"Big 'Fraid and Little 'Fraid": An Afro-American Folk Tale.

Minton's work will be of value to scholars interested in the debate over the origins of African American tales. This already limited audience, however, will be further confined by the very specific folkloric emphasis of the discussion and analysis. The main task of the book is deconstructing the argument of scholars who have insisted on the European origin of most African American tales, and proposing a more reliable methodology for establishing their African or African American derivations. In particular, the author is concerned with the life history of one tale, "Big 'Fraid and Little 'Fraid." This tale can be summarized as follows: (1) A man decides to frighten another by dressing in a sheet; (2) his pet monkey imitates him by also putting on a sheet and following him; (3) the man hears his intended victim say, "Run Big 'Fraid, run; Little 'Fraid'll get you"; and (4) the man sees the monkey in the sheet, is frightened, and runs.

Folklorists concerned with the problematics of Stith Thompson's "motifs" and "tale types" might also find this monograph engaging, for in many ways this is a secondary area that receives as much attention as the primary one. This "secondary" concern preoccupies Minton in the first half of the book and remains a central issue throughout. The author notes an inherent weakness of the historic-geographic method - the impreciseness of its key elements, tale types and motifs. He then focuses on this shortcoming to discredit the suggestions of researchers who have relied upon this method in arguing for the European origin of African American tales. In his convincing criticism of "types" and "motifs" as vague and intuitive constructs, another sentiment is revealed (although not fully developed). The author feels that these key concepts should be further engaged, revised, and clarified by modern scholars, and he laments that this is not being done. Thus a nostalgia for an earlier period of more text-related, folkloric scholarship pervades the work.

Another curious aspect of the book is the author's historical perspective on African American narrative research. He asserts that this is "the last area in American folk narrative research where origins remain a fundamental concern" (9). This is certainly questionable, and in fact no serious work has been devoted to this issue since roughly 1977, the most recent publication date of works discussed by Minton. The text that precipitated this debate, Dorson's American Negro Folktales, was published in 1967. Moreover, scholars who addressed this issue in the 1960s and 1970s (e.g., Alan Dundes and Steven Jones) are referred to here as "Afro-Americanists," although there is no evidence that they ever considered themselves as such: Their contributions to this area represent brief departures from their other scholarly interests. The core essays that are cited appeared in one edited work, African Folklore in the New World, and would best be considered a rare but fortunate moment; however, these articles are certainly not, as one might infer from Minton's perspective, a part of some consistent and ongoing body of research on the topic.

A number of bibliographic oversights adds further to the dubious nature of Minton's central arguments. A glaring omission is the work of William Bascom, who is perhaps the only scholar whose life's work was directly involved with origins of New World African narratives. In his historic-geographic study of "The Talking Skull that Refuses to Talk," Bascom addresses many of the same concerns that Minton does, and it is unimaginable that the author would not include this landmark article in his thesis. One also wonders about the exclusion of context-based research on African American narratives that has been done in the last twenty years. Do such obvious oversights suggest that contextual studies are not relevant to historic-geographic research? Analysis in chapters eight and nine, in which motifs in the tale are related to cultural symbols, would suggest that the author does not believe this. The reader must then look elsewhere for explanations, none of which speak well for the author. Such oversights, in combination with the questionable currency of the scholarly debate upon which the book is based, serve to discredit its argumentative foundation.

One may be led to believe from the introductory chapters of the book that a more context-related discussion is soon to follow. The severe critique of the customary method of tracing narrative origins, which extends to previous studies on either side of the debate, prepares the reader for some radical departure from those studies. Although subsequent analysis does include a consideration of social and cultural elements, the emphasis on historic-geographic methodology remains a major focus, and, in fact, this becomes one of the disconcerting things about the book. While the author is essentially debunking the historic-geographic or "Finnish" method, he is at the same time legitimating its basic tenets in his own thesis. So each assertion made about the tale under discussion is validated by an analysis of motifs and tales from this perspective. For example, the conclusion that perhaps the character of monkey in this tale suggests a link with other animals in African American culture of the South is derived through a lengthy discussion of motifs, types, and subtypes from Anglo-American, Creole, French Canadian, British, and African traditions.

The consideration of monkey represents the point at which the book begins seriously to address social context as an important element in the search for narrative, motif, and type origins, and is the perhaps the book's most important contribution. In chapter eight, the author engages the link between several societal symbols and motifs in the tale. The tale is placed in the context of the very old "night rider" genre of narratives that depict the efforts of whites to intimidate African Americans by dressing as ghosts. A second issue connects the monkey in "Big 'Fraid and Little 'Fraid" to other animal tricksters in the African American tradition such as Brer Rabbit and the later "Signifying Monkey." With these elements in mind, the tale can be read as a commentary on interracial tensions, just as many other African American narratives have been. The monkey's cultural role as signifier is discussed briefly, along with a short mention of the trope of signifying in the black community. This adds yet another dimension to the reading of the tale. The monkey's imitation can be seen as commentary on two aspects of white society: its belief that African Americans wanted nothing more than to copy whites, and the derogatory tradition of white imitation of blacks - e.g., minstrelsy.

This part of the discussion would have benefited from further development. Numerous studies address the trope of signifying, and Lawrence Levine's work on African American folklore focuses extensively on the meanings and functions of tales in the black tradition, from the period of slavery through more contemporary times. Consideration of context-based studies of narratives could have helped what is now a briefly covered, hypothetical concept become a richer and more convincing argument. The author could also have included some discussion of the contexts from which some of his textual examples are taken: It is difficult to believe that none of them offered any such information.

One conclusion of the book is that the tale "Big 'Fraid and Little 'Fraid" is of African American origin, a contention supported by the analysis of social context as an essential interpretive element. Another is that no one theory can be applied to the question of African American tale origins, that each tale must be considered separately rather than, as scholarly tradition suggests, making general statements about an entire tale corpus.

This work will probably have little appeal to those outside the field of folklore or to readers who are not especially interested in historically based narrative research. Readers looking for analysis of tales within African American culture would be better served to consider earlier works by authors such as Lawrence Levine or Gladys-Marie Fry. While folklorists will find Minton's work of more interest than will the general reader or scholars from other fields, they will note that it breaks no new ground, and they may ponder its theoretical underpinnings, which seem somewhat removed from current research.

Reviewed by Sw. Anand Prahlad University of Missouri-Columbia