A Guide on African American Stories and Tales

Harris and many others since who grew up with house-slaves thought the stories reflected slaves’ lowly status, even after Emancipation. This impression arose from the ways in which the stories were put into the mouths of those superannuated slaves, those Uncle and Aunt characters who told tales of how to get by via wit in the face of those who were larger and more powerful. In this dimension the tales work not unlike m€archen, in that the smaller, cleverer figure appears to obtain a prize or some other source of power that he then uses to gain his rewards. In the case of Br’er Rabbit, however, the prize commonly involves slipping out of harm’s way rather than any golden goose.

This is not to say that the Br’er Rabbit or Daddy Jake stories reported by Harris did not tell the common stories of the African American repertoire. The 138 tales that Harris printed in his lifetime were predominately from an African substrate of storylore. However, he did not collect them from black storytellers himself but accumulated them from correspondence with whites raised on the plantation. In this, Harris operated no differently than most nineteenth-century collectors. But he made claims for the authenticity of the stories “as told by slaves” that can’t be proven from his correspondence.

Despite the fact that Harris and other southern Americans wrote down these stories in remarkably accurate Creole speech, they were actually several times removed from the tellers. Harris’s papers make it clear that he did not take the tales directly from ex-slaves but rather from the recitation of whites who had grown up on plantations and developed similarly close relationships with one or another slave nurturer. It is also significant that these stories are presented as typical of the entire repertoire but are written as if they were told to children and were thus used as tales with important messages. Black folklorists who collected tales directly from ex-slaves found a different repertoire, one that included in fact a number of the Uncle Remus tales, which were told as jokes, often at the expense of the planter Old Master or his overseer.

In an attempt to present the full range of African American folktales, the faculty at the Hampton Institute in Virginia initiated a project of collecting both tales and songs of exslaves. Their efforts were aimed not just at Harris’s work but at the blackface minstrel shows, which purported to portray real plantation scenes and sketches. They presented the results of this collection at their meetings before publishing them in their journal Southern Workman and Hampton School Record beginning in the early 1890s. Readers had to wait until the mid-1930s, with the publications of the Floridian Afro-American ethnographer, novelist, and collector Zora Neale Hurston before a reasonable sample of continental African American tales were published by a trade publisher. Even then her classic Mules and Men (1935) did not have many readers until it was reissued during the 1960s. During that period of rising awareness of civil rights, more contemporary stories were reported, first from prisons and ghettos.

Public attention grew as these stories achieved some prominence. Many of them were tales of tricksters not unlike those reported earlier, but they were performed as “toasts”-narrative poems with subjects reflecting the growing sense of resistance in urban areas. One of these, “The Signifying Monkey,” became emblematic of the concerns of young men in African American street-corner groups. This toast concerned “signifying,” a term for brazen trickery not unlike that pulled off by Br’er Rabbit and Compe Nansi; but now the trickster was openly identified with young black men, and the butts of his hijinks were whites in command. Even more openly critical of the white power structure is another toast dealing with Shine, an African American sailor on the Titanic who outswims all of those whites left behind, signifying at them as he swims away.