African Diaspora at Internet Archive: Bo Rabbit Smart for True

Yesterday's post was about the folktales that Zora Neale Hurston collected in Florida, and today I wanted to shift to the Sea Islands off the coast of Georgia and South Carolina. These islands have been a home to generations of Gullah speakers, and I'm going to spend the next few days on Gullah stories and resources; for an overview, you can find out more about the Gullah language at Wikipedia.

The book I will start with is not in actual Gullah (I'll share some books in Gullah tomorrow and beyond); instead, this is a lovely children's book in which some stories recorded in Gullah have been retold in literary English for a young audience: Bo Rabbit Smart for True: Folktales From the Gullah by Priscilla Jaquith.

There are 4 stories here: Bo Rabbit Smart for True / Alligator's Sunday Suit / Bo Rabbit's Hide-and-Seek / Rattlesnake's Word, with notes on each story in the back, plus a detailed bibliography.

The illustrations are by Ed Young, and they are done in a kind of cartoon style, with each story illustrated by a series of small panels. Here's what a typical page looks like; you can see Bo Rabbit here with Elephant (and yes, this is a famous African story; there are no elephants on the Sea Islands... but there are stories about elephants!).

As you can see from the book's title with the Gullah idiom "for true" there, even though the stories have been retold in literary English there is still some sense of their Gullah origins, with "Bo" instead of "Brer" as the term of address among the animals, including the notorious trickster, Bo Rabbit. It's a great way to get started becoming familiar with some of the stories that are popular in Gullah tradition, and I'll be back tomorrow with some more Gullah stories... next time IN Gullah.

Bo Rabbit Smart for True:

Folktales From the Gullah

by Priscilla Jaquith

The book cover has a kind of funky design; here's what it looks like with the spine and inside flap: