African Folklore: An Encyclopedia - Marshalls University

African Americans 985
sparked a scholarly debate questioning the sources of New World black folktales,
attracting the attention of folklorist Richard Dorson and Africanist William Bascom in
the 1970s, a debate that John Minton and David Evans examine in their consideration of
“The Coon in the Box” (2001).
Arguments favoring European origins attempt to dissuade opponents who forcefully
demonstrate the African origins of numerous African American folktales. Drawing from
an enormous number of folktale collections in both the old and new worlds, Bascom’s
comparative analyses substantiates the strong connection between African and New
World folktales, soundly refuting Dorson’s claims that most African American folktales
are of European origin (1975). Revisiting the debate and its implications, Minton and
Evans take “The Coon in the Box” as their subject matter, a version of which Dorson
collected from black narrator John Blackamore. Blackamore’s story places the servant
Jack’s life in danger when the servant’s boss wagers with his peers that Jack possesses an
uncanny ability to know everything (a “know-it-all”), unaware that Jack simply
investigates facts before appearing to “know” them. Although the contents of a box
containing a raccoon has not been revealed to Jack when the moment of truth arrives, the
perplexed servant employs an old expression when he admits “You got that old coon at
last,” correctly “guessing” the box’s content and assuring his boss’s substantial gain in
money and status (Dance 2002, 47).
Among the recurrent themes in these master-slave tales is that of ridicule of white
authority figures who institutionalized and encouraged a corrupt political system that
justified treating African slaves as human chattel. Indeed, those who advocate European
origins of many African American folktales are convinced that the trauma of the Middle
Passage between the old and new worlds, and subsequent slavery experiences, produced
among black plantation workers cultural amnesia and a general inability to retain African
traditions, oral or otherwise. Certainly the style of delivery in a storytelling performance
has distinct African characteristics, including aesthetic dimensions that underscore the
importance of the spoken word in African traditional societies, while enduring in
different forms in the New World.
Whether they are telling a story in a southern rural community, engaging in verbal
dueling (the “dozens”), or telling tall tales, black narrators constitute part of a rich
cultural heritage that includes African griots—orators who share cultural knowledge and
history with community members, and who thereby give the spoken word an extremely
important place within traditional African societies. Among such a community of voices
are performers who might employ gestures (cut eye and suck teeth), the African hare
tricksters, Black English, the ubiquitious call-and-response in all expressive forms, as
well as the verbal agility and imagination that are criteria in “signifying,” toasts, and the
dozens.
Signifying and Toasts
Many stories describe how slaves outwit their masters (purposely or otherwise), while
some trickster tales pit characters against each other. In some versions of the “Signifying
Monkey,” the monkey ridicules a lion while laughing and jumping up and down a tree
limb until he slips and falls to the ground, whereupon he begs the lion to let him up to