Editing Creole Stories for Wider Audiences

Two summers ago, I worked my way through all of Joel Chandler Harris's "Uncle Remus" stories, removing the Uncle-Remus framework and also editing the dialect to make it more readable, removing the eye-dialect and changing some of the vocabulary. I did that for all the stories in all the Uncle Remus books (around 180 stories!). You can find all those materials here: Brer Rabbit: Tales of a Trickster.

Then I did the same for the 60 Gullah stories collection and published by Charles Colcock Jones, Jr. in his book Negro Myths from the Georgia Coast, Told in the Vernacular; you can find all those materials here: CCJones at Diigo (click on the title of each story to see the text).

Eventually I think I want to publish these versions of the stories, although I'm still not sure just what the best approach is. In the case of Harris, removing the Uncle-Remus-frame is essential (Julius Lester did the same in his Brer Rabbit books), and I think the eye-dialect also needs to go, but I'm never quite sure beyond that in terms of how much/little of the rest of the text to change. In the case of Gullah stories (Harris includes a few Gullah stories also), then expanding the range of pronouns is a big help, along with changing some of the verb forms, etc. So, just consider all that a work in progress that I hope to get back to as I ponder the best approach.

Meanwhile, I've started a new editing project like the work I did on Harris and Jones's books: I'm going to go through the stories in Cronise's Cunnie Rabbit, Mr. Spider, and the Other Beef which contains 38 stories that Cronise recorded in Sierra Leone creole (Krio). She actually recorded 125 stories but only published 38... what I wouldn't give to see all the other stories she recorded but did not publish! I'll try to do a story or two each day and finish up the book in a month or so.

I started with the first story in the book: Mr Spider Wins a Wife. This is a really wonderful and also important story; it's an example of a type sometimes called "Trickster Wins Endowments" of which there are literally hundreds of examples both in Africa and also in the Americas and Caribbean. Getting teeth is a typical task (teeth of crocodile or a snake or, here, a lion), but Spider's use of the smoke is something I had not seen before; I have never seen the palm-wine task before (it's replacing the more typical task of fetching insects in a gourd or animal tears or milk); only the final task, catching the snake, is told in a completely typical fashion. Here's Spider getting ready to hammer out Lion's teeth (illustration by Gerald Sichel):

So, I started with the conveniently transcribed text at Project Gutenberg and, first of all, I stripped out the frame material. Some of the frame material is actually pretty interesting, but the use of conventional English intrudes on the narrative really painfully, just like in the Harris stories (Cronise was a great admirer of Harris). Here's the result: the creole text of the story only; no frame.

Then, I typed through that version, editing as I went: this meant removing the eye-dialect to use more conventional spelling, and also changing some of the idioms and phrases, punctuation, etc. to make the story easier to read while still retaining some sense (I hope) of the original style: edited text.

I've linked those to the table of contents on my reference page for the book.

I'm so excited about working my way through this book story by story!