Every Tongue Got to Confess Read Free

corn gossips in a cemetery; mules, alligators, horses, dogs, flies, cows, converse or sing. Language resides in the boundless sea of Great Time. One summer words frozen during a particularly severe winter thaw and suddenly the air is filled, like the air of Prospero’s enchanted island, with ghostly voices.
    Language is treacherous, the tales school us. Interpretation, translation of words, leads to dangerous misapprehensions or not-so-funny comic predicaments, such as one slave bragging to another that he got away with looking at Ole Missus’ drawers and the second slave receiving a painful thumping when he tries to look at Ole Missus’ drawers when they’re not hanging on the clothesline but wrapping her behind. The tales warn us that anyone speaking must be eternally vigilant and circumspect. For one thing, tattlers’ ears are everywhere and always open. Even a prayer is liable to interception and subversion.
    Once there was a Negroness. Every day he went under the hill to pray. So one day a white man went to see what he was doing. He was praying for God to kill all the white people; so the white man threw a brick on his head. The Negro said, “Lord can’t you tell a white man from a Negro?”
    A master’s penchant for extravagant metaphorical overkill in his speech is satirized by a slave who transposes the master’s style into an equally fanciful rhyming vernacular version and fires it back at him, “You better git outa yo’ flowery beds uh ease, an put on yo’ flying trapeze, cause yo’ red ball uh simmons done carried yo’ flame uh flapperation tuh yo’ high tall mountain.”
    “What you say, Jack?”
    The problematic relationship between oral and written is documented playfully in a tale quoting an illiterate father who chides his educated daughter because she can’t write down in the letter he’s dictating a mule-calling sound he clucks.
    Is you got dat down yit?
    Naw sir, I aint’ got it yit?
    How come you ain’t got it?
    Cause I can’t spell (clucking sound).
    You mean tuh tell me you been off tuh school seven years and can’t spell (clucking sound)? Well, I could almost spell dat myself.
    Thus these narratives from the southern states instruct us that talk functions in African-American communities as it does in Zora Neale Hurston’s fiction and life—as a means of having fun, getting serious, establishing credibility and consensus, securing identity, negotiating survival, keeping hope alive, suffering and celebrating the power language bestows.
     
    —J OHN E DGAR W IDEMAN

Negro
Folk-tales
from the
Gulf States

Why God Made Adam Last †
    God wuz through makin’ de lan’ an’ de sea an’ de birds an’ de animals an’ de fishes an’ de trees befo’ He made man. He wuz intendin’ tuh make ’im all along, but He put it off tuh de last cause if He had uh made Adam fust an’ let him see Him makin’ all dese other things, when Eve wuz made Adam would of stood round braggin’ tuh her. He would of said: “Eve, do you see dat ole stripe-ed tagger (tiger) over dere? Ah made. See dat ole narrow geraffe (giraffe) over dere? Ah made ’im too. See dat big ole tree over dere? Ah made dat jus’ so you could set under it.”
    God knowed all dat, so He jus’ waited till everything wuz finished before he made man, cause He knows man will lie and brag on hisself tuh uh woman. Man ain’t found out yet how things wuz made—he ain’t meant tuh know.
    —J AMES P RESLEY.
     
    When God first put folks on earth there wasn’t no difference between men and women. They was all alike. They did de same work and everything. De man got tired uh fussin ’bout who gointer do this and who gointer do that.
    So he went up tuh God and ast him tuh give him power over de woman so dat he could rule her and stop all dat arguin’.
    He ast Him tuh give him a lil mo’ strength and he’d do de heavy work and let de woman jus’ take orders from him whut to do. He tole Him he wouldn’t mind doing de heavy