The Negro Traditions.

Reviewed by Roger Abrahams University of Pennsylvania 

With the development of the blackface minstrel stage, the imitation of African American plantation performances came to be known throughout the world. But after Emancipation a series of documents emerged which cast a strange light on the plantation traditions reported through imitation by whites in blackface. As the jubilee and spiritual singing groups were formed at Hampton, Fisk, Tuskegee, and other such institutions, African Americans themselves attempted to wrest interpretive control over the plantation repertoire. In concerts, real plantation scenes and sketches were developed based in the main on fieldwork carried out by the musical directors or other members of these organizations.

The history of the African American storytelling traditions repeated the pattern a generation later. In the 1880s and '90s, Joel Chandler Harris published collections of plantation stories rendered in local dialects that revealed a large repository of African-derived folk narratives that had been selected by the slaves for retelling to "young marster and mistis." As Harris and his followers described their telling, the stories were translated into objects of nostalgia, representing the familiarity of white and black on antebellum plantations. These collections, and others made by whites, became as popular in their own ways as the minstrel renderings of the lore of enslaved people of African ancestry. And two generations of Negro literary figures and scholars then contended for a control through authenticity of the tales of the ex-slaves: Chesnutt, Dunbar, and, later, Arthur Huff Fauset, Zora Neale Hurston, Thomas W. Talley, and J. Mason Brewer. While Hurston's story has become well-known, the efforts of the other remains forgotten or, at least, obscured.

Talley was widely know in his time through the publication of Negro Folk Rhymes, but his story collection remained unpublished until the issuance of the volume under review. What the publication reveals is a compelling set of stories, strung together in short-story format, and told within a literary context that permits the introduction of a great deal of other sorts of lore (proverbs, short songs, folk beliefs and practices, quips, verbal battles, and other such characteristic forms). It is a treasure trove of basic material, engagingly rendered.

This major work by the important early twentieth-century African American collector Thomas W. Talley, completed in 1923, has never before been brought to print. In retrospect, it is not difficult to understand why this may have happened. The book is made up of a series of short stories, each of which provides a conversational setting in which the stories are traded in a lively manner. The stories themselves are considerably more complex in construction and in the manner in which they are tied together at each end than any collection to that point, indicating Talley's strong hand in conflation and elaboration of traditional tales. They were in the form of stories in dialect, but the general audience for literature in this form had diminished by the mid-twenties, as American readers were made aware of the racist implications of the earlier popular books.

Talley introduces his technique of rendering the stories by making a distinction between "the ordinary Negro story" and "the Negro Tradition." "The little settings given to the individual Traditions," he continues, "are the writers' own handiwork, but the Traditions themselves are the products of the Negro masses and their ancestors" (xxv). While the author was extraordinarily clever in his development within the constraints of ordinary orthography to get dialect features just right, and while his perspective is not that distant from those pursuing Afrocentric arguments today, his angle on the subject is severely dated. By the twenties, both linguistic anthropologists and folklorists of a more ethnographic bent had developed criteria of reportage that discounted the "authenticity" of these composite texts given without attribution to actual informants. Perhaps even more importantly, even an audience that had been reared on Uncle Remus and the poetry of Dunbar would find it difficult to sight-read these tales.

The book will be compared to Hurston's Mules and Men. Hurston was a considerably more adept writer, always taking the limitations of the reader into account in delivering to us her barrage of talk and stories within a setting responding to the dictates of the realistic literature of the day. The "little settings" of Talley, while effective in now one story and now another, in toto fail to convey the vibrancy and tangy flavor of the great storytelling world found throughout Afro-America. On the other hand, the stories he reports offer a unique blend of African and European folktale ideas that, if collected from actual storytellers, reveals a much more extensive repertoire than that given us by Hurston or the other African American collectors of the first third of this century.

While the editors have provided us with some useful information concerning the history of the manuscript, as well as its place in Talley's life and in the history of books in the same genre, they have not been able to provide the kind of editorial apparatus that allows us to read and understand the tales in their context. They fail to subscribe to any of the criteria by which scholarship in the area is commonly judged. Their remarks are of the neither-fish-nor-fowl sort. The bibliographical and comparative notes are sketchy in the extreme. The overview of the recent performance-centered perspectives on African American tale-telling traditions is awkwardly cast, buried in jargon derived from a number of critical traditions, none of them really germane to the stories or the materials. Most reprehensible, there is no index or other apparatus to assist the more than casual reader in working in other ways with these texts. Finding one's way back into the collection after an initial reading can be a frustrating experience.

Perhaps some reader of African American Review will take the time to go through the work and provide this kind of assistance to those scholars - and there will be many - who will want to carry out more intensive or extensive work in the traditions and the materials reported here. Equally needed is a recounting of the history of the manuscript. For a number of years, scholars have known of its existence, and of the difficulties faced by editors working in the face of the heirs of Thomas W. Talley, who, by all reports have not served his memory well.