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