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Every Tongue Got to Confess: Negro Folk-tales from the Gulf States
Every Tongue Got to Confess is an extensive volume of African American folklore that Zora Neale Hurston collected on her travels through the Gulf States in the late 1920s.The bittersweet and often hilarious tales -- which range from longer narratives about God, the Devil, white folk, and mistaken identity to witty one-liners -- reveal attitudes about faith, love, family, slavery, race, and community. Together, this collection of nearly 500 folktales weaves a vibrant tapestry that celebrates African American life in the rural South and represents a major part of Zora Neale Hurston's literary legacy.
320 pages, Paperback
First published November 27, 2001
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2714 people want to read
About the author
Zora Neale Hurston
187 books5,524 followersNovels, including
Their Eyes Were Watching God
(1937), and nonfiction writings of American folklorist Zora Neale Hurston give detailed accounts of African American life in the South.
In 1925, Hurston, one of the leaders of the literary renaissance, happening in Harlem, produced the short-lived literary magazine Fire!! alongside Langston Hughes and Wallace Thurman shortly before she entered Barnard College. This literary movement developed into the Harlem renaissance.
Hurston applied her Barnard ethnographic training to document African American folklore in her critically acclaimed book Mules and Men alongside fiction Their Eyes Were Watching God . She also assembled a folk-based performance dance group that recreated her Southern tableau with one performance on Broadway.
People awarded a Guggenheim fellowship to Hurston to travel to Haiti and conduct research on conjure in 1937. Her significant work ably broke into the secret societies and exposed their use of drugs to create the Vodun trance, also a subject of study for fellow dancer-anthropologist Katherine Dunham, then at the University of Chicago.
In 1954, the Pittsburgh Courier assigned Hurston, unable to sell her fiction, to cover the small-town murder trial of Ruby McCollum, the prosperous black wife of the local lottery racketeer, who had killed a racist white doctor. Hurston also contributed to Woman in the Suwanee County Jail , a book by journalist and civil rights advocate William Bradford Huie.
In 1925, Hurston, one of the leaders of the literary renaissance, happening in Harlem, produced the short-lived literary magazine Fire!! alongside Langston Hughes and Wallace Thurman shortly before she entered Barnard College. This literary movement developed into the Harlem renaissance.
Hurston applied her Barnard ethnographic training to document African American folklore in her critically acclaimed book Mules and Men alongside fiction Their Eyes Were Watching God . She also assembled a folk-based performance dance group that recreated her Southern tableau with one performance on Broadway.
People awarded a Guggenheim fellowship to Hurston to travel to Haiti and conduct research on conjure in 1937. Her significant work ably broke into the secret societies and exposed their use of drugs to create the Vodun trance, also a subject of study for fellow dancer-anthropologist Katherine Dunham, then at the University of Chicago.
In 1954, the Pittsburgh Courier assigned Hurston, unable to sell her fiction, to cover the small-town murder trial of Ruby McCollum, the prosperous black wife of the local lottery racketeer, who had killed a racist white doctor. Hurston also contributed to Woman in the Suwanee County Jail , a book by journalist and civil rights advocate William Bradford Huie.
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February 3, 2026
Every one of the folk tales collected by Zora Neale Hurston for this volume is interesting and thought-provoking. A number of them are humorous. A significant number of them are sad. All of them evoke truths about human existence, in the manner of folk tales throughout the world, even as they examine the historical circumstances and social realities confronting African Americans in the Deep South during the era of segregation.
Hurston, who grew up in Eatonville, Florida -- one of the first U.S. towns chartered and administered by African Americans -- may be best known as a novelist, and particularly as the author of the classic novel Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937). Yet she was also a dedicated student of anthropology, focusing upon African-American folklore during her undergraduate and graduate studies at Barnard College of Columbia University.
Admirers of Hurston’s folkloric work already know her book Mules and Men (1935), a collection of African-American folktales published during Hurston’s lifetime; the book is now widely taught, particularly in classes that focus on folklore or on ethnographic research. But Every Tongue Got to Confess, not published until 2001, offers Hurston’s readers something new.
A helpful introduction by Hurston scholar Carla Kaplan explains how this manuscript came to be discovered in the archives of the Smithsonian Institution, and situates the work within the larger context of Hurston’s oeuvre. And a foreword by John Edgar Wideman – like Hurston, a writer who has excelled as an author of both creative and scholarly work – is particularly helpful in discussing how “talk functions in African-American communities as it does in Zora Neale Hurston’s 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” (p. xx).
Every Tongue Got to Confess was not the original title of this volume. The work’s initial title, Negro Folk-Tales from the Gulf States, might have been acceptable as a title for a scholarly dissertation back in the 1930’s, but would not be suitable today; accordingly, a key phrase from one of the folktales collected by Hurston during her travels through the Deep South – a tale in which a preacher tells his congregation, “Every tongue got to confess; everybody got to stand in judgment for theyself; every tub got to stand on its own bottom” (p. 30) – is used as the title.
The statement from the preacher in this folktale emphasizes the idea that language needs to be truthful, that each person is the ultimate judge of his or her own actions, that one must take one’s own stand as a free moral agent in a world of ambiguity. At the same time, in the best folkloric tradition, Hurston shows how folklore reminds its listeners not to take themselves too seriously; one petite woman in the preacher’s congregation responds to his exhortation that “every tub got to stand on its own bottom” by saying, “Lordy, make my bottom wider” (p. 30).
The folktales are divided up by category: preacher tales, devil tales, witch tales, tall tales, mistaken identity tales, fool tales, woman tales, school tales, talking animal tales. I was particularly moved by the tales of the cultural hero John; set during slavery times, these folktales tell how an enslaved man named John uses his wits to outwit the slaveholder, and to help other enslaved people.
Readers who want more culturally authentic versions of the African-American "animal folktales" relayed by the white Georgia writer Joel Chandler Harris in books like Uncle Remus (1881) will find them here. As in Harris's work, the rabbit, which must rely on speed and guile to survive, prevails by outwitting larger, more powerful, predatory adversaries like the bear and the fox -- in a storytelling tradition that looks back to West Africa. Here, however, the stories are told with a dignity and a simplicity that I much prefer to Harris's, shall we say, broader seeking of comic effect:
[Brother Fox] said that he was going to play like he was dead and he knew if Brother Rabbit knew he was dead they could catch him. He sent one of them after Brother Rabbit. He came up and looked at Brother Fox and shook his head and said the latest style was, if a man is dead, he would turn over, and Brother Fox turned over. Brother Rabbit said that that was a lie, as no dead man could turn over, and he left. (p. 251)
There is a measure of wish-fulfillment in some of these tales; and at the same time there are many grim reminders of the cruelty and brutality of Deep South racism -- whether in antebellum slavery times, or in the early-20th-century segregation era when Hurston was collecting these folktales. Characteristic in that regard is this short tale: “In Mississippi a black horse run away with a white lady. When they caught the horse they lynched him, and they hung the harness and burnt the buggy” (p. 110).
One feature of Every Tongue Got to Confess that may not work well for modern readers is the way in which Hurston, for some of these tales, uses phonetic misspellings to convey dialect: “wuz” for “was,” “dat” for “that,” “uh” for “a,” and so on. An example of that sort of dialect transcription occurs in a section on "Mosquito and Gnat Tales," wherein Hurston shares a collection of short folktales from various informants, all of them providing creative exaggerations of the (real enough) voracity and ferocity of Gulf Coast mosquitoes. One of Hurston's informants, William Richardson, is quoted as recounting that "we had some tin suits tuh keep de skeeters off an' they went off an' fetched back can openers an' got us jus' de same" (p. 154).
Another example of such transcription occurs in a tale shared by Eliza Austin -- the story of a man who is struck by a woman's beauty, courts and marries her, and learns only on their wedding night that she wears a wig, false teeth, an artificial arm, an artificial leg, and a glass eye: "He was so put out he didn't know whut to do. He looked at all her parts strowed around and he looked at de woman in de bed. He tole her, 'I don't know whether to git in de bed wid dat half of yuh or to sit up wid de rest'" (p. 204).
These tales provide, to be sure, fun examples of folkloric exaggeration (mosquitoes with can openers!). And such phonetic “transcriptions” of dialect were a popular feature of the “local-color” literature that was popular in post-Civil War America. But most of that literature has not aged well; Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1885) is one of the few such works that are still widely read today. As a number of commentators have pointed out, if a writer wants to convey the way a rural Southerner might say “I’ll be dogged,” it can work better to write not “Ah’ll be dawged!” but rather “I be dog.” It captures the idea of the person speaking in dialect, without the patronizing quality that the elaborate misspellings provide. In that regard, Every Tongue Got to Confess is sometimes a book of its time.
It is also worth noting that Every Tongue Got to Confess does not try to provide any sort of interpretive synthesis of the larger meaning of the folktales; rather, Hurston provides us with the folktales, and that is that. Where Hurston in Mules and Men provided a framing introduction, and situated the folktales in a first-person narrative of the Florida and Louisiana travels through which she gathered the tales, there is none of that in Every Tongue. The folktales speak for themselves. Perhaps that is as it should be.
I re-read Every Tongue Got to Confess on a family trip to the Florida Gulf Coast. If one is on the coast at, say, Fort Walton Beach or Destin or Panama City Beach, one has a definite sense of being among the kind of beach-resort culture that is much the same across the country. Yet one does not have to go very far north from the coast before gaining a sense of being within the kind of rural Florida setting that nourished Hurston’s creative imagination. It was easy for me to imagine Hurston driving the narrow roads, making her way from one small town or sawmill or turpentine camp to another, building rapport with suspicious informants, facing fearlessly the dangers attendant upon being an African-American woman alone in the Jim Crow South. What a courageous individual. And what a legacy she left us.
Every Tongue Got to Confess, like Mules and Men before it, benefits from Hurston’s gift for conveying the nuances of language, character, and story. For admirers of Hurston’s work, and for students of folklore, African-American culture, and Southern culture, Every Tongue Got to Confess provides a powerful and evocative reading experience.
Hurston, who grew up in Eatonville, Florida -- one of the first U.S. towns chartered and administered by African Americans -- may be best known as a novelist, and particularly as the author of the classic novel Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937). Yet she was also a dedicated student of anthropology, focusing upon African-American folklore during her undergraduate and graduate studies at Barnard College of Columbia University.
Admirers of Hurston’s folkloric work already know her book Mules and Men (1935), a collection of African-American folktales published during Hurston’s lifetime; the book is now widely taught, particularly in classes that focus on folklore or on ethnographic research. But Every Tongue Got to Confess, not published until 2001, offers Hurston’s readers something new.
A helpful introduction by Hurston scholar Carla Kaplan explains how this manuscript came to be discovered in the archives of the Smithsonian Institution, and situates the work within the larger context of Hurston’s oeuvre. And a foreword by John Edgar Wideman – like Hurston, a writer who has excelled as an author of both creative and scholarly work – is particularly helpful in discussing how “talk functions in African-American communities as it does in Zora Neale Hurston’s 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” (p. xx).
Every Tongue Got to Confess was not the original title of this volume. The work’s initial title, Negro Folk-Tales from the Gulf States, might have been acceptable as a title for a scholarly dissertation back in the 1930’s, but would not be suitable today; accordingly, a key phrase from one of the folktales collected by Hurston during her travels through the Deep South – a tale in which a preacher tells his congregation, “Every tongue got to confess; everybody got to stand in judgment for theyself; every tub got to stand on its own bottom” (p. 30) – is used as the title.
The statement from the preacher in this folktale emphasizes the idea that language needs to be truthful, that each person is the ultimate judge of his or her own actions, that one must take one’s own stand as a free moral agent in a world of ambiguity. At the same time, in the best folkloric tradition, Hurston shows how folklore reminds its listeners not to take themselves too seriously; one petite woman in the preacher’s congregation responds to his exhortation that “every tub got to stand on its own bottom” by saying, “Lordy, make my bottom wider” (p. 30).
The folktales are divided up by category: preacher tales, devil tales, witch tales, tall tales, mistaken identity tales, fool tales, woman tales, school tales, talking animal tales. I was particularly moved by the tales of the cultural hero John; set during slavery times, these folktales tell how an enslaved man named John uses his wits to outwit the slaveholder, and to help other enslaved people.
Readers who want more culturally authentic versions of the African-American "animal folktales" relayed by the white Georgia writer Joel Chandler Harris in books like Uncle Remus (1881) will find them here. As in Harris's work, the rabbit, which must rely on speed and guile to survive, prevails by outwitting larger, more powerful, predatory adversaries like the bear and the fox -- in a storytelling tradition that looks back to West Africa. Here, however, the stories are told with a dignity and a simplicity that I much prefer to Harris's, shall we say, broader seeking of comic effect:
[Brother Fox] said that he was going to play like he was dead and he knew if Brother Rabbit knew he was dead they could catch him. He sent one of them after Brother Rabbit. He came up and looked at Brother Fox and shook his head and said the latest style was, if a man is dead, he would turn over, and Brother Fox turned over. Brother Rabbit said that that was a lie, as no dead man could turn over, and he left. (p. 251)
There is a measure of wish-fulfillment in some of these tales; and at the same time there are many grim reminders of the cruelty and brutality of Deep South racism -- whether in antebellum slavery times, or in the early-20th-century segregation era when Hurston was collecting these folktales. Characteristic in that regard is this short tale: “In Mississippi a black horse run away with a white lady. When they caught the horse they lynched him, and they hung the harness and burnt the buggy” (p. 110).
One feature of Every Tongue Got to Confess that may not work well for modern readers is the way in which Hurston, for some of these tales, uses phonetic misspellings to convey dialect: “wuz” for “was,” “dat” for “that,” “uh” for “a,” and so on. An example of that sort of dialect transcription occurs in a section on "Mosquito and Gnat Tales," wherein Hurston shares a collection of short folktales from various informants, all of them providing creative exaggerations of the (real enough) voracity and ferocity of Gulf Coast mosquitoes. One of Hurston's informants, William Richardson, is quoted as recounting that "we had some tin suits tuh keep de skeeters off an' they went off an' fetched back can openers an' got us jus' de same" (p. 154).
Another example of such transcription occurs in a tale shared by Eliza Austin -- the story of a man who is struck by a woman's beauty, courts and marries her, and learns only on their wedding night that she wears a wig, false teeth, an artificial arm, an artificial leg, and a glass eye: "He was so put out he didn't know whut to do. He looked at all her parts strowed around and he looked at de woman in de bed. He tole her, 'I don't know whether to git in de bed wid dat half of yuh or to sit up wid de rest'" (p. 204).
These tales provide, to be sure, fun examples of folkloric exaggeration (mosquitoes with can openers!). And such phonetic “transcriptions” of dialect were a popular feature of the “local-color” literature that was popular in post-Civil War America. But most of that literature has not aged well; Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1885) is one of the few such works that are still widely read today. As a number of commentators have pointed out, if a writer wants to convey the way a rural Southerner might say “I’ll be dogged,” it can work better to write not “Ah’ll be dawged!” but rather “I be dog.” It captures the idea of the person speaking in dialect, without the patronizing quality that the elaborate misspellings provide. In that regard, Every Tongue Got to Confess is sometimes a book of its time.
It is also worth noting that Every Tongue Got to Confess does not try to provide any sort of interpretive synthesis of the larger meaning of the folktales; rather, Hurston provides us with the folktales, and that is that. Where Hurston in Mules and Men provided a framing introduction, and situated the folktales in a first-person narrative of the Florida and Louisiana travels through which she gathered the tales, there is none of that in Every Tongue. The folktales speak for themselves. Perhaps that is as it should be.
I re-read Every Tongue Got to Confess on a family trip to the Florida Gulf Coast. If one is on the coast at, say, Fort Walton Beach or Destin or Panama City Beach, one has a definite sense of being among the kind of beach-resort culture that is much the same across the country. Yet one does not have to go very far north from the coast before gaining a sense of being within the kind of rural Florida setting that nourished Hurston’s creative imagination. It was easy for me to imagine Hurston driving the narrow roads, making her way from one small town or sawmill or turpentine camp to another, building rapport with suspicious informants, facing fearlessly the dangers attendant upon being an African-American woman alone in the Jim Crow South. What a courageous individual. And what a legacy she left us.
Every Tongue Got to Confess, like Mules and Men before it, benefits from Hurston’s gift for conveying the nuances of language, character, and story. For admirers of Hurston’s work, and for students of folklore, African-American culture, and Southern culture, Every Tongue Got to Confess provides a powerful and evocative reading experience.
September 22, 2018
Zora Neale Hurston (1891-1960) was an anthropologist. In this volume she has collected African-American folktales, tales that had circulated in the Gulf States of the American South for decades. It was in the 1920s that she collected them. Hurston has kept the original spoken words. It is of great value that she has left the vernacular unaltered. After each story, saying or proverb, the name of the person from whom she gathered the words is stated.
The stories are arranged in groups of tales having similar content, such as God Tales, Heaven Tales, Preacher Tales, Imp and Devil Tales. There are Master and White Folk Tales, Mistaken Identity Tales and Talking Animal Tales. Tales about the biggest, the shortest and the fastest mules, horses and cows. Tall tales too. There is no discussion of what individual or the respective groups of stories say.
We are told that these folktales reveal “attitudes about slavery, faith, race relations, family, and romance that have been passed on for generations”. I guess they do, but not to me.
John Edgar Wideman writes in the book’s foreword:
“Imagine the situations in which these speech acts occur. Recall a front stoop, juke joint, funeral, wedding, barbershop, kitchen: the music, noise, communal energy, and release. Dream. Participate the way you do when you allow a song to transport you, all kinds of songs, from hip-hop rap to Bach to Monk, each bearing its different history of sounds and silences.”
Sounds magnificent, right? But there is a problem. The readers must imagine these settings. The settings are not drawn in the text! Not so much as a hint is given.
I chuckled only occasionally. Insights gathered were for me few.
A word of warning--it is impossible to read more than just a little bit at a time. More than that becomes repetitive. Many of the sayings are merely a sentence or two long. The stories are extremely short, at most the length of a page.
To an expert, to one knowledgeable of Southern folklore, the stories may speak volumes, but not to me. I could make neither head nor tale of many of them; they went in one ear and out the other. I acknowledge that it is important the book exists. It is best utilized as a book of reference. Folklore is an important part of a people’s history. I appreciate the book’s existence but did not enjoy reading it.
The audiobook is narrated by Ruby Dee and Ossie Davis. Being black themselves, their narration enhances authenticity. Ruby Dee was easy to understand, but not Ossie Davis. Too often he mumbles. So, her narration was good, but his was bad. Three stars for her and one star for him averages out to two.
******************
"Sweat" 4 stars
The Gilded Six-Bits 4 stars
Their Eyes Were Watching God 4 stars
Spunk 3 stars
Dust Tracks on a Road 3 stars
Barracoon: The Story of the Last "Black Cargo"
2 stars
Every Tongue Got to Confess 1 star
I like best the author's works of fiction. It is here her writing comes to the fore. It is here she synthesizes what her anthropological studies taught her.
The stories are arranged in groups of tales having similar content, such as God Tales, Heaven Tales, Preacher Tales, Imp and Devil Tales. There are Master and White Folk Tales, Mistaken Identity Tales and Talking Animal Tales. Tales about the biggest, the shortest and the fastest mules, horses and cows. Tall tales too. There is no discussion of what individual or the respective groups of stories say.
We are told that these folktales reveal “attitudes about slavery, faith, race relations, family, and romance that have been passed on for generations”. I guess they do, but not to me.
John Edgar Wideman writes in the book’s foreword:
“Imagine the situations in which these speech acts occur. Recall a front stoop, juke joint, funeral, wedding, barbershop, kitchen: the music, noise, communal energy, and release. Dream. Participate the way you do when you allow a song to transport you, all kinds of songs, from hip-hop rap to Bach to Monk, each bearing its different history of sounds and silences.”
Sounds magnificent, right? But there is a problem. The readers must imagine these settings. The settings are not drawn in the text! Not so much as a hint is given.
I chuckled only occasionally. Insights gathered were for me few.
A word of warning--it is impossible to read more than just a little bit at a time. More than that becomes repetitive. Many of the sayings are merely a sentence or two long. The stories are extremely short, at most the length of a page.
To an expert, to one knowledgeable of Southern folklore, the stories may speak volumes, but not to me. I could make neither head nor tale of many of them; they went in one ear and out the other. I acknowledge that it is important the book exists. It is best utilized as a book of reference. Folklore is an important part of a people’s history. I appreciate the book’s existence but did not enjoy reading it.
The audiobook is narrated by Ruby Dee and Ossie Davis. Being black themselves, their narration enhances authenticity. Ruby Dee was easy to understand, but not Ossie Davis. Too often he mumbles. So, her narration was good, but his was bad. Three stars for her and one star for him averages out to two.
******************
"Sweat" 4 stars
The Gilded Six-Bits 4 stars
Their Eyes Were Watching God 4 stars
Spunk 3 stars
Dust Tracks on a Road 3 stars
Barracoon: The Story of the Last "Black Cargo"
2 stars
Every Tongue Got to Confess 1 star
I like best the author's works of fiction. It is here her writing comes to the fore. It is here she synthesizes what her anthropological studies taught her.
August 27, 2018
Zora Neale Hurston's task as an academic anthropologist in 1927 was to capture the African American narratives of the oral story-telling tradition of the Southern Gulf states. This collection of folklore captures the dialect, culture, humor, fantastical wit, and pantheistic beliefs of the people she met on her journey. Reading these tales, rather than actually listening to the spoken words, necessarily loses the vernacular language and sounds, the tone of voice, and the spontaneity of the stories. Hurston preserved the dialect as she wrote down these folktales and did not translate them into "common English," thus maintaining the feelings of the characters as if the reader were sitting and listening to an old relative tell his stories that entertain, instruct and reflect their worldview. Feelings of hope, grief, joy, are not intellectualized but humanized.
April 3, 2021
I really wanted to like it, but I didn't like it much at all.
May 19, 2016
The book encompass Zora Neale Hurston goals from that time period; it has a wide variance in storytelling from the gulf states, her native region in the U.S.A.; it also provide a history to viewpoints within the Black community in said region; a region very old or , more likely but unproven, the oldest Black Statian region in the United States of America. Any can argue Every Tongue Got to Confess is the oldest surviving remnant to Black American life throughout the American Continent; it inspired another fable collection from me to be made.
April 16, 2018
It took me a while to get into this--I was expecting more fairytales, I guess. But then something clicked. These are grandpa tales, uncle tales, pull my leg tales. And I grinned the rest of the way through. It was like having my grandpa back for a little bit.
June 15, 2016
In the 1920s Hurston wandered the Gulf States and the Caribbean collecting wacky stories from random black folks and made plans to collect them for posterity's sake as a grand anthropological endeavor. The academic crap aside, these are hilarious, often surprisingly unorthodox (the "preacher" tales, for example), and downright weird at times. There are hants, the Devil, daughters hunting rabbits, tricksy not-fools, witches, and children who can control animals and matter.
Most are brief and fleeting, and there's a surprising amount of repetition, sometimes from areas far from each other, which speaks to the ubiquity of these tales. Other tales will feel familiar, most will make you snicker.
Most are brief and fleeting, and there's a surprising amount of repetition, sometimes from areas far from each other, which speaks to the ubiquity of these tales. Other tales will feel familiar, most will make you snicker.
June 8, 2023
Zora Neale Huston doesn’t get enough credit for introducing southern African American culture to the rest of the world. I’ll forever sing her praises! This was an enjoyable collection.
September 1, 2013
"A man who was down on his knees praying for God to forgive him for stealing hogs said: 'You might as well forgive me for that big ole turkey gobbler dat roosts in de chinaberry tree, too, Lord'" - Edward Morris, 15 years old, 8th grade, born in Mobile, Alabama
Putting all of the issues of authorship and anthropological ethics aside, this is an important collection of African American literary history and folk tale culture. Rescuing a lost manuscript from being forgotten in the Smithsonian, mixed in with the paperwork of American anthropologist William Duncan Strong, the estate of Zora Neale Hurston, John Edgar Wideman and Carla Kaplan published this collection in 2003, many years after Hurston's death.
In her role as an anthropologist, Hurston captures the humor, grace, and original cadence of these tales, earning the trust of the people she interviewed by telling them that she was running from the law and becoming part of their community (Wall).
This is a great read placed alongside her works of autobiography and fiction, including Mules and Men and Their Eyes Were Watching God.
Putting all of the issues of authorship and anthropological ethics aside, this is an important collection of African American literary history and folk tale culture. Rescuing a lost manuscript from being forgotten in the Smithsonian, mixed in with the paperwork of American anthropologist William Duncan Strong, the estate of Zora Neale Hurston, John Edgar Wideman and Carla Kaplan published this collection in 2003, many years after Hurston's death.
In her role as an anthropologist, Hurston captures the humor, grace, and original cadence of these tales, earning the trust of the people she interviewed by telling them that she was running from the law and becoming part of their community (Wall).
This is a great read placed alongside her works of autobiography and fiction, including Mules and Men and Their Eyes Were Watching God.
August 7, 2018
This is a GoodRead! I will admit that the Mules & Men versions of these stories are better, IMO of course. The question asked in the forward: Which version of these tales do we as the readers believe Zora would prefer, Mules & Men or Every Tongue Got to Comfess? I believe Mules & Men, it’s the raw translated version of the stories from the interviews and research she conducted. This version is cleaner. I’m glad I read Mules & Men first, I did not know they were relatively the same stories until reading this version. This version too is good but the changed wording changed my reaction to the stories that were familiar. The only bad thing, I read the abridged version of Mules & Men, so I’m thinking I know more of her work from this version.
April 1, 2023
Every Tongue Got to Confess is Zora's collection of folk tales from Black people in the Gulf states of Alabama, Florida, and Louisiana, collected from 1927-1930. It was originally lost to history but was found years after Hurston's death and was first published in 2001. I enjoyed reading this collection. The tales ranged from tall tales to tales about God, preachers, animals, mistaken identities, and much more. I liked that Zora cited the sources of the tales, it allowed me to see if there were any people whose stories I especially liked. The sources whose stories I tended to like include Larkins White, Cliffert Ulmer, Joe Wiley, and R. T. Williams.
May 2, 2019
Изцяло канонични теренни записки относно „негърския” фолклор в южните щати на Северна Америка. Зора е обиколила 6 щата за повече от три години и е записала четирицифрено число истории, приказки, анекдоти и лакърдии. Разделени са прилежно на групи и е запазено оригиналното жаргонно звучене. Изследването е във всички възрастови групи (от 10 до 81 години, като последните са живи свидетели на робството) и през всички прослойки (от каруцари и миньори до кметове и секретарки).
Много хора се кълнат в тази книга, наричат я фолклорно съкровище и литературен разрез на края на 19 век. На мен, сигурно защото мие доста далече цялото нещо с расизма и правата, не ми направи толкова голямо впечатление. Да не говорим как ме изтормозиха различните видове сленг (но това не е минус, напротив).
Май най-много ми допаднаха историите от времената на робството с хитрите негра и избъзиканите бели господари – там усетих една автентичност. Историите с животни и приказките като че ли бяха прекалено наследени от европейската култура, не знам защо очаквах нещо доста по-африканско. Госпъл историите, обикновено как някой се е изложил в църквата, независимо дали пастор или вярващ, не ме докоснаха.
Не съжалявам, че я прочетох, ама ми стои доста далечна, за разлика от изследванията на Хърстън в Таити и вудото.
Много хора се кълнат в тази книга, наричат я фолклорно съкровище и литературен разрез на края на 19 век. На мен, сигурно защото мие доста далече цялото нещо с расизма и правата, не ми направи толкова голямо впечатление. Да не говорим как ме изтормозиха различните видове сленг (но това не е минус, напротив).
Май най-много ми допаднаха историите от времената на робството с хитрите негра и избъзиканите бели господари – там усетих една автентичност. Историите с животни и приказките като че ли бяха прекалено наследени от европейската култура, не знам защо очаквах нещо доста по-африканско. Госпъл историите, обикновено как някой се е изложил в църквата, независимо дали пастор или вярващ, не ме докоснаха.
Не съжалявам, че я прочетох, ама ми стои доста далечна, за разлика от изследванията на Хърстън в Таити и вудото.
April 14, 2021
A fascinating historical compilation. The "Tall Tales" were my favorite laugh out loud chapter section.
May 27, 2015
I really enjoyed these stories. There's everything from Southern flavored retellings of traditional folk and fairy tales to one-liner jokes.
Especially in the first quarter to third of the collection, there's a strong theme of talking about racial issues - both slavery and stereotypes and I found that interesting. The way they used racial stereotypes surprised me at times. Some of the time, the stories agree with and promote the stereotypes and other times they're turned on their heads.
It's quite a change from the modern use of race relations!
Formatting wise - I found the lack of a properly formatted table of contents on the Kindle edition really annoying. There's a manually created one at the front of the book that works using Hyperlinks, but it it doesn't have much other than the intros, first page, appendixes, etc. And even with that, it doesn't mention the reading group guide or footnotes.
In fact, the only way anyone would ever know if there was a reading group guide is if they deliberately paged through past the end of the appendix and looked. It's housed between Appendix 3 and the footnotes - and it's not mentioned at all in the table of contents. (Not that reading group guides are generally useful, but it's the principle of the thing that matters.)
The only way to get to the list of internal sections (God Tales, Tall Tales, Animal Tales, Preacher Tales, etc.) is to follow a hyperlink from the beginning of one of those sections. That's rather inconvenient, and is going to make locating any of the stories again difficult.
You'd think that for the arm and a leg the publishers are charging for the book, they'd spend some of the proceeds on getting a working table of contents. That would go a long way towards making this useful from a reference perspective rather than something you'd just read once.
Especially in the first quarter to third of the collection, there's a strong theme of talking about racial issues - both slavery and stereotypes and I found that interesting. The way they used racial stereotypes surprised me at times. Some of the time, the stories agree with and promote the stereotypes and other times they're turned on their heads.
It's quite a change from the modern use of race relations!
Formatting wise - I found the lack of a properly formatted table of contents on the Kindle edition really annoying. There's a manually created one at the front of the book that works using Hyperlinks, but it it doesn't have much other than the intros, first page, appendixes, etc. And even with that, it doesn't mention the reading group guide or footnotes.
In fact, the only way anyone would ever know if there was a reading group guide is if they deliberately paged through past the end of the appendix and looked. It's housed between Appendix 3 and the footnotes - and it's not mentioned at all in the table of contents. (Not that reading group guides are generally useful, but it's the principle of the thing that matters.)
The only way to get to the list of internal sections (God Tales, Tall Tales, Animal Tales, Preacher Tales, etc.) is to follow a hyperlink from the beginning of one of those sections. That's rather inconvenient, and is going to make locating any of the stories again difficult.
You'd think that for the arm and a leg the publishers are charging for the book, they'd spend some of the proceeds on getting a working table of contents. That would go a long way towards making this useful from a reference perspective rather than something you'd just read once.
May 19, 2015
It's getting four stars because of its cultural importance and because I felt like I learned something. It wasn't necessarily enjoyable, and a lot of that comes from it being unedited. I really, really wish she would have had the opportunity to publish this after editing (and for us to know which version this is as it definitely colors her choices)
June 26, 2014
Every one of the folk tales collected by Zora Neale Hurston for this volume is interesting and thought-provoking. A number of them are humorous. A surprising number of them are sad. All of them evoke truths about human existence, in the manner of folk tales throughout the world, even as they examine the historical circumstances and social realities confronting African Americans in the Deep South during the era of segregation.
Hurston may be best known as a novelist, and particularly as the author of the classic Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937). Yet she was also a dedicated student of anthropology, focusing upon African-American folklore during her undergraduate and graduate studies at Barnard College of Columbia University. Admirers of Hurston’s work already know her book Mules and Men (1935), a collection of African-American folktales published during Hurston’s lifetime; the book is now widely taught, particularly in classes that focus on folklore or on ethnographic research. But Every Tongue Got to Confess, not published until 2001, offers Hurston’s readers something new.
A helpful introduction by Hurston scholar Carla Kaplan explains how this manuscript came to be discovered in the archives of the Smithsonian Institution, and situates the work within the larger context of Hurston’s oeuvre. And a foreword by John Edgar Wideman – like Hurston, a writer who has excelled as an author of both creative and scholarly work – is particularly helpful in discussing how “talk functions in African-American communities as it does in Zora Neale Hurston’s 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” (p. xx).
Every Tongue Got to Confess was not the original title of this volume. The work’s initial title, Negro Folk-Tales from the Gulf States, might have been acceptable as a title for a scholarly dissertation back in the 1930’s, but would not be suitable today; accordingly, a key phrase from one of the folktales collected by Hurston during her travels through the Deep South – a tale in which a preacher tells his congregation, “Every tongue got to confess; everybody got to stand in judgment for theyself; every tub got to stand on its own bottom” (p. 30) – is used as the title. I find the quote and the title to be well-chosen; the statement from the preacher in this folktale emphasizes the idea that language needs to be truthful, that each person is the ultimate judge of his or her own actions, that one must take one’s own stand as a free moral agent in a world of ambiguity. At the same time, in the best folkloric tradition, Hurston shows how folklore reminds its listeners not to take themselves too seriously; one petite woman in the preacher’s congregation responds to his exhortation that “every tub got to stand on its own bottom” by saying, “Lordy, make my bottom wider” (p. 30).
The folktales are divided up by category: e.g., preacher tales, devil tales, witch tales, tall tales, mistaken identity tales, fool tales, woman tales, school tales, talking animal tales. I was particularly moved by the tales of the cultural hero John; set during slavery times, these folktales tell how an enslaved man named John uses his wits to outwit the slaveholder, and to help other enslaved people. There is a measure of wish-fulfillment in some of these tales; and at the same time there are many grim reminders of the cruelty and brutality of Deep South racism, whether in antebellum slavery times or in the early-20th-century segregation era when Hurston was collecting these folktales. Characteristic in that regard is this short tale: “In Mississippi a black horse run away with a white lady. When they caught the horse they lynched him, and they hung the harness and burnt the buggy” (p. 110).
One feature of Every Tongue Got to Confess that may not work well for modern readers is the way in which Hurston uses phonetic misspellings to convey dialect: “wuz” for “was,” “dat” for “that,” “uh” for “a,” and so on. Such phonetic “transcriptions” of dialect were a popular feature of the “local-color” literature that was popular in post-Civil War America, but most of that literature has not aged well; Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1885) is one of the few such works that are still widely read today. As a number of commentators have pointed out, if a writer wants to convey the way a Southerner might say “I’ll be dogged,” it can work better to write not “Ah’ll be dawged!” but rather “I be dog.” It captures the idea of the person speaking in dialect, without the patronizing quality that the elaborate misspellings provide. In that regard, Every Tongue Got to Confess is a book of its time.
It is also worth noting that Every Tongue Got to Confess does not try to provide any sort of interpretive synthesis of the larger meaning of the folktales; rather, Hurston provides us with the folktales, and that is that. Where Hurston in Mules and Men provided a framing introduction, and situated the folktales in a first-person narrative of the Florida and Louisiana travels through which she gathered the tales, there is none of that in Every Tongue. The folktales speak for themselves. Perhaps that is as it should be.
I re-read Every Tongue Got to Confess while on a recent trip to the Florida Gulf Coast. If one is on the coast at, say, Fort Walton Beach or Destin or Panama City Beach, one has a definite sense of being among the kind of beach-resort culture that is much the same across the country. Yet one does not have to go very far north from the coast before gaining a sense of being within the kind of rural Florida setting that nourished Hurston’s creative imagination. It was easy for me to imagine Hurston driving the narrow roads, making her way from one small town or sawmill or turpentine camp to another, building rapport with suspicious informants, facing fearlessly the dangers attendant upon being an African-American woman alone in the Jim Crow South. What a courageous individual. And what a legacy she left us.
Every Tongue Got to Confess, like Mules and Men before it, benefits from Hurston’s gift for conveying the nuances of language, character, and story. For admirers of Hurston’s work, and for students of folklore, African-American culture, and Southern culture, Every Tongue Got to Confess provides a powerful and evocative reading experience.
Hurston may be best known as a novelist, and particularly as the author of the classic Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937). Yet she was also a dedicated student of anthropology, focusing upon African-American folklore during her undergraduate and graduate studies at Barnard College of Columbia University. Admirers of Hurston’s work already know her book Mules and Men (1935), a collection of African-American folktales published during Hurston’s lifetime; the book is now widely taught, particularly in classes that focus on folklore or on ethnographic research. But Every Tongue Got to Confess, not published until 2001, offers Hurston’s readers something new.
A helpful introduction by Hurston scholar Carla Kaplan explains how this manuscript came to be discovered in the archives of the Smithsonian Institution, and situates the work within the larger context of Hurston’s oeuvre. And a foreword by John Edgar Wideman – like Hurston, a writer who has excelled as an author of both creative and scholarly work – is particularly helpful in discussing how “talk functions in African-American communities as it does in Zora Neale Hurston’s 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” (p. xx).
Every Tongue Got to Confess was not the original title of this volume. The work’s initial title, Negro Folk-Tales from the Gulf States, might have been acceptable as a title for a scholarly dissertation back in the 1930’s, but would not be suitable today; accordingly, a key phrase from one of the folktales collected by Hurston during her travels through the Deep South – a tale in which a preacher tells his congregation, “Every tongue got to confess; everybody got to stand in judgment for theyself; every tub got to stand on its own bottom” (p. 30) – is used as the title. I find the quote and the title to be well-chosen; the statement from the preacher in this folktale emphasizes the idea that language needs to be truthful, that each person is the ultimate judge of his or her own actions, that one must take one’s own stand as a free moral agent in a world of ambiguity. At the same time, in the best folkloric tradition, Hurston shows how folklore reminds its listeners not to take themselves too seriously; one petite woman in the preacher’s congregation responds to his exhortation that “every tub got to stand on its own bottom” by saying, “Lordy, make my bottom wider” (p. 30).
The folktales are divided up by category: e.g., preacher tales, devil tales, witch tales, tall tales, mistaken identity tales, fool tales, woman tales, school tales, talking animal tales. I was particularly moved by the tales of the cultural hero John; set during slavery times, these folktales tell how an enslaved man named John uses his wits to outwit the slaveholder, and to help other enslaved people. There is a measure of wish-fulfillment in some of these tales; and at the same time there are many grim reminders of the cruelty and brutality of Deep South racism, whether in antebellum slavery times or in the early-20th-century segregation era when Hurston was collecting these folktales. Characteristic in that regard is this short tale: “In Mississippi a black horse run away with a white lady. When they caught the horse they lynched him, and they hung the harness and burnt the buggy” (p. 110).
One feature of Every Tongue Got to Confess that may not work well for modern readers is the way in which Hurston uses phonetic misspellings to convey dialect: “wuz” for “was,” “dat” for “that,” “uh” for “a,” and so on. Such phonetic “transcriptions” of dialect were a popular feature of the “local-color” literature that was popular in post-Civil War America, but most of that literature has not aged well; Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1885) is one of the few such works that are still widely read today. As a number of commentators have pointed out, if a writer wants to convey the way a Southerner might say “I’ll be dogged,” it can work better to write not “Ah’ll be dawged!” but rather “I be dog.” It captures the idea of the person speaking in dialect, without the patronizing quality that the elaborate misspellings provide. In that regard, Every Tongue Got to Confess is a book of its time.
It is also worth noting that Every Tongue Got to Confess does not try to provide any sort of interpretive synthesis of the larger meaning of the folktales; rather, Hurston provides us with the folktales, and that is that. Where Hurston in Mules and Men provided a framing introduction, and situated the folktales in a first-person narrative of the Florida and Louisiana travels through which she gathered the tales, there is none of that in Every Tongue. The folktales speak for themselves. Perhaps that is as it should be.
I re-read Every Tongue Got to Confess while on a recent trip to the Florida Gulf Coast. If one is on the coast at, say, Fort Walton Beach or Destin or Panama City Beach, one has a definite sense of being among the kind of beach-resort culture that is much the same across the country. Yet one does not have to go very far north from the coast before gaining a sense of being within the kind of rural Florida setting that nourished Hurston’s creative imagination. It was easy for me to imagine Hurston driving the narrow roads, making her way from one small town or sawmill or turpentine camp to another, building rapport with suspicious informants, facing fearlessly the dangers attendant upon being an African-American woman alone in the Jim Crow South. What a courageous individual. And what a legacy she left us.
Every Tongue Got to Confess, like Mules and Men before it, benefits from Hurston’s gift for conveying the nuances of language, character, and story. For admirers of Hurston’s work, and for students of folklore, African-American culture, and Southern culture, Every Tongue Got to Confess provides a powerful and evocative reading experience.
March 2, 2013
SUMMARY:
Every Tongue Got to Confess by Zora Neale Hurston is a funny folktale-filled book. In the late 1920s, Zora Neale Heaston went on a lot of travels in which she collected a lot of stories and opinions from other African-Americans like herself. Over 500 stories are in this amusing, thought-provoking collection of folklore about God, the Devil, talking animals, mistaken identities and more! :)
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Zora Neale Hurston knew how to make an entrance. On May 1, 1925, at a literary awards dinner sponsored by Opportunity magazine, the earthy Harlem newcomer turned heads and raised eyebrows as she claimed four awards: a second-place fiction prize for her short story "Spunk," a second-place award in drama for her play Color Struck, and two honorable mentions.
The names of the writers who beat out Hurston for first place that night would soon be forgotten. But the name of the second-place winner buzzed on tongues all night, and for days and years to come. Lest anyone forget her, Hurston made a wholly memorable entrance at a party following the awards dinner. She strode into the room--jammed with writers and arts patrons, black and white--and flung a long, richly colored scarf around her neck with dramatic flourish as she bellowed a reminder of the title of her winning play: "Colooooooor Struuckkkk!" Her exultant entrance literally stopped the party for a moment, just as she had intended. In this way, Hurston made it known that a bright and powerful presence had arrived. (Read more at http://zoranealehurston.com/about/)
MY OPINION:
I really like how humorous this book was in parts, but had a good lesson and was thought-provoking in others. Just to let you know, if you're wondering, this story is an anthology--it's a collection of folktales told by different African-Americans when Ms. Hurston went on a trip through the Gulf States. That makes it interesting, with different writing styles and all. This book also does have some inappropriate content (not suitable for kids) and some cursing (the 'n' word).
★★★★ 4/5 stars!
SPECIAL THANKS:
Special thanks to my Facebook fan, Joni Dischner, for suggesting this book as a must read for Black History Month. :)
Blog: KBR and KKR
http://amazon.com/author/kristinacardoza
www.KristinaCardoza.com
www.facebook.com/KristinaCardozaChild...
www.twitter.com/KristinaCardoza
Every Tongue Got to Confess by Zora Neale Hurston is a funny folktale-filled book. In the late 1920s, Zora Neale Heaston went on a lot of travels in which she collected a lot of stories and opinions from other African-Americans like herself. Over 500 stories are in this amusing, thought-provoking collection of folklore about God, the Devil, talking animals, mistaken identities and more! :)
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Zora Neale Hurston knew how to make an entrance. On May 1, 1925, at a literary awards dinner sponsored by Opportunity magazine, the earthy Harlem newcomer turned heads and raised eyebrows as she claimed four awards: a second-place fiction prize for her short story "Spunk," a second-place award in drama for her play Color Struck, and two honorable mentions.
The names of the writers who beat out Hurston for first place that night would soon be forgotten. But the name of the second-place winner buzzed on tongues all night, and for days and years to come. Lest anyone forget her, Hurston made a wholly memorable entrance at a party following the awards dinner. She strode into the room--jammed with writers and arts patrons, black and white--and flung a long, richly colored scarf around her neck with dramatic flourish as she bellowed a reminder of the title of her winning play: "Colooooooor Struuckkkk!" Her exultant entrance literally stopped the party for a moment, just as she had intended. In this way, Hurston made it known that a bright and powerful presence had arrived. (Read more at http://zoranealehurston.com/about/)
MY OPINION:
I really like how humorous this book was in parts, but had a good lesson and was thought-provoking in others. Just to let you know, if you're wondering, this story is an anthology--it's a collection of folktales told by different African-Americans when Ms. Hurston went on a trip through the Gulf States. That makes it interesting, with different writing styles and all. This book also does have some inappropriate content (not suitable for kids) and some cursing (the 'n' word).
★★★★ 4/5 stars!
SPECIAL THANKS:
Special thanks to my Facebook fan, Joni Dischner, for suggesting this book as a must read for Black History Month. :)
Blog: KBR and KKR
http://amazon.com/author/kristinacardoza
www.KristinaCardoza.com
www.facebook.com/KristinaCardozaChild...
www.twitter.com/KristinaCardoza
February 24, 2020
Odd path to this book - I like crossword puzzles and "Neale" is a common word in that venue because it is rich in vowels. I had vaguely heard of Hurston's work, but decided to look her up one day because of the crossword connection. She impressed me as a significant author that I should know. I happened to be near this work and "Barracoon" (read that one, too) in the library, so I picked them up. I do plan to circle back to one of her novels sometime.
On to this book. Hurston is both a novelist and an anthropologist; here she is the anthropologist. This collection of folk tales from African Americans in the 1920's is rendered in the vernacular. That gives the book significant weight and reality that enhances its impact. I approached this as a cross-cultural study. I understand that folk tales are a very limited view into a culture, but it is a legitimate view. I am challenged by the culture I see. There are points of connection with my Christian faith, but vast swaths of culture that are foreign to me. The pain and degradation of slavery are strongly evident, even 50 years after the end of the Civil War. It drives home the fact that botched reconstruction and Jim Crow extended the impact of slavery long past the 1860s. Some of the stories are funny and interesting on their own, but most don't appeal to me as stories. However, they do appeal as some insight into their sources.
I appreciate Hurston' work in putting this together. I appreciate her preserving this piece of culture. I hope that it continues to work on me as I try to understand other humans on very different trajectories from mine.
On to this book. Hurston is both a novelist and an anthropologist; here she is the anthropologist. This collection of folk tales from African Americans in the 1920's is rendered in the vernacular. That gives the book significant weight and reality that enhances its impact. I approached this as a cross-cultural study. I understand that folk tales are a very limited view into a culture, but it is a legitimate view. I am challenged by the culture I see. There are points of connection with my Christian faith, but vast swaths of culture that are foreign to me. The pain and degradation of slavery are strongly evident, even 50 years after the end of the Civil War. It drives home the fact that botched reconstruction and Jim Crow extended the impact of slavery long past the 1860s. Some of the stories are funny and interesting on their own, but most don't appeal to me as stories. However, they do appeal as some insight into their sources.
I appreciate Hurston' work in putting this together. I appreciate her preserving this piece of culture. I hope that it continues to work on me as I try to understand other humans on very different trajectories from mine.
February 21, 2021
Overall, though, Every Tongue Got to Confess would serves best as an academic text for individuals studying folk tales of the 1920s, which is part of why it took me so long to finish this Hurston work. It can be easy to put down. Or it surprises you — it’s a mixed bag. Mules and Men has similar but better written folk tales, which just suggests that Hurston edited those and added her own “flavor.” Her ethics as an anthropologist were always in question.
Check out the full review at Grab the Lapels.
Check out the full review at Grab the Lapels.
July 15, 2018
After reading this great collection of folktales from my region, I am asking myself why I haven't read Mules and Men, yet. These are tales that range from funny to sad, and sometimes I found myself at a loss for words. Still, Hurston's steady collection of the stories from black people has to be one of her best qualities. She preserved a lot of history down here in the south - Alabama in particular - and I am glad that I get to read her work.
December 1, 2021
This is the first book that I have read that is attributed to Zora Neale Hurston. I believe that she is one of the those authors whose first publication should be read. The book was published after her death and based on her travels along the Gulf states, principally Alabama, Florida and Louisiana.
The folktales here are told by workers in the Gulf area to each other and passed down through the ages. These tall tales somewhat remind me of "The Conjure Woman," which I found a more amusing piece. One of things that appreciated is the list of those residents that contributed their tales. It says a lot about what they did for living, their educational level and their ages --- some contributors were very young.
Since it is the South, it was probably good to lead the book with God Tales. One of the tales more or less asks the congregants to repent and mentions a woman with children by multiple men. In the appendix, one of the contributors did indeed have many children by multiple men. I wonder how many of these contributors knew each other.
The book's title seems to come from a tale by one Rebecca Corbett, a cook. Sometimes, you had to read passages twice in order to truly understand what the contributor was saying. Some would say that the cadence of speech is what modern-day linguists would call Ebonics, a discredited way of pronunciation among black people. This manuscript was collected during the 1920s, when the USA was very segregated society and the educational level of blacks, especially in the extremely segregated South was an abomination.
Some of the tales were amusing and this is how many were forced to pass time as few could read or write. It's a nice book. Have book will travel. The first owner left the sales slip in the book. It was purchased in Texas. I plan to leave the slip there and may add where I purchased the book.
The folktales here are told by workers in the Gulf area to each other and passed down through the ages. These tall tales somewhat remind me of "The Conjure Woman," which I found a more amusing piece. One of things that appreciated is the list of those residents that contributed their tales. It says a lot about what they did for living, their educational level and their ages --- some contributors were very young.
Since it is the South, it was probably good to lead the book with God Tales. One of the tales more or less asks the congregants to repent and mentions a woman with children by multiple men. In the appendix, one of the contributors did indeed have many children by multiple men. I wonder how many of these contributors knew each other.
The book's title seems to come from a tale by one Rebecca Corbett, a cook. Sometimes, you had to read passages twice in order to truly understand what the contributor was saying. Some would say that the cadence of speech is what modern-day linguists would call Ebonics, a discredited way of pronunciation among black people. This manuscript was collected during the 1920s, when the USA was very segregated society and the educational level of blacks, especially in the extremely segregated South was an abomination.
Some of the tales were amusing and this is how many were forced to pass time as few could read or write. It's a nice book. Have book will travel. The first owner left the sales slip in the book. It was purchased in Texas. I plan to leave the slip there and may add where I purchased the book.
August 4, 2025
‼️“Hey satan , you coming back for more?”
🔥“Mhm”
✍️ I loved this book! Growing up in Florida, I appreciate the collection of folk-stores told by those who bulit our state. Hurtson makes sure to retain the original accent/vernacular of the orginal story teller as to keep the reader in the present. I was heartbroken to find out that stories such as these were shoved in closets (explained by Hurtson in the beginning of the book) and were left unread. Hurtson took it upon herself to record these stories.
🌴A must read for everyone who loves funny short stories.
⭐️5/5
🔥“Mhm”
✍️ I loved this book! Growing up in Florida, I appreciate the collection of folk-stores told by those who bulit our state. Hurtson makes sure to retain the original accent/vernacular of the orginal story teller as to keep the reader in the present. I was heartbroken to find out that stories such as these were shoved in closets (explained by Hurtson in the beginning of the book) and were left unread. Hurtson took it upon herself to record these stories.
🌴A must read for everyone who loves funny short stories.
⭐️5/5
November 10, 2025
This is a collection of folktales from the Gulf States, meaning Florida, Mississippi, Alabama, Louisiana, and Texas. Zora Neale Hurston collected African-American tales and presented about 500 of them in this book. They are grouped by topic. Most are just a sentence or two. I really wish there had been more longer tales and my rating reflects that. The audiobook is excellently read by Ruby Dee and Ossie Davis. Be warned about language usage – these are not folktales for children.
September 17, 2024
This treasury of Black folk-tales was collected by Zora Neale Hurston in the late 1920’s among the rural, Black communities in Florida, Alabama, Georgia, and Louisiana … The subjects range from Preacher Tales to Talking Animal Tales to Massa and White Folks Tales, and so on … re-creates a lost culture …
September 18, 2018
Narrated by Ruby Dee and Ossie Davis which made this audio a treat and a very good book to listen to; the words flow and enter your mind, and your heart goes out to the people who shared these short memorable tales and parables across many tellings and many years.
April 21, 2019
Zora Neale Hurston is a GOAT. I loved reading these tales... my family is mostly from Georgia and Florida and reading these felt like home. Sayings I never knew the origin of were documented in this anthology and I am so grateful for Zora’s work in capturing our people and their culture during a time when the world seemed (and still is) hellbent on erasing us. Black humor, Black joy, Black pain and Black love all in this book. What a study and succulent body of work this is.
August 2, 2020
Zora Neale Hurston worked for a while under the famous American anthropologist, Frank Boas, collecting folk material around the South. This collection of "folk tales" contains only a few stories that fit the traditional folk tale form. Most of it is short anecdotes with ironic twists. You could think of them as jokes, though there is more grim irony and commentary on the human condition than there is humor. I think that it is valuable to have preserved this material, and I don't doubt its authenticity, but the view of Southern Black culture presented in these stories is not a pretty one. I think that if these stories had been collected by a White man, say Ms. Hurston’s boss, Frank Boas, they would be condemned as racist distortions of Black culture that are designed to put Black people in a bad light and therefore should be consigned to the rubbish heap. But since the collector was an acclaimed Black female author the reactions of other GoodReads reviewers are filled with praise and compassion.
There is much in these stories that perpetuates the worst kind of old time Stepandfetchit Black stereotypes. The Black people in these stories are often lazy, craps playing, moonshine drinking, superstitious dimwits. They are people who yearn to be White. Sometimes the heroes of these stories are clever fools who manage to get the better of the White man, but mostly not, and when they get the short end of the stick, it is more often than not because they have done something stupid or sinful so that they deserve what they get. These aren't stories of people who are self deprecating or who suffer nobly under the yoke of racism. These are examples of learned helplessness, people who have bought the bullshit that they have been fed about their own inferiority and almost accept it as natural. This is beyond sad and is the harshest possible commentary on the White people who brought about this situation. It makes me thankful that we have managed over the course of the last seventy years to discard a lot of this bad thinking. We still have a long way to go, but we have already come far from the world where people could tell the stories that are preserved here.
There is much in these stories that perpetuates the worst kind of old time Stepandfetchit Black stereotypes. The Black people in these stories are often lazy, craps playing, moonshine drinking, superstitious dimwits. They are people who yearn to be White. Sometimes the heroes of these stories are clever fools who manage to get the better of the White man, but mostly not, and when they get the short end of the stick, it is more often than not because they have done something stupid or sinful so that they deserve what they get. These aren't stories of people who are self deprecating or who suffer nobly under the yoke of racism. These are examples of learned helplessness, people who have bought the bullshit that they have been fed about their own inferiority and almost accept it as natural. This is beyond sad and is the harshest possible commentary on the White people who brought about this situation. It makes me thankful that we have managed over the course of the last seventy years to discard a lot of this bad thinking. We still have a long way to go, but we have already come far from the world where people could tell the stories that are preserved here.
February 27, 2011
I always have mixed feelings about the literary necromancy involved in posthumous publication of an author's unfinished work. I feel like you aren't really seeing the whole picture that was intended and that can be a disservice.
You can see that in 'Every Tongue Got to Confess', some stories are repeated, others seem out of place. Kaplan has tried admirably in her editing to maintain the integrity of Hurston's work, but it seems that work was likely in such a rough form that it is a huge task to divine what she had intended at some points.
But an important fact about an ethnographer like Zora Neale Hurston is that editorial nitpicking really doesn't count. If it wasn't for Hurston's original epic work in the collecting and Kaplan's efforts at seeing even these fragments to publication, a lot of these folktales would now simply be lost to time. That's what really counts.
The stories contained in this collection run the gamut in subject and tone. Some are weird, some are funny, some are tragic. Many are a combination. But all of them form a part of the complex tapestry of American culture and are too important to be lost.
You can see that in 'Every Tongue Got to Confess', some stories are repeated, others seem out of place. Kaplan has tried admirably in her editing to maintain the integrity of Hurston's work, but it seems that work was likely in such a rough form that it is a huge task to divine what she had intended at some points.
But an important fact about an ethnographer like Zora Neale Hurston is that editorial nitpicking really doesn't count. If it wasn't for Hurston's original epic work in the collecting and Kaplan's efforts at seeing even these fragments to publication, a lot of these folktales would now simply be lost to time. That's what really counts.
The stories contained in this collection run the gamut in subject and tone. Some are weird, some are funny, some are tragic. Many are a combination. But all of them form a part of the complex tapestry of American culture and are too important to be lost.
December 9, 2014
This is a collection of folk tales from the mostly rural South collected in the early part of the 20th Century. The language is intentionally accented and heavy with local sound. This made it slightly hard to understand sometimes, particularly in the quiet points, but also made it much more interesting. Folktales should be audiobooks it seems.
I found myself wanting to speak with a Southern accent, or add a bit of a drawl to some words. It took the majority of the book for me to get used to the frequency of the word 'nigger' - but it's used self-referentially and not in the least derogatorily. Many many of the stories use the word, and are also slave stories, and that's an element of what interested me.
Some of the stories are very repetitive, but there are a lot of them, and the minor variations between different stories are worth it. Also, the idea that the same story has many local touches in different areas is part of being folk tales I think. Many are funny, or tricky, and while there are some Brer Rabbit stories, this is a collection of far more than that style.
I found myself wanting to speak with a Southern accent, or add a bit of a drawl to some words. It took the majority of the book for me to get used to the frequency of the word 'nigger' - but it's used self-referentially and not in the least derogatorily. Many many of the stories use the word, and are also slave stories, and that's an element of what interested me.
Some of the stories are very repetitive, but there are a lot of them, and the minor variations between different stories are worth it. Also, the idea that the same story has many local touches in different areas is part of being folk tales I think. Many are funny, or tricky, and while there are some Brer Rabbit stories, this is a collection of far more than that style.
February 14, 2011
If you've never read Hurston and are interested in this book (and you should be; she was a talented anthropologist as well as a wonderful writer), make sure you read both the Forward and Introduction. I haven't started the actual book yet, and am already enthralled all over again with this extremely gifted writer.
It was a pretty quick read, and interesting (and heartrending) to read how these people coped with such adversity and discrimation with humor in these stories and anecdotes passed down through the generations. The three stars was for the fact that many of the stories were repeated by different people almost verbatim; still a useful book to catch a glimpse at what it must've been like to be a black person after slavery but during "Jim Crow", which wasn't much different.
It was a pretty quick read, and interesting (and heartrending) to read how these people coped with such adversity and discrimation with humor in these stories and anecdotes passed down through the generations. The three stars was for the fact that many of the stories were repeated by different people almost verbatim; still a useful book to catch a glimpse at what it must've been like to be a black person after slavery but during "Jim Crow", which wasn't much different.
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