This document provides an overview of African American folktales, including: 1) Folktales are interactions between authors and audiences that reflect social and individual experiences, and printed versions only represent moments in an ongoing process of invention and adaptation. 2) African American folktales contain traditional elements from both African and European traditions that storytellers have selected and adapted to reflect their own social experiences, such as substituting dependent masters and slaves in some tales originally about parsons and sextons. 3) The relationship between storytellers and collectors, and how this interaction is represented, has changed over time from fictionalized retellings to attempts at accurate portrayals.

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African American Folktales
Folktales provide a radical illustration of the principle that fictions are not the fixed
texts that printed pages imply but interactions between authors and audiences, who
bring to the meeting their own social and individual experiences. The printed texts of
the folktales int the book are themselves products of a complex network of interactions.
Though the process of collection, publication, and now selection gives them the
appearance of a fixed identity, they are actually only moments in a continuous process
of invention, adaptation, and performance—cupfuls dipped out of a river.
What goes into a published folktale? The structural elements of folktales are traditional
tale types and motifs widespread in world folklore and classified by folklorists. The
motifs of African American folktales come from both African and European tradition.
Over time, storytellers have selected and adapted them to reflect their own social
experience. For example, in European variants of the popular tale "Dividing Souls," here
represented by John Blackamore's individualized "Old Boss Wants into Heaven," the
two watchers are typically a parson and a sexton, but in most African American
variants, they are a crippled master and the slave who carries him. The motif of the
dependent master frightened into running on his own two feet becomes a metaphor for
the unwarranted economic dependency of white on black in slavery. Blackamore's
highly developed and pointed version of this tale calls attention to another component
of the folktale, the individual storyteller's insight and imagination.
An oral story also involves interaction between the storyteller and the audience. The
printed story, however, is the product of a different interaction, that between the
storyteller and the folklore collector, who is at least to some extent an outsider to the
folk group. Conventions of how to represent the folk storytelling situation and
acknowledge the role of the collector have changed over the years. Early folklore
popularizers often embedded the tales in a fictional framework and retold them in
heightened language. "Brer Coon Gets His Meat" provides an example of exaggerated
dialect as well as the mimicry and music of folk delivery. Zora Neale Hurston's "John
Calls on the Lord" seems to reflect collaboration between storyteller and collector; here
John addresses "the Lord" in language that Hurston, the daughter of a black lay
preacher, had heard all her life and repeated with relish in her fiction. In the 1930s,
Federal Writers Project teams collecting the reminiscences of the last generation of
former slaves attempted to portray accurately the relationship between informants and
collectors by describing the communities they visited, identifying individual
informants, and recording their own role in eliciting the stories. They set the standard
that subsequent collectors, notably Richard M. Dorson, have developed.
We cannot be sure to what extent collectors rather than storytellers have determined the
history of the African American folktale repertoire. There is little doubt that the animal

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tales were told during slavery. But tales of the contest of wits between the black man
and the white first appear in collections between 1915 and 1919, and only gradually
develop in the 1930s and 1940s into the cycle of episodes in the perpetual battle between
John the unsubmissive slave and his Old Marster. Whether former slaves withheld
these stories for fifty years after Emancipation, or early collectors intent on animal
stories failed to seek them out, or they developed in the twentieth century as a
commentary on the perpetuation of inequality, we don't know. What the published
record does show is that, while African American folk narrative comes out of slavery, it
is not an artifact of the slave period but a living tradition. In the twentieth century, as
the selections in the book reflect, African American folktales became increasingly
politically pointed and were adapted to the rhythms and concerns of an increasingly
urban folk. Perhaps the clearest testimony to the continuing vitality of African
American folk narrative is its importance in the fiction of such writers as Charles
Chesnutt, Zora Neale Hurston, Langston Hughes, Ralph Ellison, and Toni Morrison.
The tales in this section have been chosen to represent some of the most commonly
collected tales and a variety of narrative styles and collection principles. For more tales
(including genres such as ghost stories and preacher jokes not included here), see the
collections from which these are taken.