African Folktales at Internet Archive: Beautiful Blackbird

Yesterday, I wrote about Lisa Grainger's Stories Gogo Told Me, a collection of 44 folktales from southern Africa. Today, I'm writing about a book by one of my favorite children's authors and illustrators, Ashley Bryan: Beautiful Blackbird, copyright 2003. The book is available for borrowing at Internet Archive: books to borrow (there are two copies, so if one is checked out, you can borrow the other one). This is a children's book which contains just one story:

The beautiful illustrations are done with colored paper collages, and Bryan explains at the end that he is using the scissors his mother used to use for sewing to create the paper collages in the book.

Here's the story as Bryan tells it (summarized): The birds were all kinds of colors, but not black. Only Blackbird had black markings; he was all black. Ringdove summoned all the birds to see who was most beautiful. They admired themselves in the water. Then they decided Blackbird was most beautiful, and they danced in his honor. Ringdove wanted to be black too. Blackbird said they were different birds, not the same, but he offered to paint a black ring around Ringdove's neck to go with Ringdove's name. Other birds wanted black markings too, so Blackbird made spots, stripes, and lines on the different birds. Then all the birds rejoiced because they were all even more beautiful than before. 

Here are the birds admiring themselves before the transformation:

And here are the birds after Blackbird does his work:

Bryan explains that the story comes from Zambia, as reported in The Ila-speaking Peoples of Northern Rhodesia by Smith and Dale, published in 1920; you can read the story online at the Internet Archive here: How the Ringdove came by its ring. In that story, the Blackbird (Mintengwe) actually curses the other birds when they ask him to share his color. Blackbird puts the ring on the ring dove, the spots on the Guinea-Fowl, etc. as in Bryan's story, but he curses them at the same time. For example, he gives Guinea-Fowl spots like a leopard and says the leopard will eat Guinea-Fowl. Here's how he curses Ringdove: "You shall always eat the grain belonging to men, so that you may die." The end result: "as for the rest of the birds, they are in trouble; they are killed, they are ensnared, they are persecuted. Some are caught in traps. And all because they were cursed by Blackbird."

I really like Bryan's feel-good take on the story, and it obviously makes a far better children's story this way... but it's also good to be able to look at Bryan's source in order to see how he took the story in his own direction, with his own characteristic verbal art and illustrations too. You can find out more about Ashley Bryan and his remarkable career at the Ashley Bryan Center website.

There are more of Bryan's books at Internet Archive, and I'll feature some of those in later blog posts.