African Diaspora at Internet Archive: Stories For Children

Carrying on with the public domain books for this week, here is another children's book, this one published in 1912: Stories For Children by Mrs. M.R. Allen (I have not been able to find out anything more about this author, not even her own name!).

This is another book written with of bit of faux-African-American dialect, but it is less offensive than other books in this genre, and thankfully it doesn't feature the "happy days on the plantation" type of framing that makes the books by Joel Chandler Harris and others so unreadable. In the introduction, the author claims that she collected the stories from African American storytellers, and I am inclined to believe her. The variety of the stories in this book does a good job of representing a range of African American folktale types, and the quirks in the stories seem indicative of the quirks of individual storytellers. How much better it would have been if the author had told us more about the storytellers, and credited them here in the book itself!

I was excited to find one of my favorite African American folktales here about violating the no-fishing-on-Sunday prohibition, where the protagonist is often named Simon. Here is Mrs. Allen's version: Simon the Fisher. (You can click on the image for a larger view.)

For comparison, here is a version recorded by Thomas Talley in Negro Folk Rhymes: Fishing Simon.

This is an African folktale, although the "Sunday" prohibition comes with the Christian context. Here's one African folktale for comparison: "Fishing Where the Water People Live" in Bundy's Folktales from Liberia published in the Journal of American Folklore, 1919.

I picked out several stories from Allen's book to include in the Anthology for the Reader's Guide that I'm working on now; here are some of them: trickster stories from Allen's book. 

Stories For Children

by Mrs. M.R. Allen