African Diaspora at Internet Archive: At the Big House

I've started assembling public domain stories to go into the anthology part of the Reader's Guide to African Diaspora Folktales at the Internet Archive (the anthology was one of my favorite things about work on the African folktale guide), and this week I want to catch up on some of the public domain books that will be doing into the Guide. These are older books, and their use of dialect, especially eye-dialect, is undesirable in the extreme, but in preparing the stories for the anthology, I can try to minimize the eye-dialect so that the language can be better appreciated for its own sake.

So, the book I want to share today is At the Big House: Where Aunt Nancy and Aunt 'Phrony Held Forth on the Animal Folks by Anne Virginia Culbertson, published in 1904. 

You can read more about Culberton's life and career as a writer at Wikipedia. You will find 50 stories here, featuring animal characters, especially the trickster rabbit, Mr. Hare. One of the most fascinating aspects of the book is that it reflects the confluence of African American and Cherokee storytelling in eastern North Carolina at the time; among the Cherokee, Rabbit was an important trickster character.

The illustrations are by E. Warde Blaisdell, who did illustrations for other animal books like The Animals at the Fair and Beastly Rhymes. Here's his illustration for a funny story about Hare and Bear which I might include in the anthology; you can see how I have transcribed it, with the eye-dialect mostly removed, here: Mister Hare Dines with Mister Bear.

A book like this is probably not the kind of thing anybody is going to want to read from cover to cover, and the framing of the stories is pretty repugnant, much like the Uncle Remus framing in Joel Chandler Harris's books, but this is still a source we can use for stories and to get at a least a sense, however indirect, of the oral arts of African American storytellers in the late 19th century, as reflected in their literary exploitation by white writers like Culbertson.

At the Big House where Aunt Nancy and Aunt 'Phrony
Held Forth on the Animal Folks
by Anne Virginia Culbertson