These are the stories you will find in the book: The Right Drumstick / The High-Low Jump / The Bamboo Cutter / Old Mister Smoothback / Lookit the Little Pig! / The Little Pig's Way Out / The Great Fishbowl Contest / The River-Road Ramble / The Going Home Mix-up / The Long Wait / Faster Than Thunder / The Wonderful Jug of Wild-Cherry Wine / The Little Fisherman / Full Moon a-Shining / The Dance of Bubber Baboon / Look on Your Back! / The Run of the Forest / The Big Bamboo Boat Race.
The illustrations are by Wallace Tripp; see Wikipedia for more about Tripp's work:
As you can read in the book's preface, these are stories Julian Elihu Bagley heard growing up in St. Nicholas, Florida (now part of Jacksonville); he was born in 1891. He later enrolled at the Hampton Institute in Virginia and graduated with a degree in agriculture. After completing his degree, he worked with Black farmers in Virginia in the early 1920s, where he also collected Virginia variations on the stories he knew from Florida. It was during this time that he became acquainted with Countee Cullen and other members of the Harlem Renaissance and began writing for the Crisis and other periodicals; see Wikipedia for details. Bagley then moved to San Francisco where he became a hotel manager and spent the rest of his life; he died in 1981.
Bagley is probably best known for his many years as the concierge of the San Francisco War Memorial Opera House, and UC Berkeley's Bancroft Library has digitized a work of oral history about that: Welcome to the San Francisco Opera House by Julian Bagley, based on a series of interviews in 1973, when Bagley was in his 80s; it is the source for this portrait:
In one of the interviews Bagley gives an account of how the Bodidalee book came to be published in 1971. Previously, only a few of the stories had appeared in print, as contributions to W. E. B. DuBois's children's magazine, The Brownies' Book. You can find The Brownies' Book online at the wonderful project: The Tar Baby and the Tomahawk: Race and Ethnica Images in American Children's Literature, 1880-1939, and that site is also archived at the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine.
Here are the stories by Bagley that appeared there:
The Brownies' Book, November 1920:
The Brownies' Book, January 1921:
The Brownies' Book, April 1921:
The Brownies' Book, July 1921:
The Little Pig's Way Out (not illustrated)
If you have never read any issues of The Brownies' Book, I highly recommend it. You will find both African American and also African folktales in its pages, along with many other materials that provide a valuable insight into African American children's literature during the 1920s.
Meanwhile, thanks to the Internet Archive, Julian Bagley's book is also available for you to read and enjoy online:
by Julian Bagley
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