African Diaspora at Internet Archive: Tales from Guilford County, North Carolina

I had finished up last week with a post about Elsie Clews Parsons' book of stories from the South Carolina Sea Islands, and I'll be dedicating this week to Parsons' other collections of African American and Caribbean folktales, which date to both the 1910s and 1920s, and then her monumental 3-volume work on the folktales of the Antilles, which was published posthumously.

So, I'll start with one of the books from the 1910s: Tales from Guilford County, North Carolina, published in the Journal of American Folklore in 1917. (If you know where Greensboro is, that's Guilford County.)

You'll find 62 stories here, along with an introduction with information about each storyteller that Parsons worked with. These links will take you straight to each page: Tar Baby - In the Briar-Patch / Big Fraid and Little Fraid / Playing Dead Twice in the Road / Rabbit makes Fox his Riding-Horse / The Race: Relay Trick / The Race: Slow but Steady / Above the Ground and under the Ground / No Tracks Out / In the Chest / Pay Me Now / Talks Too Much / Dividing the Souls / The Insult Midstream / Watcher Tricked / The Insult Midstream; Watcher Tricked; Mock Funeral / Brush-Heap A-fire / The Spitting Hant / Fiddling for the Devil / Fixed / Alligator's Tail; In Briar-Patch / The Devil Marriage / Blue-Beard / Tickling 'Possum / The Frog / Woman up a Tree / Old Man on a Hunt / Fishing on Sunday / The Little Girl and Her Snake / The Woman-Horse / Racing the Train / Man Above / The Three Little Pigs / The Witch Spouse / Out of Her Skin / Mustard-Seed / Feasting on Dog / Keeping Pace / Buger / The Witches and the Dogs / Fatal Imitation / The Pumpkin / The Turnip / The Single Ball / As Big a Fool / Pleasing Everybody / Playing Godfather - Jumping over the Fire / The Step-Mother / The Best Place / Woman on House-Top / The Talking Bones / The Haunted House / The Black Cat / Self-Confidence / The Woman-Cat / The Murderous Mother / The Cat who wanted Shoes / Straw into Gold / Three-Eyes / The Frog who would fly / Brave Folks / The Adulteress / Anyhow.

Parsons uses a system here that she follows in her other collections for indicating stories that are composed of multiple formulaic episodes: instead of giving a single title to the story, she creates a compound title invoking each of the episodic elements. For example, this story title features three episodes: The Insult Midstream; Watcher Tricked; Mock Funeral. This style is ideally suited to both African and also African American storytelling where a story is often an improvised stitching together of episodes where the charm of the story is in seeing the way the storyteller arranges the incidents one after another to create the story. The tar-baby story might end up with the trickster escaping into the briar patch: Tar Baby - In the Briar-Patch, but the briar patch escape might appear in another story too: Alligator's Tail; In Briar-Patch.

And yes, the rabbit is the main trickster here; you can use the Internet Archive to search for all the rabbits and page through the stories that way:

As you can see from the notes to the stories, Parsons was already interested in finding the shared origins of these stories told in North Carolina with stories she was already collecting in the Bahamas; I'll have more to say about that later this week. Meanwhile, enjoy these stories from North Carolina (which is where I happen to live!).

Tales from Guilford County, North Carolina

by Elsie Clews Parsons