Who are your people, your family, your community? What are your traditions, your history, your values? And why don't your words come more spontaneously and palpably from the grain of your experience?

—John F. Callahan, “Who You For?: Voice and the African-American Fiction of Democratic Identity”

“LITERATURE OF NECESSITY”: A HISTORICAL OVERVIEW

At the turn into the twentieth century, Charles W. Chesnutt asserted that his writing was a “literature of necessity,” provoked into being by the need for African Americans to refute the fictions written about them by white writers. Similarly, folklorists assert that African-American folk culture arises out of and responds to the needs of its community, urged into being not only as contradiction but also as celebration, as education, and as cultural expression. African-American folk culture answers the questions that John F. Callahan poses in “Who You For?: Voice and the African-American Fiction of Democratic Identity,” and does so in a voice that is distinctly, palpably black. Zora Neale Hurston responds:

“Who are My People? I would say all those hosts spoken of as Negroes, Colored folks, Aunt Hagar's chillum, the brother in black, Race men and women, and My People. They range in color from Walter White, white through high yaller, yaller, Punkin color, high brown, vaseline brown, seal brown, black, smooth black, dusty black, rusty black, coal black, lam black and damn black. My people are in the south of the world, the east of the world, in the west and even some few in the north. Still and all, you can't just point out my people by skin color.”¹

The study of African-American folklore broadens and focuses the definitions of “people,” “family,” “community,” and “American.” It provides valuable insight into how African Americans define themselves and how they locate their culture within the sweep of history as well as within the American landscape. It illuminates those characteristics of black folk that are uniquely American as well as those attributes rooted in far away Africa. African-American-folklore study remains a vital pursuit because of what it reveals about the beliefs, history, and values of disparate African cultures synthesized into a single marginalized group within American society. It is equally important to study because it reveals as much about the group within which African Americans are marginalized. Ralph Ellison says of folklore:

Taken as a whole, its spirituals along with its blues, jazz, and folktales, it has … much to tell us of the faith, humor, and adaptability to reality necessary to live in a world which has taken on much of the insecurity and blues—like absurdity known to those who brought it into being.²

Folklore study, generally, arose during the nineteenth century out of the tension between competing ideologies: scientific rationalism and romanticism. The professional study of folklore formally began in the United States with the establishment of the American Folk-Lore Society in 1888. Ironically, a professional interest in folk culture flourished during the late 1800s because of the belief that modernization and advances in science would lead to a decline in folk belief. The society published the inaugural edition of the Journal of American Folk-Lore in spring 1888, and stated as its purpose “the collection of the fast-vanishing remains of folk-lore in America.”³ William W. Newell, the first treasurer and permanent secretary of the society and the first editor of the journal, stressed the urgency of collecting folklore, observing, “such inquiries are becoming difficult, and in a few years will be impossible” (5). The society's goal was to collect Old English, southern Negro, North American Indian, French Canadian, and Mexican lore.

Newell, who was instrumental in the establishment of the society and the journal, advocated the collection of folklore not only for preservation but also for analysis. Particularly interested in spiritual beliefs, he sought to determine “the character of early religion” and to find a solution to the psychological problems intrinsic to those beliefs. Although he debunked myths regarding African and African-American spiritual practices, Newell nevertheless believed that such cultures were not as highly evolved as Western white cultures. He saw culture as reflective of the fundamental nature of a race or nation and believed that the essence of a group could be found through an empirical study of its folklore.

Newell's approach—scientific rationalism—viewed folklore from a cultural evolution perspective and theorized that all cultures evolved from savagery to civilization. Equating folk belief with superstition, scientific rationalists saw folk culture as evidence of a group's lack of evolution. While offered as objective science, the theories of scientific rationalists served to reinforce the stereotypes of the Negro as inferior to and less human than whites, thus justifying their continued domination. For example, an essay in the first edition of the journal reports instances of child sacrifice and cannibalism in Haiti and concludes that left unsupervised, blacks would resort to barbarism. The essay notes, “Behind the immorality, behind the religiosity, there lies active and alive the horrible revival of the West African Superstitions: the serpent worship, the child sacrifice, and the cannibalism.”⁴

Essentially, scientific rationalism viewed Negro folk culture as pathologic and reinforced the stereotype of free Negroes as unregenerate, a race devolving into its most base instinctual characters once released from the benevolent education of white control. Elements of the Negro culture were considered pathological responses to or interpretations of the dominant culture. For example, from the scientific rationalist perspective, the Brer Rabbit tales illustrated the extent to which enslaved Africans embraced antisocial and violent behavior in response to the condition of bondage. The rationalist view held that the dissemblance, stealing, laziness, licentiousness, and the dissension exhibited in the animal tales not only reflected the moral world of the slaves but also provided negative models with which they socialized their children.

The scientific rationalist thesis employed hierarchical binaries to rationalize their assessment of folk culture as backward. Folklore held the negative place in several descriptive binaries: civilized/savage, science/superstition, official/unofficial, urban/rural, elite/folk. In contrast to scientific rationalism, romanticism embraced the cultural evolution thesis and hierarchical binary argument, but interpreted it oppositely. Romanticists held a primitivist rather than a pathological view of the folk, and romanticized folk culture as close to nature, benevolent, and communal. As such, superstitions and folk beliefs indicated the innocence of the primitive, natural folk rather than their backwardness. As with literary and artistic romanticism, cultural romanticists valued subjective and emotional experience above the rational and scientific. From this perspective, for example, herbal folk remedies or the interpretation of signs meant that the folk were spiritual people in tune with the earth. As natural, salt-of-the-earth folks, the primitives would be less likely to engage in destructive behavior or to be led astray by scientific discoveries and progress. Civilized humanity could learn from and regenerate itself by studying primitive peoples. Essentially, Negro folk life evoked nostalgia for a simpler, idyllic time romanticized in fiction.

African Americans engaged in the professional study of folklore during this period not only to preserve their declining culture but also to counter both the rationalist and romanticist characterizations of the folk. The romantic depictions of Negroes in the plantation tradition of literature popularized Negro folktales and encouraged an interest in folk culture as a whole. Initially, folklorists who studied Negro folk culture often were whites who brought racist biases to their observations and interpretations.

In 1926 Newbell Niles Puckett published the first comprehensive collection of African-American folklore, Folk Beliefs of the Southern Negro. A sociology professor, Puckett studied Negro folklore extensively and published works on Negro religious beliefs and slave names as well. Folk Beliefs of the Southern Negro was his doctoral dissertation and is characterized by an affectionate condescension toward Negroes, but also demonstrates a sincere interest in the subject matter. Puckett supported the cultural evolution theory and viewed Negro folklore as intrinsically beautiful but backward.

Puckett's “Race Pride and Folklore” was published in 1926 in the Urban League journal Opportunity: A Journal of Negro Life. Puckett's view in the essay serves as an excellent example of the cultural evolution position. However, the essay also raises an important issue as regards to the ambivalence, and sometimes antipathy, many Negroes felt toward Negro folk-heritage. Puckett laments that “the illiterate Negro, as a rule, will generously share with you his treasure of unwritten lore, while, too often, colleges and cultured individuals regard Race-Pride and Folk-Lore as irreconcilable enemies.”⁵ Puckett articulates the cultural evolution theory directly in chastising race pride advocates and employs scientific metaphors in explaining the development of healthy race relations in the United States. He argues that “folk-beliefs and superstitions are normal stages of development through which all peoples have passed and are passing in their societal evolution.”⁶ His theory was that race-pride advocates were impeding the progress of race relations by refusing to contribute to the study of Negro folk culture. Their refusal, according to Puckett, contributed to the rapid loss of folk culture. More importantly, however, the reluctance of educated Negroes to act as informants slowed the process of their enculturation. Puckett argued that if educated Negroes would contribute accurate data to folklore studies, “the task of removing the people from the spell of certain undesirable beliefs may proceed with a certitude and efficiency far superior to that of aimless repression” (5).

Puckett was convinced that in addition to ridding the Negro of “undesirable” beliefs and behaviors, a study of folk culture actually could instill race pride. He argued that vestiges of African pride were evident in folk beliefs that suggested a black origin of humanity. He cites, for example, the rhyme, “I'd druther be a Nigger dan a po' white man,” as evidence of race pride (5). Further, he argues that the goal of race pride might be attained more successfully if Negroes would embrace the cultural evolution theory and emphasize “the distance traveled as well as the heights attained” rather than by “blotting out the footprints of the past” (6). Their openness and honesty would allow social scientists to chart Negro progress more accurately.

Finally, Puckett asserts that not all folklore is valueless superstition in need of eradication. He notes that some of the signs that Negro farmers read in nature have been verified as scientifically sound. He also suggests that the folklore used to teach children moral or historical lessons serves an important purpose. Not even conjure is without worth, Puckett finds, because some remedies actually work. He recounts the advice of a New Orleans conjure man who offers a client a love potion. Along with the potion, the conjure man dispenses advice: “gib de 'oman ebbything she laks and lots uv hit” (8). The advice is sure to win the woman even if the love power proves to be a placebo. Hence, the conjure remedy can teach valuable lessons in human relationships.

Puckett suggests that the “United States is a great laboratory with a gigantic experiment in race-contact, working itself out before the very eyes of the student of race” (4). The accurate contributions of the Negro to the study of folklore would assist rather than hinder the great race experiment.

Although problematic in its assessment of folk culture as evidence of the Negro's position on the evolutionary ladder, Puckett's essay nevertheless makes important contributions to the study of Negro folk culture. First he offers valuable insight into the attitudes of Negroes toward folk culture during the early 1900s. Secondly he underscores the necessity of Negro contributions to the field. Often Negro communities and societies were closed to white investigators. Thus, white folklorists could never be sure if they were getting full or accurate depictions of black folk life.

Published in Opportunity, Puckett's essay was directed toward a predominantly black audience during the Harlem Renaissance. His goal was to urge Negro involvement in the professional study of Negro folk culture. In the essay, Puckett effectively characterized the attitudes of the intellectual arm of the New Negro movement. Having adopted the cultural evolution theory as a central tenet in their philosophy of racial uplift, the Negro intelligentsia accepted folklore as backward and questioned its place in the urban-centered culture of the New Negro. Leaders such as Du Bois and Locke considered that the geographical and ideological shifts Negroes made during the Great Migration demanded a cultural shift as well. The goal of acceptance by and assimilation into white culture necessitated the repression of values and characteristics that marked the Negro as essentially different from whites. Consequently, the New Negro was charged with reversing his or her position in the binaries posited by the cultural evolution thesis. High culture replaced low; rationalism replaced superstition; urbanity replaced folksiness. The hope of the New Negro was that the ability to reject the “negative” values of folk culture would cause a shift in the views of white people who held the Manichean⁷ oppositions of white/black, good/evil, civilization/savagery, intelligence/emotion, and rationality/sensuality as evidence of white superiority and black inferiority.

Not all artists and intellectuals of the Harlem Renaissance accepted the pathological perspective of the cultural evolution theory of uplift, however. Some of the leaders of the movement did not engage in the erasure of folklore from Negro literature, but rather embraced the romantic view of folk culture and primitivized the Negro in their works. Writers such as McKay and Hurston romanticized the Negro in what scholar Patrick Mullen sees as “an attempt to construct an essentialist rural and pastoral African American identity.”⁸ In many ways, both McKay and Hurston were primitivists and believed that industrialization, urbanization, and technological development were detrimental to blacks, as they estranged Negro people from their folk consciousness rooted in the natural world. McKay asserted that such alienation killed the souls of black folks as their histories and strategies of resistance against white racist ideologies and oppression emerged from their folk roots. Without access to such sources of strength, the culture—the soul—of the Negro people would die.

Thus, at the same time the leaders of the New Negro movement were reconsidering, and in some cases rejecting, folk culture, a corresponding desire emerged to collect and preserve the Negro folk heritage. The first professionally trained African-American folklorists began their work during this period. While Hurston was trained in the cultural evolution school of thought, she ultimately rejected the thesis. She often characterized her subjects exotically and stereotypically for professional and political expedience, however. Her essay “My People, My People,” for example, characterizes Negro people as uncouth, violent, intractable, and primitive, describing the Negro and the monkey as brothers. However, Hurston's descriptions in the essay cannot be taken at face value as denigrating her race. She notes in the essay that “Tomming,” behaving subserviently or pandering to whites in the manner of “Uncle Tom,” can be acceptable. She explains, “‘Tomming’ is not an aggressive act, it is true, but it has its uses like feinting in the prize ring” (775). Her stereotypical characterizations might be read as a diversion, drawing the reader's attention away from her assertion of the Negro's basic human equality.

Most important, then, is Hurston's conclusion that the Negro “doesn't really exist” (780). “What we think is a race is detached moods and phases of other people walking around … other folks, seen in shadow,” she explains (780). Further, she writes in “Seeing the World As It Is” that race “is a loose classification of physical characteristics. It tells nothing about the insides of people.”⁹

Hurston's appreciation of Negro folk culture, as well as her romantic, primitivist view, grew out of the nurturing experience of her developmental years in all-black Eatonville and was reinforced by her fieldwork in African-derived spiritual beliefs. Consequently, she did not view Negro culture pathologically, and her folklore studies countered many of the stereotypes of biased white-authored reports.

The fieldwork being done by Negro folklorists during the 1930s was valuable to the development of Negro folklore studies as counter-narrative, as validation of the authenticity of folklore previously collected by whites, and as an addition to the existing store of folk knowledge. Puckett acknowledged early in his studies the inaccessibility of some folk materials to white collectors because Negro informants did not trust interlopers. Hurston explains Negro resistance in Mules and Men:

Folklore is not as easy to collect as it sounds. The best source is where there are the least outside influences and these people, being usually underprivileged, are the shyest. They are most reluctant at times to reveal that which the soul lives by. And the Negro, in spite of his open-faced laughter, his seeming acquiescence, is particularly evasive. You see we are a polite people and we do not say to our questioner, “Get out of here!” We smile and tell him or her something that satisfies the white person because, knowing so little about us, he doesn't know what he is missing.¹⁰

The dissemblance on the part of the informant has the same effect as Hurston's double-voiced essays. Because the interviewer does not know whether the informant is “Tomming” for a white audience, it becomes difficult to determine the authenticity and accuracy of the lore being collected. Consequently, folklorists and anthropologists such as Puckett and Franz Boas then sought to train Negroes as professionals in the fields.

Boas, Melville Herskovits, and Ruth Benedict, important and prominent anthropologists, instructed Hurston in the field during her years at Barnard in the late 1920s. Hurston's education under Boas, a cultural relativist, eventually equipped her to debunk racist notions and dispel fears of a disappearing Negro folk culture. Initially, Hurston's educated manner put her at odds with her rural informants. Her first field trip for Boas, in February 1927, was less than successful, and he complained that her fieldwork offered no more than information obtained by white investigators. Hurston recognized the reticence of Negro informants and changed her approach. Alan Lomax, a budding folklorist, in a letter to his father John Lomax, one of the most well respected scholars in the field, noted Hurston's ability to put her informants at ease during a 1935 expedition:

They have been perfectly natural and easy from the first on account of Zora who talks their language and can out-nigger any of them. She swaps jokes, slaps backs, honies up to the men a little when necessary and manages them so well that they ask us for no money, but on the other hand cooperate in the friendliest sort of spirit.¹¹

Having perfected her approach following the first disastrous trip, Hurston's investigations into the rural south as well as to the Caribbean established her as one of the most important folklorists of Negro culture in America.

At the time of Hurston's expeditions in the early 1930s, only one other African American, Arthur Huff Fauset, was a professionally trained folklorist. Fauset's “American Negro Folk Literature,” published in The New Negro, advocated “a scientific collecting of Negro folk lore before the original sources of this material altogether lapse.”¹² In the essay, he called for a reconsideration of Harris's Uncle Remus tales and pointed out the apologist nature of the tales as regards the institution of slavery. Fauset also commented on the relationship between folklore and literature. He did not wish to “deny or begrudge the delightful literary by-products of this material” (244). Rather, he hoped that the scientific study of folk materials would result in literature that did not “transgress so far from the true ways and the folk spirit and the true lines of our folk art” as did Harris's Uncle Remus tales (244).

During this period, several works were produced with the intent of preserving Negro folklore. Alain Locke's Negro Art: Past and Present (1936), Alan and John Lomax's American Ballads and Folk Songs (1935), and the WPA's American Stuff: An Anthology of Prose and Verse by Members of the Federal Writers' Project (1937) contributed to the growing body of Negro folklore.

The Federal Writers' Project of the Works Progress Administration was instrumental in encouraging the objective study of Negro folk materials and also brought the disciplines of folklore and literature into closer contact than had previously been the case. Hurston approached folklore dualistically. On one hand, she saw the importance of collecting and studying folk culture scientifically, and noted the impossibility of capturing the essence of folklore in a static form, such as literature. Her interest in drama indicates her appreciation of the performative nature of folklore. She saw the theater as an important vehicle in preserving and presenting folk culture. On the other hand, Hurston also saw the value of preserving folklore through the conscious art of literature, as she recognized the ephemerality of performance.

During the period of the WPA, Hurston was joined by several African-American writers in the conscious pursuit of representing folklore in literary works. While the study of folklore had previously been associated fairly closely with anthropology, its incorporation into literary study was becoming more commonplace. For example, Sterling Brown, an associate professor of English at Howard University at the time of the WPA, saw folklore as crucial to African-American literature. During the 1930s and 1940s, Brown published essays on folklore and literature in the Journal of Negro Education, the Journal of American Folklore, Opportunity, and the Journal of Negro History. In a speech given at a folklore conference in 1946 and published in the Journal of American Folklore, Brown explained his interest in folk culture:

I became interested in folklore because of my desire to write poetry and prose fiction. I was first attracted by certain qualities that I thought the speech of the people had, and I wanted to get for my own writing a flavor, a color, a pungency of speech. Then later I came to something more important—I wanted to get an understanding of people, to acquire an accuracy in the portrayal of their lives.¹³

This attitude was evidenced early on in his work for the WPA. Although not a trained folklorist, Brown developed questions geared toward soliciting important and authentic information from the ex-slave informants interviewed for the project. He also critiqued accounts written for guidebooks by biased whites, and encouraged the involvement of black field workers. During his WPA tenure as the national editor of Negro affairs, Brown also insisted on hiring as many African-American writers as possible, bringing several rising stars in contact with the folk culture that would inform their writing. Most notable among the young writers to emerge from the FWP was Ralph Ellison.

Ellison's critical consideration of folklore, though fostered during the WPA, matured during the 1940s and 1950s. The FWP had immersed Negro writers in political issues of race, poverty, labor unions, and socialism, fostering the growth of sociological and militant fiction. Richard Wright, in Uncle Tom's Children (1938) and Twelve Million Black Voices: A Folk History of the Negro in the United States (1941), dramatizes the revolutionary consciousness of the period, representing the folk as primitive victims of the pastoral South or among the impoverished and exploited brown masses. In “Blueprint for Negro Writing,” Wright valorizes the folklore of the “unwritten and unrecognized” Negro masses:

It was, however, in a folklore molded out of rigorous and inhuman conditions of life that the Negro achieved his most indigenous and complete expression. Blues, spirituals, and folk tales recounted from mouth to mouth; the whispered words of a black mother to her black daughter on the ways of men, the confidential wisdom of a black father to his black son; the swapping of sex experiences on street corners from boy to boy in the deepest vernacular; work songs sung under blazing suns—all these formed the channels through which the racial wisdom flowed.¹⁴

Although laudatory in his discussion of Negro folk culture, Wright viewed it as evidence of a psychological nationalism borne out of oppression. He took a pathological view of Negro life and suggests that those “Negro writers who seek to mold or influence the consciousness of the Negro people must address their messages to them through the ideologies and attitudes fostered in this warping way of life.”¹⁵

While Ellison shares Wright's view of the necessity of “racial wisdom” for survival, his work contrasts the militancy and pathology of Wright's fiction in representing folk culture not as evidence of shared oppression but rather as the source of resistance. His collection of critical essays, Shadow and Act, devotes considerable space to discussions of the relevance of Negro folk life to American literature. “Change the Joke and Slip the Yoke” and “The World and the Jug” are particularly noteworthy as they are conversations with prominent white critics regarding the nature of African-American literature. In both essays, Ellison addresses the distortion of the Negro image as a compelling reason to invoke folk culture as a source of authentic Negro life. However, he makes it clear that distortions occur in the fictions of both Negro and white Americans. His Invisible Man represents his “literature of necessity,” as it responds to the false depictions of black character and life.

Similarly, James Baldwin departed from the protest tradition in his literature, finding that Wright's characters fell short of representing Negro humanity. Many of his works borrow their titles from Negro folk literature, lore, and religious belief—Go Tell It on the Mountain (1952), The Amen Corner (1954), and Blues for Mister Charlie (1964). Although he explores political topics, he uses folk culture as the fabric of his characters' lives. He incorporates elements of Negro religious, sermonic, and blues traditions in his fiction. Baldwin shares with Studs Terkel in a 1961 interview that he initially rejected Negro folk culture out of shame but that Bessie Smith's blues helped him reclaim his heritage. Baldwin explains, “I was ashamed of the life in the Negro church, ashamed of my father, ashamed of the Blues, ashamed of Jazz, and of course, ashamed of watermelon: all of these stereotypes that the country inflicts on Negroes, that we all eat watermelon or we all do nothing but sing the Blues.”¹⁶ Smith's blues illustrated the “fantastic understatement” regarding the tragedies of Negro life that Baldwin wanted to capture in his fiction (3). She refused to be defined as a victim, Baldwin thought, a stand he was determined to take.

Although Baldwin's personal political involvement brought him praise, Ellison's work and his politics were called into question during the Black Arts Movement of the 1960s. As the development of degree-granting folklore programs in American universities in the 1940s and the growing access to higher education experienced by blacks during the 1950s converged with the brewing modern Civil Rights Movement, a renewed interest in black folk culture emerged. John W. Roberts, in his presidential address to the American Folklore Society in 1998, explained the mood of the country during the 1960s, and considered the impact of politics on the study of folklore. He suggests that student activists on college campuses across the country demanded a course of study that reflected the nation's plurality and was relevant to the sociopolitical crisis facing America. Roberts asks, “And what was more relevant than folklore, and who had advocated longer for pluralism than folklorists as an extension of our concern with human diversity in evaluating certain types of artistic and cultural achievements?”¹⁷

Young African-American leaders and intellectuals advocated the development of a Black Aesthetic free of the oppressive forces of European cultural values. They urged a return to cultural sources and looked to black folk culture as evidence of a distinctly black character. Addison Gayle Jr., in his essay “Cultural Strangulation: Black Literature and the White Aesthetic,” cites Paul Laurence Dunbar as a black writer whose identity and art were strangled by white definitions of African Americans. As such, Dunbar's poetry was characterized by “buffoonery, idiocy and comedy.”¹⁸ In contrast to Dunbar, the black writer and critic must define the terms of his or her own literary expression and to do so must “unearth the treasure of beauty lying deep in the untoured regions of the Black experience,” Gayle avers (212).

Similarly, Larry Neal in “The Black Arts Movement” deemed the integrationist efforts of the Harlem Renaissance a failure, and proposed a new black aesthetic created by and for African Americans. “The Black artist must create new forms and new values, sing new songs (or purify old ones); and along with other Black authorities, he must create a new history, new symbols, myths and legends (and purify old ones by fire),” he demands.¹⁹ More directly, LeRoi Jones (Amiri Baraka) argues that the black masses rather than the elite are the true Negro artists. The solitary Negro contribution to American culture has been music, specifically blues and jazz, Baraka insists, because the “bearers” of this folk tradition have been “the lowest classes of Negro.”²⁰ He advocates a complete break, an exorcism of white cultural values. Baraka wrote a poem, “Sacred Chant for the Return of Black Spirit and Power,” that unites his political and artistic vision as this excerpt demonstrates:

Ohhh break love with white things.
Ohhh, Ohhh break break break let it roll down.
Let it kill, let it kill, let the thing you are destroy
Let it murder, and dance, and kill. Ohhh OhhhOhhh break the white thing. Let it dangle dead. Let it rot like nature needs.
MMMMMMMMMMM
MMMMMMMMMM … OOOOOOOOOO … Death Fiddle
                                                            Claw life
                                                                      From space
                                                            Time
                                                            Cries inside
                                                                      Bleeds the word(21)

Baraka breaks with what he sees as a white literary aesthetic to valorize the orality fundamental to black culture.

The demands of the intellectual leaders of the Black Arts Movement were met with the development of academic programs in African American, folklore, and American studies into which “antisocial,” “anticultural,” and “subversive” forms of expression could be incorporated.²² The 1970s saw the emergence of “performative and contextual” theories of folklore and emphasized a long-standing tension between public and academic folklorists. Performative approaches shifted considerations of folklore away from its representation in literature toward an examination of folk forms as performed within a folk context. Folklorists began to emphasize literature's inability to capture the essence of folk culture because folklore is essentially peformative in nature.

This shift actually reflects a return to Hurston's arguments during the 1930s. Hurston became involved in the creation and production of folk dramas because she saw the theater as an essential medium for preserving and presenting folklore. She often argued that folklore was not a literary product but a living experience. The new proponents of the performative approach to folklore insisted on a strict fidelity to the informant's words, resulting in a romantic exaltation of the folk informant.

At the same time that performance was being elevated in folklore studies, cultural studies was gaining prevalence in the academic world. This new discipline drew folklore studies beneath its umbrella and “threatened the viability of folklore as an independent discipline.”²³ The focus on the importance of performance and context also called into question the place of theory in folklore studies, raising concerns about the intellectual rigor of such programs. Consequently, cultural studies gained currency within the university and appropriated many of the methodologies and theories of folklore studies, displacing the discipline in the curriculum. An excellent example of this shift away from folklore toward an emphasis on cultural studies and theory is Henry Louis Gates Jr.'s “Preface to Blackness: Text and Pretext.” Gates argues that “a literary text is a linguistic event; its explication must be an activity of close textual analysis.”²⁴ His essay examines what Gates views as the failings of previous African-American literary movements, and calls for the “sophisticated verbal analysis” of black texts (254). In 1988 Gates published The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of African-American Literary Criticism, in which he applied his “vernacular theory” to Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God. Although he titles and bases his theory on an African-American folktale, and draws upon African lore and religious thought in his explanations, Gates does not use African or African-American folk sources in his discussion. Folklorists lament that Gates's work presages the complete break between folklore and literature and literary criticism.

Definitions of the folk expanded during the 1980s and 1990s as folklore studies included the marginalized and the disenfranchised as folk groups. Roberts considers the expansion in some ways as positive for folklorists as it offers them a way to “keep the discipline alive in their institutions” (135). He sees institutional change as affecting the public folklorist as well and anticipates that this sector of folk study will keep folklore alive. He argues that the study of folklore always has been characterized by “profound fragmentation” (137). He suggests that the discipline embrace this unique state:

Our future health as a field lies not in denying or even fighting against our fragmented identity but, rather, in learning to see ourselves in it, in accepting our essential dividedness, our diversity if you will, as our greatest virtue rather than the problem to be overcome.

(139)

As a brief overview of the history of folklore study indicates, the field has been deeply fragmented since its formal establishment in 1888. In part, the constant challenges to the notion of fixed theories of folklore have kept the field alive.

APPROACHES TO THE STUDY OF LITERATURE AND FOLKLORE

Because the field of folklore initially was associated with anthropology, approaches to its study often have been scientific, with the goal being the objective collection of data. As the humanities incorporated folklore into the discipline, folkloristics (the study of folklore) began to change. From the perspective of the humanities, particularly literary studies, the goal of folkloristics is to examine the manner in which folklore informs literature. What are the sources of the folk tradition that have inspired a literary work? What purpose does the folklore serve in the theme or formal structure of a text? In his annotated bibliography of folklore and literature studies, Steven S. Jones delineates three methodologies advocated by Richard Dorson, Alan Dundes, and Roger Abrahams, major figures in the development of the field.

Dorson was a Harvard educated historian who worked to establish folkloristics as a serious academic field. His goal is reflected in his approach to the study of folklore. Dorson believed that serious study demanded the extensive documentation of the intentional presence of folklore in a literary work. The responsibility of the critic is three-fold: 1) identify the folklore reference within the text; 2) document the existence of the specific folk form outside of the text; and 3) offer evidence that the author was familiar with the folklore which he or she incorporated in the literary work.²⁵

Dorson's essay “The Career of ‘John Henry’”²⁶ demonstrates the documentation process. He conducted a “scholarly probe” to determine the reason for the popularity of the ballad. First Dorson traced the scholarship of the folk song. Describing himself as a “sleuth,” Dorson discovered an article that linked John Henry to an outlaw named John Hardy. His next step was to validate or invalidate the connection. He determined that John Hardy and John Henry were different men through research done by another folklorist, Newman I. White. Dorson then sought scholarship that would prove John Henry was real rather than a mythical hero. Once the “historicity of John Henry at Big Bend” (571) was validated, Dorson turned his attention to literary and dramatic presentations of his story. Throughout his essay, Dorson praises the “minutely detailed critique” or the “exhaustive monograph” of other researchers, emphasizing the scholarly approach to folklore study.

Ellison considered this method of research “archetype hunting,”²⁷ and found it inadequate for exploring the purposes of the folklore or the motives of the author in incorporating folklore into literature. Alan Dundes's folkloristic goal was similar to that of Ellison. According to Swann, Dundes sought to discover the function and significance of literary uses of folklore. Swann explains that Dundes “argues for folkloristic explication de text; this approach attempts to use rhetorical, semiotic, and symbolic analysis to explicate the meaning and function of folklore as it occurs in literary works” (xvii). As such, Dundes is suggesting that the purpose of incorporating folklore into literature is to imbue the art with archetypal meaning, readily recognizable by the audience.

Although Dundes conducted “scholarly” research into the origins of African-American folktales, employing tale type and motif indices, his essays move beyond the sterile reporting of objective data. In “African Tales among the North American Indians,” he discusses how racist assumptions can skew folklore study. He uses as an example many folklorists' biases in asserting that Native Americans as well as Negroes borrowed most of their tales from European sources. Dundes notes Stith Thompson's assumption: “The animal tales here treated are usually of Negro and Spanish origin—all of them ultimately belonging to European tradition.”²⁸ His goal is to demonstrate how even “objective” scholarship can be influenced by bias.

Roger Abrahams proposes the deepest connection between folklore and literature, suggesting that the two share “identical narrative patterns and basic sociological premises” (xvii). Finding that establishing a relationship with the audience is central to folklore and literature, Abrahams focuses on the performative nature of both. His goal is to demonstrate that authors use folklore in literature because they recognize its role in forming a bond with the audience. This approach calls for drawing comparisons between the narrative strategies and sociological functions of the folklore element and the literary text.

Abrahams's “Playing the Dozens” reflects his interest in the performative nature of folklore. He examines the verbal ritual of insult popular among urban males. Abrahams suggests that the game is a way for young men to practice “some of the words and concepts they have overheard and are just beginning to understand.”²⁹ His essay includes extensive examples of the form, and he discusses the linguistic features of the contest. He concludes that the dozens serve to mentally train adolescent boys for battle on tough urban turf.

Ellison's view of the relationship between folklore and literature seems to combine Dundes's and Abrahams's strategies. Folklore is functional. Ellison outlined his observations regarding the uses of folklore in literature in his essay “Change the Joke and Slip the Yoke,” published in 1958 in Partisan Review. He explains that he came to an appreciation of folklore through literature: “For me, at least, in the discontinuous, swiftly changing and diverse American culture, the stability of the Negro American folk tradition became precious as a result of an act of literary discovery” (222). Because of the way in which he came to esteem folk tradition, Ellison seeks to discover how folklore and literature reflect, respond to, and alter American values. He eschews objective “archetype hunting,” and advocates the interpretation of folklore within the context of the literary work. He asks how and why folklore becomes a part of a specific text and examines how it functions in the formal structure of the work. While Ellison finds that the writer's form is his most important tool, he considers the Negro folk tradition “a valuable source for literature” (222).

CRITICAL RESPONSE: “AN EXCHANGE”

Critical consideration of the role of folklore in African-American literature surfaced alongside the first popular folkloric texts. From critiques of Harris's Uncle Remus tales at the turn into the twentieth century to examinations of Toni Morrison's Paradise at the turn into the twenty-first century, critics have written volumes on this subject. While the foci of critical studies logically vary according to the texts being examined, certain themes recur across the corpus of African-American folklore and literature criticism. Critics address the issue of the origin of black folklore, the goal of correcting negative black images, the importance of language, and the liberating function of folklore. [An essay written by Stanley Edgar Hyman and Ralph Ellison] raises many of these concerns and illustrates critical debate at its best. It is a discussion between critic Stanley Edgar Hyman and writer Ralph Ellison regarding the nature and role of folklore in Negro fiction.

Originally published in Partisan Review, the exchange was initiated by a lecture Hyman was preparing for the Ludwig Lewisohn lectures at Brandeis University. Ellison notes in Shadow and Act that he wrote a letter while he was in Rome and shared his opinion of the argument with Hyman. Hyman then suggested that Ellison formalize his reply, and the two submitted the essays to Partisan Review. Taken together, these essays crystallize the central issues in the critical study of African-American folklore and literature.

SUGGESTED FICTION FOR FURTHER STUDY

Numerous African-American writers pay tribute to their folk heritage through their fiction. Their use of folk tradition is not simply laudatory, however. In the fashion of their own heritage, their use of the folk tradition is functional. African-American writers incorporate or represent folklore in their fiction to teach, name, claim, resist, and celebrate. Following are suggested readings that share similar themes and goals in their use of African-American folklore as those previously addressed in the “Representative Writers” section of this work. They are arranged thematically to reflect the most popular forms of folklore reflected in African-American literature.

A great deal of criticism has been written about the blues ideology as reflected in the works of Ellison, Baldwin, Morrison, and others. However, the forms of folklore most directly reflected in African-American literature are portraits of folk-life and spiritual beliefs, including African retentions. These forms provide the central theme in several fictional works that are imbued with other folk elements such as sermons, spirituals, jazz, and the blues.

PORTRAITS OF “THE FOLK”

Folkloric fiction of the 1920s and 1930s reflected the debate regarding the appropriate representation of the Negro. At issue were the use of dialect and the depiction of negative Negro images. In some schools of thought, only the elite and educated were proper subjects for literature. Objections lessened to the portrayal of simple people in the following years, and several writers, including Langston Hughes, Gwendolyn Brooks, Chester Himes, and Margaret Walker celebrated the “folk” in their fiction. The elements of folklore considered in the following works include folk speech, folk songs, and the realistic depiction of rural folk-life.

JEAN TOOMER'S CANE

Jean Toomer's Cane is one of the most celebrated works of the Harlem Renaissance. Hailed as a modernist autobiography, the text is difficult to categorize. It is composed of poems, sketches, short stories, a novella, and a short drama. Although Cane is a moving depiction of black life in rural Georgia and the urban center of Washington, DC, it has been controversial to categorize it as “Negro fiction.”

Jean Toomer was born 26 December 1894 in Washington DC, to Nathan and Nina Toomer. His mother was the daughter of P. B. S. Pinchback, a prominent politician in Louisiana and a “voluntary Negro.” Although he was light-skinned enough to “pass” for a white man, Pinchback claimed his Negro heritage. In contrast, Toomer refused to be labeled a Negro and identified himself as simply American. He writes in a letter to James Weldon Johnson, “My poems are not Negro poems, nor are they Anglo-Saxon or white or English poems. My prose likewise. They are, first, mine. And second … they spring from the result of racial blending here in America.”³⁰ He did not wish for Cane to be publicized as the work of a Negro writer; nevertheless, the work has been identified as such.

Toomer's sense of racial ambiguity, although it isolated him, afforded him an aesthetic distance from his subject and allowed a portrait of the Negro uncontrolled by New Negro politics. He employed dialect in some of his stories and addressed issues of promiscuity, miscegenation, and lynching without drawing the ire of the intellectual leaders of the movement.

Toomer had little familiarity with Negro life. He was introduced to rural Georgia in fall 1921 when he took a teaching position near Sparta. Pastoral Georgia touched him, and he believed that the folk existence that he witnessed would soon fade. Toomer writes in a letter to his friend Waldo Frank, “I heard folk songs come from the lips of Negro peasants. I saw the rich dusk beauty that I had heard many false accents about, and of which, till then, I was somewhat skeptical. And a deep part of my nature, a part that I had repressed, sprang suddenly into life and responded to them.”³¹ He sought to capture the beauty that he saw and felt, and did so successfully in Cane. The work is divided into three parts. The first is woman-centered and located in Georgia. The second part is male-dominated and set in the North. The third part, a drama titled “Kabnis,” reconciles North and South.

The first section includes poems and portraits of Negro women as natural and mystically beautiful. Each vignette is titled after the main character and sketches the simple struggles of her life. Toomer celebrates their natural sensuality without censure. Du Bois credited him with countering the negative stereotypes of black women as sexually aggressive and promiscuous. However, Toomer claimed that the work had no propagandistic purposes but simply was art. The second section reflects the Negro migration north into the unnatural, mechanized city. While the rural section includes snatches of blues songs, the urban section references jazz as a backdrop to city life. The high expectations of the characters for excitement and self-fulfillment are not recognized in the North, and the text moves back into the South. Ralph Kabnis, the title character in the last section returns to his southern home after failing to find success in the North. He cannot reconcile the pain of his southern past, however, and is immobilized by fear. Lewis and Halsey demonstrate the different choices for coping with painful southern history. Toomer saw the structure of the novel as a circle, symbolizing and perhaps achieving the eternalness of folk-life in Georgia.

CLAUDE MCKAY'S HOME TO HARLEM

Claude McKay was a major contributor to the New Negro movement. Often at odds with the intelligentsia of the literary renaissance, McKay eschewed the notions of elitism and uplift and wrote works that protested Negro conditions, and celebrated the peasant and the “seamier” side of urban existence. A primitivist, he believed that rural and dark-skinned blacks were closer to nature than the urbanized light-skinned elite. He considered industrialization and urbanization a threat to Negro folkways and ultimately to Negro life.

McKay was born in 1889 in Jamaica, to middle-class farmers Thomas Francis and Ann Elisabeth McKay. The youngest of eleven children, he learned his love of folk language from his father's folktales, and his love of literature from the library of his mentor Edward Jeckyll, an English scholar of Jamaican folklore. McKay's first work, Songs from Jamaica, published in 1912 in Jamaica, was a collection of dialect poems that celebrated the peasantry of the island. His reputation as a poet was well established in Jamaica before he came to the United States in 1912.

Harlem Shadows was McKay's first American publication, and it received praise as “the first significant expression” of the Negro race, in part because the poems are “sung by a pure blooded Negro.”³² The volume included his most anthologized poem, “If We Must Die,” a militant call to arms inspired by the 1919 Chicago riots. McKay's most recognized work, Home to Harlem, was published in 1928 and received mixed reviews. Langston Hughes appreciated its representation of the common Negro, while Du Bois criticized it as pandering to puerile tastes. In the novel, McKay chronicles the life of Jake, a lower-class worker. The author touches on issues of color consciousness, intraracial class conflict, and the concerns of Negroes in relationship to the wider world. Jake represents the countless Negro males who joined the army to fight for the United States during World War I, but were denied dignity and humanity both in the military and at home. He also demonstrates the difficult existence of Pullman porters and lower-class workers. He reflects the common man's escape from his struggles in the city's dives and cabarets.

McKay juxtaposes Jake against Ray, a Haitian intellectual who dreams of becoming a writer. Ray is unhappy and unfulfilled—a social misfit due to his intelligence and lofty desires. Jake, on the other hand, can find satisfaction in his instinctual existence. In valorizing the primitive side of Negro life, McKay hoped to demonstrate that the natural black man was freer than his elite counterpart.

LANGSTON HUGHES'S FINE CLOTHES TO THE JEW AND SIMPLE STORIES

Although Langston Hughes belongs in the ranks of the Harlem Renaissance writers, his career spans from the 1920s through the 1960s. He was a prolific writer, authoring thirty-seven book-length works and editing or coediting nine anthologies. Among his publications are two autobiographies, two novels, seven collections of short stories, and sixteen collections of poetry. Celebrated as the “poet laureate of the Negro,” Hughes pioneered the use of blues and jazz in his poetry.

He was born James Mercer Langston Hughes in 1902 in Joplin, Missouri, to James and Carrie Langston Mercer Hughes. His father left the family when Langston was young, and Langston accompanied his mother to his maternal grandmother's home in Lawrence, Kansas. These women nurtured in him a love of literature and the theater as well as racial pride and a sense of social justice. Themes of protest and social critique figure prominently in his body of work.

Hughes began writing in high school and published in The Crisis his most celebrated poem, “The Negro Speaks of Rivers,” in 1921, when he was only nineteen years of age. He began incorporating folk-music forms in his poetry in 1923 with his seminal poem “The Weary Blues.” His biographer Arnold Rampersad describes the poem as “a work virtually unprecedented in American poetry in its blending of black and white rhythms and forms.”³³ Hughes published a collection of poems titled The Weary Blues in 1926; however, blues poetry does not dominate the volume. The first section of the collection includes jazz poems and the remainder of the volume consists of more traditional poetry.

A second collection, Fine Clothes to the Jew, followed in 1927. In it Hughes captured the blues aesthetic and wrote sad and sensuous blues ballads. Its subject matter was controversial. As the titles of several poems indicate, the collection addressed the life of the unrefined: “Porter,” “Brass Spitoons,” “Elevator Boy,” “The Death of Do Dirty,” and “Ballad of Gin Mary.” Hughes demonstrated the traditional topics of the blues, including sexuality, the problems of romantic relationships, the desire to escape a sorrowful existence, violence, and the troubles of southern life. Hughes was harshly criticized for his raw depictions; however, he defended his poems as real portraits of one facet of Negro life.

While Hughes is best known as a folk or blues poet, his Simple stories deserve investigation as well. In character Jesse B. Semple, Hughes created an urban folk hero in the tradition of Chesnutt's Julius McAdoo. Deceptively simple, as his name indicates, Semple displays considerable insight regarding the plight of the Negro. Critic Susan Blake calls him “the migrant descendant of John, the militant slave of black folklore.”³⁴

Hughes's character first appeared in “Here to Yonder,” a column he wrote from 1943 to 1966 for the Chicago Defender. His Simple stories were collected in three volumes: Simple Speaks His Mind (1950), Simple Takes a Wife (1953), and Simple Stakes a Claim (1957). The Best of Simple, selected stories from all three Simple volumes, was published in 1961, and Simple's Uncle Sam appeared in 1965. Semple offers folk wisdom on varied issues, among them, race, the war, economic oppression, romantic relationships, and middle-class acculturation. He reminisces about blues singers and comments on the segregated military.

The Simple stories are framed in a manner similar to Chesnutt's Julius McAdoo stories. Semple's educated friend Boyd narrates the stories and initiates a conversation about some current affair with his race conscious companion. While Boyd points out the logical and ideal in the situation, Semple exposes the racism that often lurks beneath the surface. Consequently, it is the simple man who teaches the educated man about life.

Jesse B. Semple emblematizes Hughes's body of work. It is humorous and simple, yet complex in its themes and rich in African-American folk heritage.

CONJURE TALES AND ANCIENT RITES

West African-derived spiritual beliefs form a second category of folklore frequently incorporated in African-American fiction. Ranging from the simple presence of a ghost to complex sacred rituals, mystical lore reflects the African American's continued belief in the power of an unseen world. Houston A. Baker Jr. theorizes that because Africans in the New World were “stripped of material culture,” they gave primacy to “nonmaterial transaction” which “led to a privileging of the roles and figures of medicine men, griots, conjurers, priests, or priestesses.”³⁵ Magic becomes, for Baker, the refuge of the powerless. For the following writers, magic is a return to powerful sources.

ISHMAEL REED'S MUMBO JUMBO

Ishmael Reed has been described as a parodist, a satirist, an iconoclast, and “the enfant terrible of black letters.”³⁶ He has published novels; poetry and essay collections; and several anthologies. His fiction is characterized by humor, irreverence, the subversion or parody of literary convention, and the extensive use of historical and topical allusions.

Reed was born in 1938 in Chattanooga, Tennessee, to Henry Lenoir and Thelma Coleman. His mother and stepfather Bennie Reed raised him in Buffalo, New York. He began writing during the late 1950s while a student at Millard Fillmore College, and demonstrated a flair for parody and satire. Although a journalist during the early 1960s, Reed's literary career began with the 1967 publication of his first novel, The Freelance Pallbearers. Mumbo Jumbo (1972), his third novel, was nominated for a National Book Award.

A complex work, Mumbo Jumbo ostensibly is a detective tale. It tells the story of the leader of the Neo-HooDoo detectives, Papa LaBas, who recalls the Haitian deity Papa Legbas. Papa LaBas is searching for Jes Grew with the assistance of his military group, the Mu'tafika. Their combatants in the story are members of an organization called the Antonist Path and its military group, the Wallflower Order. In explaining the recurring battles with the Antonists and the Wallflower Order, LaBas relies on the Egyptian myth of Set and Osiris. LaBas's story explains to his listeners, and demonstrates to the reading audience, that the conflict in Mumbo Jumbo is an allegory of the Egyptian myth.

At the same time, the novel parodies the aesthetic aims of the Harlem Renaissance. The name “Jes Grew” refers to the origin of Topsy in Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin and symbolizes the beginning of black culture in the 1890s with the birth of jazz in New Orleans. Jes Grew reflects the black cultural impulse touted during the Harlem Renaissance that the Western master narrative seeks to destroy. The Wallflower Order, which symbolizes the Ivy League, personifies Western domination. LaBas captures the leader of the Wallflower Order and takes him to Haiti for a vaudou trial. The conflict is not resolved in the novel but ends with LaBas giving a lecture in the academy about the Harlem Renaissance. In Mumbo Jumbo, Reed draws upon storytelling practices, Egyptian myth, Haitian vaudou, and black history in order to critique Western and black literary traditions.

TONI CADE BAMBARA'S THE SALT EATERS

Toni Cade Bambara writes of the genesis of her novel The Salt Eaters, “I began with such a simple story line—to investigate possible ways to bring our technicians of the sacred and our guerillas together.”³⁷ Seeking a narrative voice for the novel, Bambara tried a tree and rain but settled on a medium through whom the story is told. Bambara's novel reflects her concern with the survival of the community and her belief that communal healing must start with the individual.

Bambara was born Toni Cade in 1939 in New York City, to Helen Brent Henderson Cade. Bambara is the surname her grandmother adopted, and which Bambara decided to assume as well. Following her undergraduate work in English and theater at Queens College, Bambara earned a master's degree in African literature at the City College of New York. She worked as a teacher, social worker, and occupational therapist, among other jobs, before editing two literary volumes in 1970 and 1971. Tales and Stories for Black Folks (1971) introduced several of Bambara's short stories, and demonstrated her facility with black language and her recognition of the functional character of the black folk tradition. She incorporated those values into her first novel, The Salt Eaters.

The present moment of the novel is a two-hour period during which Minnie Ransom attempts to spiritually heal Velma Henry, who has suffered a nervous breakdown. The community of Claybourne, Georgia, has gathered in the community center to observe the healing. The novel flashes back to moments in the lives of the participants and the observers as their thoughts wander during the ritual. Set in 1977, the novel shows African Americans in a state of flux. They had rehearsed the revolution during the Civil Rights Movement and must now engage in a time of reflection as they prepare to do battle in the coming decade.

Velma had been a tireless warrior in the fight for human rights, and thought she had learned the lessons of survival from African-American tradition: “Douglass, Tubman, the slave narratives, the songs, the fables, Delaney, Ida Wells, Blyden, Du Bois, Garvey, the singers, her parents, Malcolm, Coltrane, the poets, her comrades, her godmother, her neighbors, had taught her that.”³⁸ She thought that the movement would be successful, but it was not. She questions the values, strategies, and even the goals of the struggle.

Bambara explains in an essay, “What Is It I Think I'm Doing Anyhow,” that the community separates spiritual and political forces, resulting in imbalance, which prevents the accomplishment of social and political imperatives.³⁹ She does not believe the racial battle that continues to rage is strictly over civil or human rights, but is about the truth. She says, “It's not just the battle over turf and who has the right to utilize resources for whomsoever's benefit. The war is also being fought over the truth: what is the truth about human nature, about the human potential.”⁴⁰ According to Bambara, restoring the balance and continuing the war to reclaim “truth” from the myth of “Western Civilization” means recognizing the unity or interconnectedness of all knowledge. All warriors must come to the realization that Campbell discovers in the novel; he “knew in a glowing moment that all the systems were the same at base—voodoo, thermodynamics, I Ching, astrology, numerology, alchemy, metaphysics, everybody's myths” (210).

Velma's fractured self mirrors the fragmentation of the community, and Minne, the salt eater, can heal both the individual and the collective. The salt eaters were people who practiced folk medicine and used salt as a cure for snakebites. Additionally, the flying African tale holds that the salt-eating Africans were those who had the power of flight. As such, Minne holds the key to Velma's healing and freedom. When Velma recognizes the connectedness of all things and accepts responsibility not only for herself but also for all others, she will regain spiritual balance. Likewise, all those who observe the healing—those watching inside the community center and those reading the novel—can achieve balance by accepting the same West-African derived spiritual beliefs.

GLORIA NAYLOR'S MAMA DAY

Henry Louis Gates Jr. suggests that “perhaps no author has been more immersed in the formal history of the African-American literary tradition than Gloria Naylor.”⁴¹ He cites her undergraduate study in African-American literature at Brooklyn College and her graduate work in Afro-American studies at Yale. A novelist and anthologist, Naylor has gained a reputation as a respected author, having won an American Book Award for The Women of Brewster Place, a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship, and a Guggenheim fellowship.

Naylor was born to Roosevelt and Alberta McAlpin Naylor in 1950 in New York City. After graduating from high school, she became a Jehovah's Witness and traveled the South for seven years. She returned to New York in 1975 to study nursing, but soon left Medgar Evers College and the medical field to study English at Brooklyn College. Naylor began her writing career with The Women of Brewster Place, published in 1982.

Mama Day (1988), Naylor's third novel, is a re-working of Shakespeare's The Tempest. While Naylor takes the Bard of Avon as her literary source, Mama Day's magical powers are rooted in Africa. Miranda, called Mama Day, is the matriarch of the Day family and presides over a closed community of African Americans who inhabit Willow Springs, an island off the coasts of South Carolina and Georgia. The descendants of slaves, Willow Springs's inhabitants are separated from mainland values by a tenuous bridge. Mama Day's niece Cocoa crosses over the bridge and moves for a brief while to New York. There she meets George who epitomizes rationality and restraint. He sharply contrasts Cocoa's sensual approach to the world.

The central theme of the novel is the contrast between “mainside” and “the other place” thinking. George has confidence in science, logic, and self-sufficiency. He does not dwell in the past and will not disappoint himself with expectations for the future. The one thing that he can depend on is football. It is something tangible in which he can believe, some place where he can feel that he belongs. George explains how the crowd becomes “a single living organism—one pulse, one heart-beat, one throat.”⁴²

Cocoa's vision is centered in Mama Day's world. Across the bridge in “the other place,” Mama Day has confidence in the spiritual and natural worlds. She reads the signs of nature and harvests its gifts for healing and protection. She believes in family and community and understands the intricate relationships among people and with nature. The novel makes the choice between these worldviews a matter of life and death. When Cocoa's life is in danger, George must choose to believe in the unseen or sacrifice himself. The meaning of his sacrifice becomes clear in Naylor's following novel, Bailey's Cafe; however, in Mama Day the author is suggesting that the folk beliefs that tie one to a sense of community and place are life sustaining.

Notes

1. Zora Neale Hurston, “My People, My People!,” in Zora Neale Hurston: Folklore, Memoirs, and Other Writings, edited by Cheryl A. Wall (New York: The Library of America, 1995), 773-81.

2. Ralph Ellison, “Change the Joke and Slip the Yoke,” Partisan Review 25, no. 2 (spring 1958): 214-22, reprinted in his Shadow and Act (New York: Random House, 1964).

3. The Journal of American Folk-Lore, 1, no. 1 (1888): 1.

4. William W. Newell, “Myths of Voodoo Worship and Child Sacrifice in Hayti,” The Journal of American Folk-Lore 1, no. 1 (1888): 16-30.

5. Newbell Niles Puckett, “Race Pride and Folklore,” in Opportunity: A Journal of Negro Life 4, no. 39 (1926): 82-4, reprinted in Mother Wit from the Laughing Barrel: Readings in the Interpretation of Afro-American Folklore, edited by Alan Dundes (New York: Garland Publishing, Inc., 1981), 3-8.

6. Puckett, 4. Italics in the original.

7. Although Manichean refers to a syncretic dualistic religious philosophy, it is used in postcolonial criticism to address the dualistic philosophy of assigning oppositional characteristics to the colonizer and the colonized in order to support domination. For a thorough discussion of the concept, see Abdul R. JanMohamed, “The Economy of Manichean Allegory: The Function of Racial Difference in Colonialist Literature,” Critical Inquiry 12, no. 1 (1985): 59-87.

8. Patrick B. Mullen, “Belief and the American Folk,” Journal of American Folklore 113, no. 448 (spring 2000): 119-43.

9. Zora Neale Hurston, “Seeing the World as It Is,” in Folklore, Memoirs, and Other Writings, edited by Cheryl A. Wall (New York: The Library of America, 1995), 782-95.

10. Hurston, Mules and Men (New York: Lippincott, Inc., 1935).

11. Quoted in Hemenway, 212.

12. Arthur Huff Fauset, “American Negro Folk Literature,” in The New Negro, edited by Alain Locke (New York: Albert & Charles Boni, Inc., 1925), reprinted (New York: Macmillan Publishing Company, 1992).

13. Sterling A. Brown, “The Approach of the Creative Artist,” in Journal of American Folklore 59 (October-December): 506.

14. Richard Wright, “Blueprint for Negro Writing,” in Within the Circle: An Anthology of African American Literary Criticism from the Harlem Renaissance to the Present, edited by Angelyn Mitchell (Durham: Duke University Press, 1994): 97-106.

15. Ibid.

16. Studs Terkel, “An Interview with James Baldwin,” in Conversations with James Baldwin, edited by Fred L. Standley and Louis H. Pratt (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1989): 3-23.

17. John W. Roberts, “‘… hidden right out in the open’; The Field of Folklore and the Problem of Invisibility; 1998 American Folklore Society Presidential Address,” in Journal of American Folklore 112, no. 444 (spring 1999): 119-39.

18. Addison Gayle Jr., “Cultural Strangulation: Black Literature and the White Aesthetic,” in Within the Circle: An Anthology of African American Literary Criticism from the Harlem Renaissance to the Present, edited by Angelyn Mitchell (Durham: Duke University Press, 1994), 207-12.

19. Larry Neal, “The Black Arts Movement,” in Within the Circle: An Anthology of African American Literary Criticism from the Harlem Renaissance to the Present, edited by Angelyn Mitchell (Durham: Duke University Press, 1994), 184-98.

20. LeRoi Jones (Amiri Baraka), “The Myth of a Negro Literature,” in Within the Circle: An Anthology of African American Literary Criticism from the Harlem Renaissance to the Present, edited by Angelyn Mitchell (Durham: Duke University Press, 1994), 165-71.

21. Imanmu Amiri Baraka, Black Magic: Collected Poetry, 1961-1967 (New York: Bobbs-Merrill, 1969).

22. John W. Roberts, 132.

23. John W. Roberts, 134.

24. Henry Louis Gates Jr., “Preface to Blackness: Text and Pretext,” in Within the Circle: An Anthology of African American Literary Criticism from the Harlem Renaissance to the Present, edited by Angelyn Mitchell (Durham: Duke University Press, 1994), 235-55.

25. Steve S. Swann, Folklore and Literature in the United States: An Annotated Bibliography of Studies of Folklore in American Literature (New York: Garland Publishing, 1984).

26. Richard Dorson, “The Career of ‘John Henry,’” in Mother Wit from the Laughing Barrel: Readings in the Interpretation of Afro-American Folklore (New York: Garland Publishing, 1981), 568-77.

27. Ellison, “Change the Joke, Slip the Yoke,” 214.

28. Quoted in Alan Dundes, “African Tales among the North American Indians,” in Mother Wit from the Laughing Barrel: Readings in the Interpretation of Afro-American Folklore (New York: Garland Publishing, Inc., 1981), 114-25.

29. Roger Abrahams, “Playing the Dozens,” in Mother Wit from the Laughing Barrel: Readings in the Interpretation of Afro-American Folklore, edited by Alan Dundes (New York: Garland Publishing, Inc., 1981), 295-310.

30. Quoted in David Bradley, “Looking Behind Cane,” in Afro-American Writing Today: An Anniversary Issue of the Southern Review, edited by James Olney (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1985).

31. Quoted in John F. Callahan, “‘By de Singin’ ud de Song': The Search for Reciprocal Voice in Cane,” in In the African-American Grain: Call and Response in Twentieth-Century Black Fiction (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1988), 62-114.

32. Quoted in Arthur P. Davis, From the Dark Tower: Afro-American Writers 1900-1960 (Washington, DC: Howard University Press, 1981).

33. Arnold Rampersad, “Langston Hughes,” in African American Writers: Profiles of their Lives and Works—from the 1700s to the Present, edited by Valerie Smith, Lea Baechler, and A. Walton Litz (New York: Collier Books, 1991), 163-74.

34. Susan L. Blake, “Old John in Harlem: The Urban Folktales of Langston Hughes,” in Langston Hughes: Critical Perspectives Past and Present, edited by Henry Louis Gates Jr. and K. A. Appiah (New York: Amistad Press, Inc., 1993), 205-21.

35. Houston A. Baker Jr., “There Is No More Beautiful Way: Theory and the Poetics of Afro-American Women's Writing,” in Afro-American Literary Study in the 1990s, coedited with Patricia Redmond, (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989), 135-63.

36. Henry Louis Gates Jr., “Ishmael Reed,” in African American Writers: Profiles of their Lives and Works—from the 1700s to the Present, edited by Valerie Smith, Lea Baechler, and A. Walton Litz (New York: Collier Books, 1991), 278-94.

37. Claudia Tate, “Toni Cade Bambara,” in Black Women Writers at Work (New York: Continuum, 1983), 12-38.

38. Toni Cade Bambara, The Salt Eaters (New York: Random House, 1980).

39. Bambara, “What It Is I Think I'm Doing Anyhow,” in The Writer on Her Work, edited by Janet Sternburg (New York: Norton, 1980).

40. Tate, 17.

41. Henry Louis Gates Jr., Gloria Naylor: Critical Perspectives Past and Present, coedited with K. A. Appiah (New York: Amistad, 1993).

42. Gloria Naylor, Mama Day (New York: Ticknor & Fields, 1988).

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