison, ed. Maryemma Graham and Amritjit Singh (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1995), 334.
9 Ibid., 465.
10 Margaret Atwood, Negotiating with the Dead: A Writer on Writing (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 178.
11 Lawrence W. Levine, Black Culture and Black Consciousness: Afro-American Folk Thought from Slavery to Freedom (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), 80.
12 Toni Morrison, “Rootedness: The Ancestor as Foundation,” in Black Women Writers (1950–1980): A Critical Evaluation, ed. Mari Evans (New York: Anchor Press, Doubleday, 1984), 340.
13 Zora Neale Hurston, “High John de Conquer,” American Mercury 57 (1943), 450; rpt. in The Sanctified Church (Berkeley, CA: Turtle Island Foundation, 1981), 69.
14 Ruth Finnegan writes that the ritual use of drums turns them into “instruments . . . regarded as speaking and their messages consist of words.” See Oral Literature in Africa (London: Oxford University Press, 1970), 11.
15 Bernard DeVoto, Mark Twain’s America (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1932), 92–93.
16 Herman Melville, Moby-Dick; or, The Whale (New York: W. W. Norton, 2002), 22.
17 Houston A. Baker Jr., Long Black Song: Essays in Black American Literature and Culture (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1990), 16.
18 Richard Dorson, Negro Folktales in Michigan (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1956), 187.
19 Charles Joyner, Down by the Riverside: A South Carolina Slave Community (Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 1985), 223.
20 Paule Marshall, Reena and Other Stories (Old Westbury, NY: Feminist Press, 1981), 7.
21 Edward O. Wilson, The Social Conquest of Earth (New York: Liveright, 2013).
22 Ernst Bloch, The Fairytale Moves on Its Own Time: The Utopian Function of Art and Literature. Selected Essays (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1988).
23 Julius Lester, The Tales of Uncle Remus (New York: Dial Books for Young Readers, 1999), viii.
24 Virginia Hamilton, The People Could Fly (N
ew York: Knopf, 1985), xii.
25 Ralph Ellison, “Change the Joke and Slip the Yoke,” in Shadow and Act (New York: Random House, 1995), 58.
26 Julius Lester, Black Folktales (New York: Grove Press, 1969), xvi, vii.
27 Robert Hemenway, ed., Uncle Remus: His Songs and His Sayings (New York: Penguin, 1982), 14.
28 R. Bruce Bickley, Critical Essays on Joel Chandler Harris (Boston: G. K. Hall, 1981), 55.
29 Richard Dorson, quoted in Neil Gaiman, American Gods (New York: HarperCollins, 2001), epigraph.
30 Lewis Hyde, Trickster Makes This World: Mischief, Myth, and Art (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1998), 72.
31 Henry Louis Gates Jr., The Signifying Monkey (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988; rpt. 2014), p. 35. Gates relies on Ayodele Ogundipea’s recorded tale in Esu Elegbara, the Yoruba God of Chance and Uncertainty: A Study in Yoruba Mythology, 2 vols. (PhD diss., Indiana University, 1978), II, 135.
32 Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being (New York: Harper Perennial, 2009), 63.
33 Letters of Charles W. Chesnutt, 1889–1905, ed. Joseph McElrath Jr. and Robert C. Letiz III (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997), 105.
34 Zora Neale Hurston, “Halimuhfack,” recorded by Herbert Halpert, June 18, 1939, Hurston Sound Recordings, American Folk Life Center, Library of Congress, Washington, DC.
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