American Negro Folktales

by Richard M. Dorson

Overview

A preacher battles a bear, a mother returns from the dead, and a clever servant conducts a Big Feet Contest in this rich anthology of African-American folklore. Scores of humorous and harrowing stories, collected during the mid-twentieth century, tell of talking animals, ghosts, devils, and saints.
The first part of the book provides a setting for the fables, in which folklorist Richard M. Dorson discusses their origins and the artistry of storytellers. The second part consists of the tales, which include the adventures of Old Marster and John, supernatural episodes, and comical and satirical anecdotes as well as more realistic accounts of racial injustice. Recounted in the actual words of the narrators, the folktales abound in bold language, memorable imagery, and bittersweet humor that reflect the essence of African-American storytelling traditions.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780486805801
Publisher:	Dover Publications
Publication date:	05/05/2015
Series:	African American
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	384
Sales rank:	889,235
File size:	623 KB

About the Author

Richard Mercer Dorson (1916–81) was an American folklorist, author, professor, and Director of the Folklore Institute at Indiana University.

Read an Excerpt

American Negro Folktales

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By Richard M. Dorson

Dover Publications, Inc.

Copyright © 1967 Richard Mercer Dorson
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-486-80580-1

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CHAPTER 1

ORIGINS OF AMERICAN NEGRO TALES

One of the memorable bequests by the Negro to American civilization is his rich and diverse store of folktales. This body of oral narratives took form on Southern plantations during the dark days of slavery and has expanded and traveled north on the lips of colored people in the last hundred years. By contrast, the white population has inherited no firm tradition of ethnic folktales. Ever since the Grimm brothers in 1812 first revealed the abundance of European peasant stories, the folklorists of every country in Europe have enjoyed a succession of field days. But no Grimms have made their appearance, or can appear, in Uncle Sam's America.

The reasons why are fairly clear. Americans are not ethnically homogeneous, and their history is far too short for the new homogenized American that Crèvecoeur spoke about to have become a reality. Various colonizing and immigrant groups — Pennsylvania Germans, Louisiana French, Spanish-Mexicans in the southwest, Italians and Poles in northern cities — have preserved their own transplanted narratives in their own tongue. But the colonizing Englishmen of the seventeenth century had largely lost the folk art of storytelling. They retained vivid legends of witches, ghosts, and the Devil, but they had ceased to relate magical fictions of stripling heroes and enchanted castles. In the American colonies and the new republican states, a mobile class of independent farmers replaced the communal peasants of Europe, and European storylore has always flourished among the peasantry. Then, too, in the modern world new forces were at work to inhibit the older forms of oral narration: the forces of popular education, industrial and urban growth, and mass communications. Storytelling did not and never will die, but the nightlong novelettes replete with marvelous adventures have yielded to snappy jokes, witty anecdotes, and conversational city legends.

Only the Negro, as a distinct element of the English-speaking population, maintained a full-blown storytelling tradition. A separate Negro subculture formed within the shell of American life, missing the bounties of general education and material progress, remaining a largely oral, self-contained society with its own unwritten history and literature. In 1880 a portion of this oral literature for the first time became visible to the mass of Americans with the publication by Joel Chandler Harris of Uncle Remus: His Songs and His Sayings. Harris was a journalist in central Georgia who worked on the first plantation newspaper, The Countryman, and then spent a quarter of a century on the staff of the Atlanta Constitution. In its pages he launched the character of Uncle Remus, the favored elderly slave of the old plantation who fascinated the little white boy of the house with his Brer Rabbit stories. Harris was not the first to report on the wealth of Negro oral expression; for instance, William Owens discussed "FolkLore of the Southern Negroes" in Lippincotfs Magazine in 1877, calling attention to the special popularity of the "Story of Buh Rabbit and the Tar Baby." Owens declared that the fables of talking animals, which formed the bulk of Negro folklore, were "as purely African as are their faces or their own plaintive melodies." Harris repeated this assertion, when he suddenly found himself a literary celebrity and a presumed authority on folklore. To his admirers and inquirers he protested that he was both an accidental author and an incidental folklorist. Yet he could be dogmatic on the sources of slave tales. "One thing is certain — the Negroes did not get them from the whites: probably they are of remote African origin."

Subsequent collectors and scholars reaffirmed this belief in the African basis of American Negro tales and spirituals. The term "Afro-American folklore" passed into standard use in the late nineteenth century. No one thought to question so obvious a matter, since the Brer Rabbit stories differed markedly from any yarns known to the whites, since the slaves had come from West Africa, and since the published collections of African folktales contained a high quota of animal characters. When American anthropologists such as Melville J. Herskovits and his students turned their attention to Africa, they reinforced the thesis of African origins with the best scholarly credentials. In his much praised work, The Myth of the Negro Past (1941), Herskovits chastised the white supremacists who denied all cultural inheritance to the Southern slaves and placed them on the level of childlike savages. Rather, he contended, and cited evidence from his own field researches in Dahomey, the slaves had been torn from proud and ancient kingdoms with highly developed institutions and arts.

Meanwhile, intermittent collecting broadened and deepened the known repertoire of Negro folktales in the United States. Harris himself had not sought to reproduce literally the narratives he heard in middle Georgia. The plot outlines sufficed for his literary purposes. While the excessive dialect he placed in the mouth of Uncle Remus and Daddy Jake seemed a sign of realistic portrayal, the writers of local color fiction in the nineteenth century regularly employed phonetic dialect as a literary device to emphasize the quaintness of regional characters. Still, the Uncle Remus books did tap oral folklore and inspire methodical field collections. Two volumes of unadorned tales soon appeared — Negro Myths from the Georgia Coast, by Charles C. Jones, in 1888; Afro-American Folk Lore, Told Round Cabin Fires on the Sea Islands of South Carolina, by Mrs. A. M. H. Christensen, in 1892 — both stressing animal stories. The emphasis on the south Atlantic coast and islands was continued by Elsie Clews Parsons, the active feminist and anthropologist who published numerous shorter and longer collections of tales from 1917 to 1943. Her most substantial works presented repertoires from the South Carolina sea islands, the Bahamas, and the Antilles. Parsons first brought to light previously unreported kinds of tales popular among Negroes, particularly jests and numskull stories. Two Negro collectors, Zora Neale Hurston and J. Mason Brewer, further extended the spectrum of Negro oral narratives by calling attention to the dramatic cycle of episodes pitting Old Marster, the planter, against John, his favorite slave, and to other genres such as supernatural accounts of "hants" and jocular anecdotes about preachers. Zora Hurston, a gifted novelist who died penniless in a Jacksonville hotel room, gathered tales in middle Georgia; Brewer, a university teacher with a master's degree in folklore from Indiana University, harvested stories from North and South Carolina and the Brazos bottoms of east Texas.

By 1952, when I began my own collecting, a sizable store of American Negro folktales had reached the printed page. Yet the extant collections fell short of the needs of the folklorist. Both Hurston and Brewer gave some literary gloss to tales, and neither provided the comparative notes that identify traditional narratives. The scholarly Parsons did annotate her texts, but she did not utilize the great Motif-Index of Folk Literature of Stith Thompson (1932-36), published late in her career, although she did make use of its companion tool, The Types of the Folk-Tale (1928). Since her time both of these ingenious indexes, which make possible the tracing of folktales to their family tree, have been considerably expanded by Stith Thompson. Parsons fully accepted the Africanist theory and arranged her tables of contents to place first the tales of clearly African provenance, but since she concentrated her activities on the island network of the Caribbean and the Atlantic seaboard, her collections only partially represent the mainland. None of these collectors identified their narrators properly, if at all, and they tell us nothing about individual styles and repertoires.

In 1952 and 1953 I recorded over a thousand oral narratives from Negroes born in the South. To travel into every state of the South and to establish contacts there would require a prolonged investigation, but in fact I performed my main fieldwork in Michigan, Negro communities had formed there from Southerners migrating north, and the storytellers I met came from Mississippi, Alabama, Louisiana, Georgia, Tennessee, North Carolina, Missouri, Arkansas, West Virginia, and Texas, and they had traveled and lived in many other states from New York to California. The most fertile raconteur, James Douglas Suggs, had resided in thirty-nine states. On one occasion I ventured south to collect in Pine Bluff, Arkansas, and Mound Bayou, Mississippi, and discovered that various of the Arkansas narrators were born in Mississippi, North Carolina, South Carolina, Kentucky, and Tennessee. These thousand stories, then, well represent the full storehouse of American Negro folktales. From this batch of tape-recorded and dictated narratives I have selected typical specimens, grouped them according to their central themes and characters, supplied data on all the narrators and described the most talented and prolific in some detail, and furnished comparative notes indicating the traditional nature of the tales. From this information one can render new judgments on the sources and content of Negro stories.

The first declaration to make is that this body of tales does not come from Africa. It does not indeed come from any one place but from a number of dispersal points, as the comparative notes make clear. Many of the fictions, notably the animal tales, are of demonstrably European origin. Others have entered the Negro repertoire from England, from the West Indies, from American white tradition, and from the social conditions and historical experiences of colored people in the South. Only a few plots and incidents can be distinguished as West African. Each tale has to be studied separately to discern its history. The "Old Marster" cycle appears to be a solid block of narratives, but upon examination they are seen to flow together from a number of separate channels. On one occasion I played a tape recording of Suggs to Melville Herskovits, who exclaimed, "Those are some remarkable African tales!" Shortly after, I played the same tape to Stith Thompson, who exclaimed, "Those are some remarkable European tales!" These comments reflect the strong biases of the two masters, whom I equally admired. But the question of origins is susceptible of proof, and the proof of European origins lies in my notes.

Comparing the motifs known in West African folktales with those in my own collection, I have found a correspondence of only about ten percent. Of the twenty-two African motifs found in the over two hundred motifs in my tales, only one is not known in Europe. This is K1162 (an index to these motifs appear on p. 380), "Dupe tricked into reporting speaking skull, is executed for lying," which does provide an African core to one popular American Negro tradition. But this case is exceptional. Not a single example is listed for J17, "Animal learns through experience to fear men," and yet this was the story I encountered most often on my field trips, far more frequently than Tar Baby. The Type Index reports instances of this tale (Type 157, "Learning to Fear Men") throughout Europe. Another fiction, "The Mermaid," that I collected in eight well-structured variants has not previously been reported in Europe or Africa or anywhere else. However, the conception of a mermaid with magic powers is European. Again, the witch of Negro Americans clearly follows the English rather than the African idea of a witch. Such a typical West African motif as G271.1, "Ju-ju man cures bewitched boy, takes witch out of his heart and puts it in rock," never occurs in the United States. On the other hand, some of the court records of the Salem witchcraft trials of 1692 closely match my 1952 tape recording in Calvin, Michigan, of conversation about witches who ride human beings.

A second observation concerns the geographical area of American Negro folklore, which overlaps with, but yet remains distinct from, other New World Negro folklore. Joel Chandler Harris recognized from the first that dissimilar stories were told in central Georgia and coastal Georgia, and lie sought to enlist collectors on the coast. One of his fictional storytellers, Daddy Jake, had come directly from Africa, and recited in a different idiom from Uncle Remus. In the present century Lorenzo Turner has shown the number of African words retained in Gullah, the name for the dialect spoken by ex-slaves and their offspring living along the Georgia and South Carolina coast. In her Caribbean island-hopping trips, Elsie Clews Parsons collected some unmistakably African tales dealing with an unresolved dilemma, but this tale type is unknown on the mainland. Another noted folklorist, Martha Warren Beckwith, assembled a whole volume of Anansi the Spider stories in Jamaica, but Anansi fails to set foot in the United States, bowing out to Brer Rabbit. The conclusion emerges that the New World Negro repertoire falls into two groups of stories, one pointing toward Africa and one pointing toward Europe and Anglo-America. The Atlantic and Caribbean islands and northeastern South America comprise the first block and the plantation states of the Old South the second block. But both story stocks draw from multiple sources.

Two recent publications of Negro tales, one from the Bahamas and one from North Carolina, can confirm this point. In his admirable study and collection, I Could Talk Old-Story Good: Creativity in Bahamian Folklore (1966), Daniel J. Crowley supports the Africanist view of Elsie Clews Parsons advanced in her own Bahamian collection of 1918. With many more comparative materials at his disposal, Crowley places the old-stories from the Bahamas in the West Indies family of tales, sharing the stock characters and magical beings, the opening and closing formulas, the pattern of inserted songs and nonsense verses, and the episodic plots. The usual cast of characters includes B'Rabby, the tricky rabbit or man; B'Booky, the foil to B'Rabby, who takes different forms; B'Anansi, originally a spider among Twi-speaking Africans but now a mischievous boy or monkey; Mr. Jack, a youthful hero; and Mr. King, a bumbling dolt. Of this pantheon, only B'Rabby has his counterpart in mainland Negro folktales. The popular narrative of B'Rabby stealing the butter from his fellow workers by pretending to play godfather, or the account of B'Booky duping B'Rabby into playing his riding horse so that B'Booky can impress the girl they are both courting, are exceptional instances of stories shared by the Bahamian and mainland Negroes. By contrast, J. Mason Brewer's Worser Days and Better Times, Folklore of the North Carolina Negro (1965), fits at once into the now familiar traditions of the Southern Negro. Here are short, rapidfire anecdotal fictions about Old Marster, talking parrots, discomfited preachers, and slyly innocent colored folk. Some of these tall tales, jokes, and ghost stories circulate equally in white and Negro circles.

A third general observation applies to the changing character of the Negro folktale repertoire within the United States. The note of social protest has come to sound more overtly, both in historical accounts of the white man's injustice and in wryly humorous jests of race relations. As colored people move north, the forms and style of their oral expression alter to catch the rhythms of the urban ghettos. In his collection of Negro narrative folklore from south Philadelphia titled Deep Down in the Jungle (1964), Roger D. Abrahams has placed on record the powerfully obscene staccato jokes and long rhymed toasts heard in poolrooms, dives, and slum apartments. Brer Rabbit has become a fast-talking, sporty hipster in the reshaped Negro lore of Harlem, Watts, south Chicago, and other metropolitan ghettos.

(Continues...)

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Excerpted from American Negro Folktales by Richard M. Dorson. Copyright © 1967 Richard Mercer Dorson. Excerpted by permission of Dover Publications, Inc..
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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Table of Contents

Contents

Part One. The Setting,
Origins of American Negro Tales, 12,
The Communities and the Storytellers, 19,
The Art of Negro Storytelling, 47,
The History of James Douglas Suggs, 59,
Part Two. The Tales,
I. Animal and Bird Stories, 66,
II. Old Marster and John, 124,
III. Colored Man and White Man, 171,
IV. Hoodoos and Two-Heads, 186,
V. Spirits and Hants, 212,
VI. Witches and Mermaids, 236,
VII. The Lord and the Devil, 254,
VIII. Wonders, 272,
IX. Horrors, 282,
X. Protest Tales, 300,
XI. Scare Tales, 320,
XII. Fool Tales, 332,
XIII. Lying Tales, 353,
XIV. Preachers, 363,
XV. Irishmen, 372,
Bibliography, 379,
Index of Motifs, 381,
Index of Tale Types, 384,