African Diaspora at Internet Archive: How and Why Stories

Carrying on with the public domain books this week, here is an unusual little book of a stories, remembered from childhood, by John C. Branner: How and Why Stories.

John C. Branner was an important geologist, and you can read more about his career at Wikipedia. This book is his only foray into this type of storytelling, and the preliminary materials are extremely revealing. Branner was born in 1850, and as the introduction makes clear, he saw slavery as a completely benevolent institution about which he felt nothing but sentimental affection... until a freed slave managed to make at least a small breakthrough in his thinking so that he realized, even if dimly, that, uh, slavery was a bad thing. Anyway, the prefactory materials are very much worth reading; I would suspect that this endorsement of slavery as a benevolent institution is behind the thinking of many of the white authors who published books of stories they remembered from childhood. The difference is just that Branner has shared his thoughts here out loud.

I'll admit that it makes for some pretty repugnant reading, though, so if you just want to skip to the stories, skip to the stories... and there are some really great ones in here! The storytellers that Branner was in contact with as a child told highly Christianized versions of the stories in which God, the Devil, Noah, etc. play prominent roles. One of my favorite stories in here is about why the cat has nine lives, and you can read a version with the eye-dialect removed here: Why the Cat Has Nine Lives.

I'm guessing it didn't even cross Branner's mind, who puts a positive spin on the story, but it's clearly a story born from the enormous pain of enslaved women separated from their children, with Noah as a heartless overseer or master. Heavy stuff, and heart-rending, even if Branner doesn't exactly get it.

The illustrations of the animals are by W. S. Atkinson, so here is his illustration for the story of the cat's nine lives:

Plus there are actual story illustrations by R. K. Culver, as here where Noah is pulling the cat up into the ark:

You'll find 21 stories here, and if you can managed to tolerate the eye-dialect, you can use this book to hear, albeit remotely and indirectly, the voices of African American storytellers circa 1860, when John Branner was growing up in a household that owned people as slaves.

How and Why Stories

by John C. Branner