ABC 20: Mrs. Chicken and the Hungry Crocodile

And here we are already, starting the October calendar for Anansi Book Club (plus you can see all the Anansi Book Club posts at this blog). Our first book this month is Mrs. Chicken and the Hungry Crocodile by Won Ldy-Paye and Margaret Lippert, just a click away at the Internet Archive.

The beautiful illustrations for this book are by Julie Paschkis, and you can see how the illustrations, text, layout, everything works together, as in this 2-page spread:

You might remember that we read a collaboration by Ldy-Paye, Lippert, and Paschkis several months ago, back in June: The Talking Vegetables. You can find out more information about Ldy-Paye in that blog post too!

One of my favorite things about this book is that Ldy-Paye lets us know that he learned this story from his grandmother, who told him other stories from the Dan storytelling traditions of Liberia. 

I also want to note that you can find the story of Mrs. Chicken, basically the same but with some different wording in the collection of Dan stories from Liberia that Won Ldy-Paye and Margaret Lippert wrote with illustrations by Ashley Bryan: Why Leopard Has Spots, which is also available at the Internet Archive. 

Here's Ashley Bryan's depiction of the chicken and the crocodile:

You'll find six stories here: Why Leopard Has Spots, Mrs. Chicken and the Hungry Crocodile, The Talking Vegetables, The Hunger Season, Why Spider Has a Big Butt, and Spider Flies to the Feast. In the very moving introduction to that book, Won Ldy-Paye explains that his grandmother died in 1995, knowing that her grandson was bringing the storytelling traditions of the Dan people to new audiences in a different part of the world (Ldy-Paye had to flee Liberia during the civil war in which both his father and his older brother were killed.) In the note for the Mrs. Chicken story in this book, Ldy-Paye adds that the story was a favorite of his younger brother, so the way that he tells it comes both from his grandmother and from his brother.

Ldy-Paye's grandmother and his brother shaped this story into something that is distinctively different from other versions of the "chicken-and-crocodile-both-lay-eggs" type of story. In Ldy-Paye's story, the chicken is a trickster: she swaps the eggs without the crocodile realizing what she has done, and when she offers to exchange their offspring, the crocodile is grateful, as if she is actually doing him a favor. She is only pretending to be the crocodile's sister when she says "Sisters help each other," because as soon as the chicken gets free she vows never to go near the crocodile ever again; she is not the crocodile's sister:

So the story concludes with the chicken taking a bath in a little puddle instead of going to the river, and that's why chickens bathe in puddles to this day.

In other versions of this story, however, the focus is more on the crocodile and the lesson that he learns: when he finally realizes that both he and the the chicken lay eggs, he realizes that the chicken belongs to his family, which means the chicken is not his enemy. You can find this story in Dennett's Notes on the Folklore of the Fjort, "Why the Crocodile Does Not Eat the Hen," and I did a 100-word version of that one (click on the image for larger view), but be sure to look at Dennett's version for all the details (including a reference to the god Nzambi).

There's a children's book version based on the story as reported in Dennett's book: Crocodile and Hen: A Bakongo Folktale by Joan M. Lexau, with illustrations by Doug Cushman, which you can read at the Archive:

Like the version in Dennett, here the crocodile gets schooled by his friend, the wise lizard:

If there are any teachers out there reading this post, my guess is that you could do compare-and-constrast with these two children's books, even with very young readers, helping them to see how storytellers each make their own choices, and then to speculate about just why storytellers choose the details that they do.

I did a readers theater version of the crocodile-and-the-hen, following the Bakongo version where the crocodile goes to seek an answer to his question and ends up consulting with the lizard; you can read my version of the story here: The Crocodile and the Chicken (CC-licensed for teachers to reuse, rewrite as needed!).

There's also a very different type of story told with this same "we all lay eggs" motif in which the plot revolves around male characters; this story comes from the Yao people of Malawi as published by H. Stannus in 1917: The Cock and the Crocodile (click on the image for a larger view). This story ends up providing an explanation for why crocodiles and humans are enemies: we, after all, do not lay eggs.

To finish up, I wanted to share this lovely video with Won-Ldy Paye talking about the art of storytelling: It Takes a Village to Tell a Story.

So, you might not have a village with a storyteller on the verandah, a storyteller who is a "walking library" as Paye says... but we do have the Internet Archive, and Won-Ldy Paye's books await you there! 

Mrs. Chicken and the Hungry Crocodile

by Won Ldy-Paye and Margaret Lippert