Gullah Folktales from the Georgia Coast

by Charles Colcock Jones Jr., Susan Millar Williams (Foreword by)

In 1888, Charles Colcock Jones Jr. published the first collection of folk narratives from the Gullah-speaking people of the South Atlantic coast, tales he heard black servants exchange on his family's rice and cotton plantation. It has been out of print and largely unavailable until now.

Jones saw the stories as a coastal variation of Joel Chandler Harris's inland dialect tales and sought to preserve their unique language and character. Through Jones' rendering of the sound and syntax of nineteenth-century Gullah, the lively stories describe the adventures and mishaps of such characters as "Buh Rabbit," "Buh Ban-Yad Rooster," and other animals. The tales range from the humorous to the instructional and include stories of the "sperits," Daddy Jupiter's "vision," a dying bullfrog's last wish, and others about how "buh rabbit gained sense" and "why the turkey buzzard won't eat crabs."

Genres: Adult, History

232 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1888

Reviews

[Cathy · Rating 4 out of 5]

Anyone in my age bracket remembers Uncle Remus because of the Disney film Song of the South (remember the song 'When I See an Elephant Fly'?). The Uncle Remus stories were collected from verbal traditions in Georgia after the Civil War by Joel Chandler Harris and became so popular that he enlisted the author of this book, Charles Colcock Jones Jr., to collect even more. Jones had owned slaves and openly supported slavery but he also wanted to preserve the history of the pre-civil war south. I can see why in the 20th century these stories were sometimes seen as demeaning to blacks. I'm not a scholar of folk traditions but I find them (such as De Po Man an de Snake, Chanticleer an de Ban-Yad Rooster) historically interesting and entertaining. They're written in the Gullah dialect which takes a little getting used to plus a glossary. How did a slave living on a barrier island in Georgia come up with a tale that sounds a lot like Chaucer?

[Lindsay · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is so much fun to read aloud. Fuh true.