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THE CONTESTED ORIGINS

OF AFRICAN AMERICAN FOLKLORE
How do you make something from nothing? Or from something that appears to be
nothing? African American slaves may not have owned property, but no one could
prevent them from storing, remembering, recounting, and, over time, creating and
re-creating their own cultural property in the form of songs, stories, and belief sys-
tems. They used narratives and other forms of expressive culture not just to strategize
and survive, but also to create symbolic and imaginative spaces to which they could
escape, almost like an alternate universe, where they could live and breathe. The
entire sacred world of the black slaves, American historian Lawrence Levine writes,
created the necessary space between the slaves and their owners and were the means
of preventing legal slavery from becoming spiritual slavery.11 These were anything
but the much-heralded public spaces of freedom that are the signature of democratic
societies. Instead, they were private arenas, imaginary playgrounds, secular as well as
sacred, in the fields, by the fire, and in cabins. Song and story emerged, often in the
form of narratives encoded with symbolic meaningthings made up for the purpose
of diverting and entertaining, and also for focusing and concentrating propulsive ener-
gies that could not be contained.
Over time, however, our culture has lost touch with many of these improvisations
and inventions: We dont live in places where we can hear ... stories anymore; parents
dont sit around and tell their children those classical, mythological archetypal stories
that we heard years ago. But new information has got to get out, and there are several
ways to do it, Toni Morrison once remarked.12 Her strategy was to embed black folk-
lore in the postmodern black novel. Others have made the stories new in a range of
creative ways. Or they have laid the groundwork for what we attempt in this volume:
collecting, contextualizing, and organizing what remains of stories from times past.
Few have captured more vividly the indestructible energy and resilience of story
than Zora Neale Hurston, who documented folklore in action in her 1935 Mules and
Men, a volume that doubles as autobiography and ethnography. She understood that,

11 Lawrence W. Levine, Black Culture and Black Consciousness: Afro-American Folk Thought from
Slavery to Freedom (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), 80.
12 Toni Morrison, Rootedness: The Ancestor as Foundation, in Black Women Writers (19501980):
A Critical Evaluation, ed. Mari Evans (New York: Anchor Press, Doubleday, 1984), 340.

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notwithstanding the multiple traumas of the Middle Passage and plantation life, it was
impossible to restrain the animating energy of telling tales. In a counternarrative to
what Richard Wright, author of Native Son and Black Boy, reports about the silencing
of voices and the damaging losses suffered by slaves, she invokes a tale of survival, one
that shows how words, stories, and beliefs made it across the Atlantic and flourished
on distant shores. Here is how Hurston works magic with words, reviving stories from
times past and bringing to life cultural heroes from faraway lands. High John de Con-
quer, the mythical trickster and strongman hero of African American lore, was not, as
she tells us, a natural man in the beginning:

First off, he was a whisper, a will to hope, a wish to find something worthy of laugh-
ter and song. Then the whisper put on flesh. His footsteps sounded across the world
in a low but musical rhythm as if the world he walked on was a singing drum. The
black folks had an irresistible impulse to laugh. High John de Conquer was a man in
full, and had come to live and work on the plantations, and all the slave folks knew
him in the flesh.13

In this extraordinary scene of animation and embodiment, we are given a cascading

sequence of words and phrases that become flesh, a chain of attributes that revive and
vivify. High John de Conquer begins as a whisper, transmutes into a wish, and comes
alive. His footsteps are attuned to the frequencies of whispers and hopes, amplifying
them and turning them into audible laughter and music. The world becomes a singing
drum, sounding in measured, communicative cadences.14
In one creative flash, Hurston, who made it her mission to validate and ennoble the
African American vernacular, mobilizes High John de Conquer of African American
lore to open the possibility for utopian aspirations that defy all the social odds. At a
time of scarcity and lack, when everything seems doomed to disappoint, suddenly
there is a sign that even those flimsiest of things, whispers and dreams, are more than
fugitive and futile acts of imagination. They assert brute presence and material solid-

13Zora Neale Hurston, High John de Conquer, American Mercury 57 (1943), 450; rpt. in The
Sanctified Church (Berkeley, CA: Turtle Island Foundation, 1981), 69.
14 Ruth Finnegan writes that the ritual use of drums turns them into instruments ... regarded as
speaking and their messages consist of words. See Oral Literature in Africa (London: Oxford University
Press, 1970), 11.

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ity, refusing to remain invisible. This is not mere magical thinking; it is words working
miracles.
Hurston reveals how the make-believe of folktale, myth, and legend operates in the
making of beliefs. Illusion can become so compelling that it rivals material reality, and
suddenly the word becomes flesh and phantoms of the mind have substance. It is here
that we discover the truth of the maxim that the consolations of imagination are not
imaginary consolations. In powerful stories like And the People Could Fly (included
in this anthology), the enabling force of faith becomes evident. The tale of High John
de Conquer gives us the flip side to that story, offering a parable of materialization and
empowerment rather than a transcendent vanishing act. But in both stories, passion
and desire are so forceful and energetic as to become real.
The transformative energy of bravura moments like the materialization of High
John de Conquer is what makes folktales stick and what kept themand keeps
themfrom disappearing, even in a culture of material deprivation and physical coer-
cion. Recall the wizardry of Mozarts music in a scene from The Shawshank Redemp-
tion, a film released in 1994, when the character played by Tim Robbins enraptures
the men serving time at Shawshank with song. In a voice-over that comes after the
broadcast of a duet from Mozarts opera Nozze di Figaro, Morgan Freeman reveals
the liberating power, not only of sonic beauty but also of the words used to describe
its effects: It was like some beautiful bird flapped into our drab little cage, Freeman
intones (adverting elliptically to Paul Laurence Dunbars verse about why the caged
bird sings), and made those walls dissolve away, and for the briefest of moments, every
last man in Shawshank felt free. Hurstons tale about willing a hero to life reveals the
same power of words to summon liberating reserves of strength.
The stories in Annotated African American Folktales will offer evidence of High
John de Conquers resurrection in the New World. The volume will begin, as noted,
with folklore from African discursive traditions to show how a rich repertoire of stories
became powerful source material for a sprawling tangle of tales told by African Ameri-
cans, which constitute the core of this volume. But rather than rehearsing academic
debates about the fate of African cultures in the diaspora, it will lay out the evidence
for connections and bonds pointing to a culture that is both of a piece with and dis-
tinct from other global traditions. Hurstons survivalist model surely trumps Wrights
narrative of cultural obliteration. By embracing it, we can begin to explore how sto-
ries migrated and how poetic geniuses made new versions of them in creative bursts

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that defied efforts to silence and enslave. By borrowing bits and pieces of the old and
merging and melding traditions, storytellers in the New World displayed an unparal-
leled determination to honor ancestral knowledge by preserving the cultural memory
encapsulated in stories from times past.
Who wrote these stories down on paper? Not the tellers, who, of course, often
lacked access to pen, ink, and paper, but anthropologists, folklorists, and others whose
curiosity was piqued by cultural difference and by the desire to create a historical
record. To be sure, much was lost in the transition from a performance that emerged
organically within a ritualized, communal setting to a formal recitation often aimed
to please a scribe putting words down on a page and unconsciously also putting new
words into the mouths of the tellers. But all was not lost, much was preserved, and the
stories are still here, printed as columns in local newspapers and as features in maga-
zines, embedded in novels and memoirs, collected in anthologies for young and old,
invoked in conversations and reminiscences, and still told today. There have been, in
short, multiple accomplices in this project of excavating, reclaiming, and anthologizing.

THE LITERATURE OF THE FRONTIER

AND THE POETRY OF THE CABINS
Anyone researching ballads about Stagolee, John Henry, Shine and the Titanic, the
Signifying Monkey, or Frankie and Johnny will eventually encounter Mark Twains
America by the eminent twentieth-century critic Bernard DeVoto. DeVoto empha-
sizes how Americans are story-tellers, and he describes and animates the frontier
leisure and frontier realities that shaped American literature. He evokes with nostal-
gic joy campfires on the shores of rivers, on the plains, in forests, and on mountains,
along with narratives about folk heroes ranging from Mike Fink and Kit Carson to
Davy Crockett and Honest Abe. In passing he mentions Annie Christmas, along with
Jim Henry [sic] and Frankie and Johnny. He declares these stories to be the frontier
examining itself, recording itself, and entertaining itself. It is, he observes in a final
rhetorical flourish, a native literature of America.15
Frontier leisure? The frontier entertaining itself? How could DeVoto get things so
wrong when it came to ballads and folklore? Did he seriously believe that the ballad
about John Henrys tragic contest with a machine was born during a rollicking good

15 Bernard DeVoto, Mark Twains America (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1932), 9293.

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