The Annotated African American Folktales

by Henry Louis Gates

  When I was a child, I heard stories told by women. My mother told me the first tale I remember hearing. I didn’t know it was a whimsy, a playful fancy, made upon the spot to comfort me.

  . . . We’d sip hot cider, sassafras tea, and listen in wonder to the household tales. Of course, they were gentle reminders about nature’s power, about ourselves in the world, where we came from, and who we were. I knew that one day I would make a book all about women like my mother, talkers, those tale tellers, and about whom tales were told.

  VIRGINIA HAMILTON, Her Stories: African American Folktales, Fairy Tales, and True Tales (New York: Blue Sky Press, 1995), 105, 109

  What the old men enjoyed most was telling jokes and stories. They told stories all the time, morning, noon and night, they were at it constantly. There were so many stories that it was often difficult to keep track of them, you got so muddled up. I always pretended to be listening, but to be honest, by the end it was all whirling round in my head. There were three or four African elders at Ariosa. There was a difference between the Africans and the Creoles. The various Africans understood each other, but the Creoles hardly ever understood the Africans. . . . I got on all right with them because I spent my whole life listening to them. They were fond of me, too.

  ESTEBAN MONTEJO, The Autobiography of a Runaway Slave (London: Macmillan, 1968), 181

  These stories are true, but one I am convinced is a fabrication because I never saw such a thing, and that is that some Negroes committed suicide. Before, when the Indians were in Cuba, suicide did happen. They did not want to become Christians, and they hanged themselves from trees. But the Negroes did not do that, they escaped by flying. They flew through the sky and returned to their own lands. The Musundi Congolese were the ones that flew the most; they disappeared by means of witchcraft. They did the same as the Canary Island witches, but without making a sound. There are those who say the Negroes threw themselves into rivers. This is untrue. The truth is they fastened a chain to their waists which was full of magic. That was where their power came from. I know all this intimately, and it is true beyond doubt.

  ESTEBAN MONTEJO, The Autobiography of a Runaway Slave (London: Macmillan, 1968), 63–64

  It is said that the first Africans upon the slave ships headed to the Americas sensed the coming of a great and lasting catastrophe. They knew that they needed something to protect and fortify them from the coming centuries of servitude and oppression, so they sent out an exalted wail beseeching God’s mercy. God looked down on them and saw that they had nothing. They were naked and in chains. God, in His wisdom, took the very sound of their lamentation and turned it into their shield and their weapon and today we call that sound music. It is those majestic wails, that cry of despair, that music, in its ever-changing forms, that has nourished our people through the centuries.

  ATTRIBUTED TO “SLEEPY WILLIE” BY HORACE MUNGIN, The Devil Beats His Wife and Other Stories from the Lowcountry (N.p.: n.p., 2004), viii

  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? Yet if you approach a Negro of Nova Scotia with the question, “Do you know the Brer Rabbit stories?” he is likely to look at you in wonderment, or even with a blank countenance, and shake his head and say, “Never heard any—what are they like?” Sometimes, after you have told him an Uncle Remus story, his face will light up a little, and he will say, “Oh, yes. I read one like that a long time ago in the Halifax Herald.” After recovering from your chagrin, you say to him, “Don’t you tell these stories around the fire?” He looks at you in astonishment and says, “Lord no, man, I never hears of ’em.”

  ARTHUR HUFF FAUSET, Folklore from Nova Scotia (New York: The American Folk-lore Society, G.E. Stechert, 1931), vii

  “You know what I like about storytelling, are the unlimited possibilities,” he asked-and-answered. “There aren’t any rules. With folk music there are rules, unspoken ones. You can bend them pretty far, but once you break them you’re in another genre. . . . Storytelling is different. You don’t want to lie, if it’s historical, you want to keep it true at the core, if you know what I mean, but you can be any first person character from the past that you like. I find that really liberating.”

  DAVID HOLT, quoted in Pamela Petro, Sitting Up with the Dead: A Storied Journey through the American South (New York: HarperCollins, Flamingo, 2001), 95

  He likes the blacks’ tales? That’s natural. Who among us at his age didn’t listen to them with pleasure? But for the rest, let’s not kid ourselves. There is in these tales, aside from the dramatic interest, a malice that is often quite refined.

  ALFRED MERCIER, L’Habitation Saint-Ybars, ou Maîtres et Esclaves en Louisiane, récit social (New Orleans: Imprimerie Franco-américaine, 1881), 109

  Went to Florida and worked six months, back to New York for four months, weighed down by the thought that practically nothing had been done in Negro folklore when the greatest cultural wealth on the continent was disappearing without the world ever realizing that it had ever been. Money was found and I returned to the south and spent three years 1928–1931 studying and collecting (a) Negro folk tales (b) Negro secular songs (c) Religious expressions (d) Hoodoo practices.

  ZORA NEALE HURSTON, October 12, 1934, letter to Thomas E. Jones, President, Fisk University, in Carla Kaplan, Zora Neale Hurston: A Life in Letters (New York: Random House, Anchor, 2007), 315

  We the darker ones come even now not altogether empty-handed: there are to-day no truer exponents of the pure human spirit of the Declaration of Independence than the American Negroes; there is no true American music but the wild sweet melodies of the Negro slave; the American fairy tales and folk-lore are Indian and African; and, all in all, we black men seem the sole oasis of simple faith and reverence in a dusty desert of dollars and smartness.

  W. E. B. DU BOIS, The Souls of Black Folks (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 7

  Your country? How came it yours? Before the Pilgrims landed we were here. Here we have brought our three gifts and mingled them with yours: a gift of story and song—soft, stirring melody in an ill-harmonized and unmelodious land; the gift of sweat and brawn to beat back the wilderness, conquer the soil, and lay the foundations of this vast economic empire two hundred years earlier than your weak hands could have done it; the third, a gift of the Spirit. Around us the history of the land has centred for thrice a hundred years; out of the nation’s heart we have called all that was best to throttle and subdue all that was worst; fire and blood, prayer and sacrifice, have billowed over this people, and they have found peace only in the altars of the God of Right. Nor has our gift of the Spirit been merely passive. Actively we have woven ourselves with the very warp and woof of this nation,—we fought their battles, shared their sorrow, mingled our blood with theirs, and generation after generation have pleaded with a headstrong, careless people to despise not Justice, Mercy, and Truth, lest the nation be smitten with a curse. Our song, our toil, our cheer, and warning have been given to this nation in blood-brotherhood. Are not these gifts worth the giving? Is not this work and striving? Would America have been America without her Negro people?

  W. E. B. DU BOIS, The Souls of Black Folks (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 167

  Now for the great historic civilizations of Asia and Europe, it has been contended by some theorists that the mythopoeic imagination has been most profoundly stirred and has found its richest expression at three historic periods and in three specific areas, India, Greece, and Christian Europe of the Middle Ages. . . . On the basis of data obtained in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries concerning the unwritten literatures of aboriginal peoples, it is now quite clear that at certain points in their history, the mythopoeic imagination had been as vitally stirred and had expressed itself among them as richly and voluminously as was ever the case in Greece, India, and Christian medieval Europe.

  PAUL RADIN, Introduction, African Folktales (Princeton, NJ:
Princeton University Press, 1952), 3

  The cultural memory inscribed in the hegemonial “writing” of Western documents, imperial monuments, colonial rituals, trade records, and individual—fictional or autobiographical—recollections have as a general rule not contained the “words” of colonial or enslaved subjects; their visceral experiences, their memories of oppression and resistances have become left “behind” by Western historiography, prose, and poetry. Those “obscurities” now, in keeping with a continuing history of social and economic decolonization and cultural reorientation, need to be displaced by way of artistic recuperation of the colonial and imperial past from the point of view of those previously muted subjects. This recuperation is by necessity an artistic act and challenge, since in most cases, “chronicles” of the dates and facts of colonization—coherently figured from that subaltern perspective—do not exist. The pervasive ellipses of Western historiography will only be pointed out and filled by way of the (literary) imagination.

  SABINE BROCK, White Amnesia—Black Memory? American Women’s Writing and History (Frankfurt: Peter Lang, 1999), 24

  Though some writers have stressed European and Indian influences in Negro tales, there is little question of the retention of Africanisms. Materials of this kind are particularly susceptible to objective analysis, because of the many independent components which render assumptions of correspondence almost indisputable. A good example of how this operates is to be seen in the case of what is perhaps the best-known Negro story, The Tar Baby. . . .

  The story is so characteristic of West Africa, that Africanists have themselves long used Joel Chandler Harris’s version of this Negro tale from the United States as a point of comparative reference. There are some who maintain that the tale, as found both in this country and in Africa, originated in India; this is a matter of specialized and somewhat acrid controversy, which is so far from settled that it is still in the realm of conjecture and need not concern us here. The fact that such a complex series of incidents should have been combined into this plot sequence, both among African and among New World Negroes, brings the inescapable conclusion that, whatever its place of absolute origin, the tale as found in the New World represents a part of the cultural baggage brought by Africans to this hemisphere.

  MELVILLE J. HERSKOVITS, The Myth of the Negro Past (Boston: Beacon Press, 1958), 272–73

  If America is to grow as a nation built upon solid, shared, creolized “spiritual soil,” Americans must open themselves to the African elements of the national culture, elements that have long been repressed in official histories. With such an opening, the nation might be able to draw in full upon Afro-Creole “gifts of the spirit” to accompany gifts of sweat, milk, blood, and knowledge that have long been accepted or appropriated without reservation. Such acknowledgment, such opening, must be accompanied by its double, meaningful acknowledgment of the haunting, warped, recurrently violent modes of being to which we all were bound in the founding of America.

  KEITH CARTWRIGHT, Reading Africa into American Literature: Epics, Fables, and Gothic Tales (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2002), 228

  In their African setting these tales are called upon not just to deliver a specific message, but to initiate talk about that message. In other words, unlike most of the stories we are accustomed to encountering in books, these come from communities that continue to use stories as ways of pulling apart current subjects and piecing them together again, both through the story itself and . . . through the discussion and arguments that story engenders.

  It is precisely the way that the storyteller “grabs your shirt” and thrusts you into the tale that isn’t there in the folktales we read in literary collections such as those of the Brothers Grimm, where what we find on the whole is a record of stories as remembered by old people who no longer tell them actively. In contrast, the African stories here were recorded while still flourishing in social and cultural environments in which the artful employment of speech in all dimensions of community is encouraged and applauded. . . . For as the Mandingo say at the beginning of a story: “A really unique story has no end.”

  ROGER ABRAHAMS, African Folktales (New York: Random House, Pantheon Books, 1983), 10–14

  We sat on the bank of the creek and ate our lunch. Afterward Dottle and Johno told stories, wonderful stories in which animals talk, and there are haunted houses and ghosts and demons, and old black preachers who believe in heaven and hell.

  They always started off the same way. Dottle would say to Johno, “Mr. Bones, be seated.”

  Though I have heard some of these stories many, many times, Dottle and Johno never tell them exactly the same. They change their gestures; they vary their facial expressions and the pitch of their voices.

  Dottle almost always tells the story about the black man who goes in a store in a small town in the South and asks for Muriel cigars. The white man who owns the store says (and here Johno becomes an outraged Southern white man), “Nigger, what’s the matter with you? Don’t you see that picture of that beautiful white woman on the front of this box? When you ask for them cigars, you say Miss Muriel cigars!”

  ANN PETRY, Miss Muriel and Other Stories (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1945), 33–34

  Usually I think of myself as a storyteller. I would like for readers to look at a person telling the story from the first person point of view as someone actually telling them a story at the time. But when you are dealing with the omniscient point of view, you are not being told a story; you are reading a story, I feel. Now maybe what I need to do is sit in a chair on a stage and just tell people stories rather than try to write them. I wish I could do that. I wish I could be paid just to sit around and tell stories, and forget the writing stuff. But, unfortunately, I am a writer, and I must communicate with the written word.

  JOHN LOWE, ed., Conversations with Ernest Gaines (Jackson: University of Mississippi, 1995), 88

  In the books, there’s always a happily ever after.

  The ugly duckling grows into a swan, Pinocchio

  becomes a boy.

  The witch gets chucked into the oven by Gretel,

  the Selfish Giant goes to heaven.

  Even Winnie the Pooh seems to always get his honey.

  Little Red Riding Hood’s grandmother is freed

  from the belly of the wolf.

  When my sister reads to me, I wait for the moment

  when the story moves faster—toward the happy ending

  that I know is coming.

  JACQUELINE WOODSON, Brown Girl Dreaming (New York: Penguin, Nancy Paulsen Books, 2014), 207

  SCIP: I come from wey de door is shet, an’ I come to wey it still is closed. All I got is dreams, an’ dey is drownded I ain’ kin make my feelin’s known. Laughin’ ain’ make no diff’ence now. God has overlooked me. I is not strong enugh I ain’ kin make my feelin’s known.

  You axe me wuh I is an’ I guh tell you. I is wuh I is. I isn’t wuh I mought er been. To my lonesome self I ain’ nothin’ but a yellow bastard—augh, I ain’ care—a yellow bastard wid no place—wid no place amongst de white folks an’ a poorly place amongst de niggers.

  De door is shet to me. Hemmed in on every side, I has nothin’ but dreams. An’ my thoughts is floatin’ out, floatin’ far above de tall tree tops, here an’ dere, listenin’ to de wind’s soft tune above de tree tops an’ de clouds. Across de stars dey wander for a lonely moment, an’ den back again an’ down, down, down into de mire. For de door is shet to me. Hemmed in, hemmed in on every side.

  I ain’ kin make my feelin’s known, for I ain’ nothin’—nothin’ but a yellow bastard to white an’ black alike. I is wuh I is—nothin’ but a yellow bastard—an’ I ain’ kin make my feelin’s known. Laugh, I ain’ care.

  TAD: I hear wuh you say. I ain’ guy laugh an’ I ain’ guy cry. I ain’ know wuh you is.

  SCIP: Let’s we finish move dis fertilizer.

  E. C. L. ADAMS, Nigger to Nigger (London: Scribner’s, 1928), 34–35

&nbs
p; I was born in the South “fo’ de wah,” and as my parents were slave holders, I grew up among the negroes. To me they seemed vastly more interesting and more human than white folks. . . .

  It was in . . . negro cabins that I first heard many of the folk-lore stories published by Joel Chandler Harris, and a lot more besides. . . . And it was in the long corn rows along the bottoms of the French-broad river that I heard from one of the old negroes these and many other stories that have now partly or entirely escaped my memory.

  It is not strange that, under the circumstances, slavery seemed to me a natural and happy state of human existence.

  Then came the civil war and after that the former slaves were taken in hand by political organizations and by the fishers in the muddy waters of the times. They were inveigled away from their former homes and friends, and finally left to the waves and winds of fate like so much flotsam and jetsam of the war.

  Meanwhile I had been sent to school away from home. . . . I returned home for a short visit, and on inquiring about our former slaves I heard that Aunt Ellen lived about eight miles away, and that she had sent word to me to be sure to come to see her when I was at home for a visit. And of course I went.

  I found Aunt Ellen in a state of poverty and wretchedness that went to my heart. . . . And I told her what I thought, or supposed I thought, in some such words as these: “Aunt Ellen, you were a lot better off as a slave than you are now. . . .”

  And this is what Aunt Ellen replied: “De Lawd bless yo’ soul, chile, dat’s a fact; hit’s jes lak you ben a sayin’. I knows I had mo’ to eat an’ mo’ to wear, an’ a better house to live in, an’ all o’ dem things, an’ you all was mighty good to me; an’ I didn’ have none o’ dese here doctah’s bills to pay. But Law’, honey, atter all, dah’s de feelin’s!”