Richard M. Dorson - American Negro Folktales

Copyright

Copyright 1956, 1967 by Richard Mercer Dorson

All rights reserved.

Bibliographical Note

This Dover edition, first published in 2015, is an unabridged republication of the work originally published by Fawcett Publications, Greenwich, Connecticut, in 1967. Parts of this book appeared first in Negro Folktales in Michigan, collected and edited by Richard M. Dorson (Harvard University Press, 1956), and in Negro Tales from Pine Bluff, Arkansas, and Calvin, Michigan, by Richard M. Dorson (Indiana University Press, 1958).

Sensitive readers should be forewarned that the text in places contains racial and cultural references that may be deemed offensive by modern standards.

International Standard Book Number

eISBN-13: 978-0-486-80580-1

Manufactured in the United States by Courier Corporation
79680901 2015

www.doverpublications.com

The present volume is drawn from my two previous books of Negro oral narratives, Negro Folktales in Michigan (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1956), of which almost all the tales are reprinted, and Negro Tales from Pine Bluff, Arkansas and Calvin, Michigan (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1958), from which about half of the contents are reproduced. I have also reprinted the following tales from articles I published in folklore journals: Grandmother Whipped and Dead Man Sits Up from Negro Tales of Mary Richardson, Southern Folklore Quarterly, VI (1956), 5-26; Who Ate Up the Food and The Elephant, the Lion, and the Monkey from Negro Tales [of John Blackamore], Western Folklore, XIII (1954), 77-97; The Baptist, Methodist, and Presbyterian Preachers from Negro Tales from Bolivar County, Mississippi, Southern Folklore Quarterly, XIX (1955), 104-116; and the A, E, O, and P texts from King Beast of the Forest Meets Man, Southern Folklore Quarterly, XVIII (1954), 118-128. In addition I am printing four previously unpublished tales, The Fight from Joe D. Heardley, On the Cooling Board from Walter Winfrey, and The Mermaid from Sarah Jackson and Mrs. E. L. Smith.

In this new edition I have taken the opportunity to do some rearranging of the chapter groupings and to update the notes. For one instance, I have dropped the chapter Fairy Tales in Negro Folktales in Michigan as too loosely integrated, and introduced a new chapter on Fool Tales. In the notes I have added references to the works of Abrahams, Brewer, and Crowley, which have appeared in the meantime; to Baughmans published index, previously referred to in its dissertation form; and to the revised editions of Stith Thompsons motif index and the Aarne-Thompson type index. Also I have written a new general introduction.

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 Sams 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 Crvecoeur spoke about to have become a reality. Various colonizing and immigrant groupsPennsylvania Germans, Louisiana French, Spanish-Mexicans in the southwest, Italians and Poles in northern citieshave 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 Folk-Lore of the Southern Negroes in Lippincotts 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.1 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 certainthe Negroes did not get them from the whites: probably they are of remote African origin.2

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.