Every Tongue Got to Confess: Negro Folk-tales from the Gulf States

this is an important historical record of black folk tales from the gulf region. hurston transcribed them right from the mouths of people living in the area, not "correcting" for language, so the flow of the vignettes is directly what she heard from the people telling the stories. (like i found when reading her other books, the creole isn't hard at all to understand.)

this book isn't meant to be read straight through (as i ended up reading it, more or less) because there isn't a narrative flow (there isn't a narrative at all) and nothing hinges on anything else. the tales are loosely grouped by category, with some repetition in the stories when there is overlap. i wonder if she was going to fill out the manuscript and give context to the show more stories or explain minor differences between stories, had she finished. as it is it is just one vignette after another, with only the name of the person who told it to her as reference. some of the stories are familiar, some are variants of other folk tales or published stories. perhaps many are, and i was just unfamiliar with them myself. it's interesting, though, to see the differences in folk tales that have the same foundation, when told from different places in the world.

i was surprised to find that the preacher tales/vignettes are largely (all?) negative or show the preachers cheating/lying/acting poorly. that's not the stereotype i expected this community to project. i was also surprised that a lot of the tales, especially in the dedicated "in slavery time" section, aren't of the black man outwitting the white man, but of the black man doing something to anger the white man and get in more trouble. i was even more surprised about this than the tenor of the preacher stories section. i thought the majority of the stories would be about the black man getting the best of the white man, not the other way around, so it almost seems like they're cautionary tales that white people would tell to keep the black man down. i wouldn't think they'd continue to tell those stories without altering them to come out ahead (either killing the white man, scaring the white man away so they get the land, or winning their freedom from the white man).

useful, from the foreword, about how to read these tales, and about translation in general: "Creole speech is approximated, at best, by any form of written transcription. In this context it is useful to read these folk-tales from the Gulf States as you would foreign poetry translated into English, grateful for a window into another culture, yet always seeing in mind that what you're consuming is vastly distanced from the original. Translation destroys and displaces as much as it restores and renders available." show less

This was a series of folktales and folk stories, recorded just as told to ZNH, complete with the names of the people who told the stories. The book was divided by subject matter--God tales, Devil tales, Tall tales, etc., plus a fairly large miscellaneous section.

They were great! As usual w/ZNH's stuff, you get a real sense of cadence and speech patterns, which I love. The mood of the stories was all over the place; lots of funny ones, some raunchy ones, some sharp ones, some sad ones. I didn't read the book cover to cover, but I dipped in and read a fair number of them--mainly the shorter ones.

This was a series of folktales and folk stories, recorded just as told to ZNH, complete with the names of the people who told the stories. The book was divided by subject matter--God tales, Devil tales, Tall tales, etc., plus a fairly large miscellaneous section.

They were great! As usual w/ZNH's stuff, you get a real sense of cadence and speech patterns, which I love. The mood of the stories was all over the place; lots of funny ones, some raunchy ones, some sharp ones, some sad ones. I didn't read the book cover to cover, but I dipped in and read a fair number of them--mainly the shorter ones.

Brief and utterly engrossing, I recommend these stories, though I suspect more could be got from them if I paid closer attention. The repetitions worked both for and against. Satisfied but I somehow wanted more...