African Folktales at Internet Archive: Cunnie Rabbit, Mr. Spider, and the Other Beef

Today's Internet Archive African folklore book recommendation is a follow-up to yesterday's recommendation of Virginia Hamilton's Ring of Tricksters. As I mentioned in that post, Hamilton relied on two old sources for the African stories in that book: Florence Cronise's Cunning Rabbit book, and C. Kamba Simango's stories in Natalie Curtis Burlin's Songs and Tales book. Both of those books are in the public domains and are thus always available at Internet Archive: you can read them there online, download the PDF, etc. Today I'll focus on Cronise's book, and then tomorrow I'll write something about the remarkable Kamba Simango.

Here's the Internet Archive listing of Cunnie Rabbit, Mr. Spider, and the Other Beef by Florence Cronise, with editorial help from Henry W. Ward, and illustrations by Gerald Sichel. 

Unlike the more contemporary books I've written about in previous posts (by Grainger, Bryan, Lester, and Hamilton), this old book by Cronise is not one I would recommend for pleasure reading exactly, although it is an incredibly valuable resource, and what I want to do here is give people a sense of what a genius job Virginia Hamilton did in adapting the creole texts from this book into stories of her own. Hamilton stripped the folktale of its cloying frametale, and then used a creole style while infusing the story with her own details.

Here, for example, is where Cunning Rabbit (a chevrotain; see information here), is fighting with Spider, and Spider hoists Rabbit up into the sky. This is the version in Cronise:

Cunnie Rabbit go to de sky; he blow one horn wey he hole nah he han'. W'en he blow um dark come, w'en he blow um agin, do' clear. He fa' down, he grip de wuld, VIP! 

And here is Hamilton's version:

Cunnie Rabbit, him goes up to the sky. Up there, he holds him a horn. Why so? 'Cause he can! He can-do and be-do Cunnie Rabbit. he hate it all, can-do all. He blows the horn, and the dark comes down. He blows it again, and down comes dayclean. An'en, he falls down next and takes him hold of the earth — whoomp! But Cunnie Rabbit, him, get'um back up!

Isn't that great? I love the way Hamilton both echoes the old text while doing new things and making it all fit together. I would really like to learn how to be able to do that. 

Meanwhile, I am working on creating creole texts of the stories stripped of the frametale and then rendered in more conventional English; more about that project here: Editing Creole Stories for Wider Audiences.

So, the texts in Cronise are fascinating to use for comparison with Hamilton in order to get some insight into her own verbal art. Another useful feature of this book is the illustrations, which are quite nice, and which can also be compared with the Barry Moser illustrations in Hamilton's book. For example, here is Tortoies riding Leopard as depicted by Sichel in Cronise's book:

And here is Moser's version in Hamilton's book:

Comparing pictures in detail (and digital versions let you zoom in for detail) is a great way to better appreciate the distinctive features of both versions.

So, today's recommendation is a "daily double" ... BOTH Hamilton's Ring of Tricksters and Cronise's Cunnie Rabbit, just a click away at Internet Archive. :-)