The Annotated African American Folktales
Page 54
In this creation tale, the black man brings himself to life, from scraps and remnants. Creative genius and improvisational verve backfire, for the man made of remnants appears to be not quite complete—“messed up.” A strength is turned into a weakness, even as it is used to mock notions of racial inferiority. Daryl Dance recorded the story in Richmond, Virginia, in 1975 as it was told to him by a fifty-year-old woman.
TWO BUNDLES
“Don’t never worry about work,” says Jim Presley. “There’s more work in de world than there is anything else. God made de world and de white folks made work.”
“Yeah, dey made work but they didn’t make us do it,” Joe Willard put in. “We brought dat on ourselves.”
“Oh, yes, de white folks did put us to work too,” says Jim Allen.
Know how it happened? After God got thru makin’ de world and de varmints and de folks, he made up a great big bundle and let it down in de middle of de road. It laid dere for thousands of years, then Ole Missus said to Ole Massa: “Go pick up that box, Ah want to see whu’s in it.” Ole Massa look at de box and it look so heavy dat he says to de nigger: “Go fetch me dat big old box out dere in de road.” De nigger been stumblin’ over de box a long time so he tell his wife:1
“ ’Oman, go git dat box.” So de nigger ’oman she returned to git de box. She says:
“Ah always lak to open up a big box2 ’cause there’s nearly always something good in great big boxes.” So she run and grabbed a-hold of de box and opened it up and it was full of hard work.
Dat’s de reason de sister in black works harder3 than anybody else in de world. De white man tells de nigger to work and he takes and tells his wife.
“Aw, now, dat ain’t de reason niggers is working so hard,” Jim Presley objected.
Dis is de way dat was.
God let down two bundles ’bout five miles down de road. So de white man and de nigger raced to see who would git there first. Well, de nigger out-run de white man and grabbed de biggest bundle. He was so skeered de white man would git it away from him he fell on top of de bundle and hollered back: “Oh, Ah got here first and dis biggest bundle is mine.” De white man says: “All right, Ah’ll take yo’ leavings,” and picked up de li’l tee-ninchy4 bundle layin’ in the road. When de nigger opened up his bundle he found a pick and shovel and a hoe and a plow and chop-axe5 and then de white man opened up his bundle and found a writin’-pen and ink. So ever since then de nigger been out in de hot sun, usin’ his tools6 and de white man been sittin’ up figgerin’, ought’s a ought,7 figger’s a figger; all for de white man, none for de nigger.
SOURCE: Zora Neale Hurston, Mules and Men, 74–76.
Framed by conversations about bad weather leading to a day off from work, these two stories take up the gendered division of labor as well as a racial division of labor. They enact the folk wisdom that good things come in small packages, while also sending a warning about the hazards of greed.
“Why the Nigger Is So Messed Up,” Daryl Cumber Dance, ed., Shuckin’ and Jivin’: Folklore from Contemporary Black Americans, 1978. Reprinted with permission of Indiana University Press. “Two Bundles,” from Zora Neale Hurston, Mules and Men. Copyright 1935 by Zora Neale Hurston; renewed ©1963 by John C. Hurston and Joel Hurston. Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers.
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1 he tell his wife: In Tell My Horse, Hurston describes the roles assigned to Caribbean black women and how they occupy the lowest rung on the social totem pole, more akin to beasts than humans. “If she is of no particular family, poor and black, she is in a bad way indeed. . . . She had better pray to the Lord to turn her into a donkey and be done with the thing. It is assumed that God made poor black females for beasts of burden” (58).
2 Ah always lak to open up a big box: The woman’s desire to know what is in the box finds parallels with the curiosity of the mythical Pandora and the biblical Eve.
3 De sister in black works harder: In the story of Adam and Eve, Adam and Eve are condemned to labor by the sweat of their brows, while Eve must also suffer the pains of childbirth.
4 tee-ninchy: tiny, and sometimes expressed as “little-tee-ninchy”
5 chop-axe: This term, like “writin’-pen,” which appears right after it, is what Hurston called the “double descriptive,” a noun that has action added to it. As Hurston put it: “Everything illustrated. So we can say the white man thinks in a written language and the Negro thinks in hieroglyphics,” an insight relevant to the ending of this tale.
6 usin’ his tools: The tools of the agricultural worker, who labors under the “hot sun,” and the white man’s writing instrument, used to determine the distribution of wealth, take on powerful symbolic importance, and the writing down of a tale that circulates in conversations marks a powerful rupture with the past. Hurston has taken possession of the “writin’-pen.”
7 ought’s a ought: Aught and ought are the opposite of naught and nought, and can mean anything or all. But in common usage, ought is used as a synonym for zero.
COMPAIR LAPIN AND MADAME CARENCRO
Do you know why buzzards are bald? No? Well, I am going to tell you.
Once upon a time Mme Carencro1 was sitting on her nest on an oak tree. Her husband was a good-for-nothing fellow, and she was always starving. At the foot of the tree there was a big hole in which a rabbit lived. Compair Lapin was big and fat, and every time Mme Carencro saw him she wanted to eat him. One day while Compair Lapin was sleeping, she took some moss and bricks and closed up the hole in the tree. Compair Lapin would never be able to get out, and he would die of hunger.
When Compair Lapin woke up and he found out that he was shut up in the hole, he begged Mme Carencro to let him out, but she replied each time: “I am hungry and I must eat the flesh on your bones.”
When Compair Lapin realized that begging was of no use, he stopped trying. Mme Carencro was so happy to have caught Compair Lapin that she licked her lips as she thought of the good dinner she would be having. When she did not hear Compair Lapin moving, she was sure that he must be dead, smothered, and she removed the moss and the bricks that closed the hole. She started to go in through the opening, but just then Compair Lapin made a single leap and escaped. When he was at some distance, he said: “You see, it is you who are caught, and not I.”
Compair Lapin ran away and went to stay at the house of one of his friends, because he was afraid to go back into the oak tree near Mme Carencro. Some days later Mme Carencro, who had forgotten Compair Lapin, went to take a walk with her children, who had all come out of their shells. She passed near the house of Compair Lapin’s friend. Compair Lapin was glad, because it made him think about how he could get revenge on Mme Carencro. He ran into the kitchen and fetched a large tin pan full of burning embers and hot ashes. When Mme Carencro and her children passed nearby, he threw everything in the tin pan down on them in order to burn them. But buzzards, as you know, have thick feathers everywhere except on the top of their heads. They shook off the embers and ashes but not quickly enough to prevent the feathers on their heads from burning down to the skin.
That is why buzzards are bald and never eat the bones of rabbits.
SOURCE: Adapted from Alcée Fortier, Louisiana Folk-Tales, 22–23.
Compair Lapin may not always win in the first contest of wits, but he almost always wins in the end. Compair Lapin and Compair Bouki (bouki means hyena in Wollof) are the clever rabbit and the stupid fool in tales collected by Fortier, who was president of the American Folklore Society and dean of Foreign Languages at Tulane University.
A printed broadside of “John Henry, the Steel Driving Man” dating to the late nineteenth or early twentieth century.
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1 carencro: a term for buzzards
PART XII
BALLADS: HEROES, OUTLAWS, AND MONKEY BUSINESS
Song and story have always helped to pass time while
carrying out repetitive chores. Whether spinning yarn, harvesting crops, sewing garments, mending tools, or rolling cigars, laborers have depended on chants, melodies, and plots to pass time, lighten workloads, and also to create a sense of group solidarity by building collective memories. For the grueling work of picking cotton, carried out from dawn to dusk, song provided the only distraction from the exhaustion produced by merciless heat and humidity, aching backs, bleeding fingers, and irksome insects.
Work songs in the fields often took the form of “hollers,” echoing calls that once resounded in West African savannah regions. In The Cotton Kingdom, Frederick Law Olmsted describes hearing one of these “hoolies” or “hollers,” which sonically bonded farmhands, muleskinners, plantation workers, and railroad teams. At midnight, he is awakened and observes a “gang of negroes” around the fire, enjoying a meal together: “Suddenly one raised such a sound as I had never heard before, a long, loud, musical shout rising and falling and breaking into falsetto, his voice ringing through the woods in the clear, frosty night air, like a bugle call. As he finished, the melody was caught up by another, and then another, and then by several in chorus” (164). When the workers rolled bales of cotton up an embankment, the same sounds filled the air.
Expressive culture builds social ties, personal connections, and communal solidarity. Through a process of signaling, stories and lyrics encode news, values, and behaviors in symbolic forms that create a cohesive group identity. Their words envision perils and possibilities, test hypotheses and speculations, model successful relationships and failed partnerships, and build a collective spirit of inquiry.
In the 1920s, the young Ralph Ellison was jealous of classmates who left school to work in the fields with their parents during the cotton-picking season. “Those trips to the cotton path seemed to me an enviable experience, because the kids came back with such wonderful stories,” he wrote. “And it wasn’t the hard work which they stressed, but the communion, the playing, the eating, the dancing and the singing. And they brought back jokes, our Negro jokes—not those told about Negroes by whites—and they always returned with Negro folk stories which I’d never heard before and which couldn’t be found in any books I knew about. This was something to affirm and I felt there was a richness in it” (1995, 7). Ellison reminds us that storytelling was once an immersive experience and that it flourished in communal spaces, not only at sites of labor but also of leisure:
The places where a rich oral literature was truly functional were the churches, the schoolyards, the barbershops, the cotton-picking camps; places where folklore and gossip thrived. The drug store where I worked was such a place, where on days of bad weather the older men would sit with their pipes and tell tall tales, hunting yarns and homely versions of the classics. It was here that I heard stories of searching for buried treasure and of headless horsemen, which I was told were my own father’s versions told long before. There were even recitals of popular verse, “the shooting of Dan McGrew,” and, along with these, stories of Jesse James, of negro outlaws and black United States marshals, of slaves who became the chiefs of Indian tribes and of the exploits of negro cowboys. There was both truth and fantasy in this, intermingled in the mysterious fashion of literature. (157)
Bad men, renegades, and outlaws figure prominently in the ballad tradition, and these rebels, who were in a state of constant conflict with the law, had a certain heroic bravado in their antagonism toward the social order. Self-destructive, antisocial, and solitary, they were less invested in justice and revenge than in displays of strength and terror. By contrast with stoic cultural heroes like John Henry, they refused to play by the rules. They exist perhaps because the John Henrys, who challenge stereotypes and are models of strength and fortitude, perish before their time, leaving a legacy of suffering and endurance rather than agency and action. Stagolee, Frankie, Annie Christmas, and others like them do not fare much better, but they stage their deaths as exercises in willful self-determination and are remembered for reckless audacity, even if, in the end, it is self-defeating.
The four-part Hampton Series Negro Folk-Songs, published in 1918–1919, includes nineteen songs transcribed and notated by folklorist Natalie Curtis Burlin, based on recordings made at the Hampton Institute in Virginia. “Hammerin’ Song” and “Cott’n Pickin’ Song” appear in Book IV, Work- and Play-Songs. In the description preceding “Hammerin’ Song,” Curtis Burlin extols—without a touch of irony—the moral value of work and the inventiveness of the black worker who transformed work’s “great rhythms” into song. The names of the singers, all Hampton students, are listed together with their singing parts and courses of study: “Ira Godwin (Lead) Agriculture, Joseph Barnes (Tenor) Tinsmith, William Cooper (Baritone) Schoolteacher, Timothy Carper (Bass) Bricklayer.”
From Hampton Series Negro Folk-Songs by Natalie Curtis Burlin (1918–1919).
This eight-foot-tall bronze statue of John Henry stands next to two tunnels, one of which he helped build in 1872, the other was completed in 1930. Sculpted by Charles Cooper, the statue was unveiled in 1972 on the hundredth anniversary of the completion of the first tunnel. Photograph by Chris Dorst, Charleston Gazette-Mail.
JOHN HENRY
When John Henry was a little fellow,
You could hold him in the palm of your hand.
He said to his pa, “When I grow up
I’m gonna be a steel-driving man.
Gonna be a steel-driving man.”
When John Henry was a little baby,
Setting on his mammy’s knee,
He said “The Big Bend Tunnel1 on the C. & O. Road
Is gonna be the death of me,
Gonna be the death of me.”
One day his captain told him,
How he had bet a man
That John Henry would beat his steam-drill down,
Cause John Henry was the best in the land,
John Henry was the best in the land.
John Henry kissed his hammer,
White man turned on steam,
Shaker2 held John Henry’s trusty steel,
Was the biggest race the world had ever seen,
Lord, biggest race the world ever seen.
John Henry on the right side
The steam drill on the left,
“Before I’ll let your steam drill beat me down,
I’ll hammer my fool self to death,
Hammer my fool self to death.”
John Henry walked in the tunnel,
His captain by his side,
The mountain so tall, John Henry so small,
He laid down his hammer and he cried,
Laid down his hammer and he cried.
Captain heard a mighty rumbling,
Said “The mountain must be caving in.”
John Henry said to the captain,
“It’s my hammer swinging in de wind,
My hammer swinging in de wind.”
John Henry said to his shaker,
“Shaker, you’d better pray;
for if ever I miss this piece of steel,
tomorrow’ll be your burial day,
tomorrow’ll be your burial day.”
John Henry said to his shaker,
“Lord, shake it while I sing.
I’m pulling my hammer from my shoulders down,
Great Gawdamighty, how she ring,
Great Gawdamighty, how she ring!”
John Henry said to his captain,
“Before I ever leave town,
Gimme one mo’ drink of dat tom-cat gin,
And I’ll hammer dat steam driver down,
I’ll hammer dat steam driver down.”
John Henry said to his captain,
“Before I ever leave town,
Gimme a twelve-pound hammer wid a whale-bone handle,
And I’ll hammer dat steam driver down,
I’ll hammer dat steam driver down.”
John Henry said to his captain,
“A man ain’t nothin’ but a
man.
But before I’ll let dat steam drill beat me down,
I’ll die wid my hammer in my hand,
Die wid my hammer in my hand.”
The man that invented the steam drill
He thought he was mighty fine,
John Henry drove down fourteen feet,
While the steam drill only made nine,
Steam drill only made nine.
“Oh, lookaway over yonder, captain.
You can’t see like me.”
He gave a long and loud and lonesome cry,
“Lawd, a hammer be the death of me,
A hammer be the death of me!”
John Henry had a little woman,
Her name was Polly Ann,
John Henry took sick, she took his hammer,
She hammered like a natural man,
Lawd, she hammered like a natural man.
John Henry hammering on the mountain
As the whistle blew for half-past two,
The last words his captain heard him say,
“I’ve done hammered my insides in two,
Lawd, I’ve hammered my insides in two.”
The hammer that John Henry swung
It weighed over twelve pound.
He broke a rib in his left hand side
And his intrels3 fell on the ground,
And his intrels fell on the ground.
John Henry, O, John Henry,
His blood is running red.
Fell right down with his hammer to the ground,
Said, “I beat him to the bottom but I’m dead,
Lawd, beat him to the bottom but I’m dead.”
When John Henry was lying there dying,