Henry Louis Gates Jr. - The Annotated African American Folktales

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Copyright 2018 by Henry Louis Gates Jr. and Maria Tatar

All rights reserved
First Edition

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For all those before us who kept these stories alive by listening to the voices of others:
Talk got us here.

Henry Louis Gates Jr. dedicates this volume to Eleanor Margaret Gates-Hatley
Ldor vador!

Maria Tatar dedicates this volume to Lauren Blum, Daniel Schuker, Jason Blum, Giselle Barcia, and Roxy Blum

This interlinking of the New World and all countries and ages, by the golden net-work of oral tradition, may supply the moral of our collection.

WILLIAM WELLS NEWELL ,

Games and Songs of American Children

Mouse goes everywhere. She prowls through the houses of the rich, and she visits the poor as well. At night, with her bright little eyes, she watches the doing of secret things, and no treasure chamber is so safe but she can tunnel through and see what is hidden there.

In olden days she wove a story-child from everything she saw, and to each of these she gave a gown of a different colorwhite, red, blue, or black. The stories became her children and lived in her house and served her because she had no children of her own.

Nigerian folktale

CONTENTS

Putting this book together offered the opportunity to stand on the shoulders of giants and geniuses. That did not always imply seeing farther or more clearly, but it did mean the chance to look back, to wade through the tides of time and uncover what remains of robust oral storytelling traditions from a past era. We are both grateful to the vibrant scholarly community in residence at the Hutchins Center for African & African American Research. To the students in our courses at Harvard University, we owe a special debt for turning solitary research into a collective intellectual adventure. Every story in this volume deserves a credit line acknowledging the many students, colleagues, and friends who guided us to sources, shared their wisdom, and contributed generously to the fund of knowledge accumulated over the course of the years dedicated to this volume.

It took the genius of Bob Weil to imagine this book and his powers of persuasion to recruit us to write it. We are grateful to him and Marie Pantojan at Liveright and W. W. Norton, who guided this book through the production process. Doris Sperber provided research materials with lightning speed and solved archival puzzles that were often beyond us. Anne Callahan entered the world of wonderlore and discovered images and stories that had escaped our attention, all the while expertly navigating the world of copyright and permissions.

As for the rest of you, who provided friendship and support, you know who you are, but we cant resist naming some names: Professor Tatar wishes to thank Lauren Blum, Daniel Schuker, Jason Blum, Giselle Barcia, Shirley Blum, John Tatar, Anna Tatar, Steve Tatar, Sanford Kreisberg, Christina Phillips Mattson, Larry Wolff, Perri Klass, Holly Hutchison, Steve Mitchell, Deborah Foster, Leah Lowthorp, Gregory Nagy, Joseph Nagy, Elizabeth Fox, Katie Kohn, Penelope Laurans, Jack Zipes, Philip Nel, Donald Haase, Cristina Bacchilega, Roger Abrahams, Genesee Johnson, and David Newman.

Professor Gates wishes to thank Kevin Burke, Carra Glatt, Bennett Ashley, David Kuhn, Lauren Sharp, Abby Wolf, Marial Iglesias Utset, Amy Gosdanian, Donald Waters, and Hollis Robbins.