Barbara P. Moss
From slavery to the present time, Blacks have written out of a need to be heard. Blacks have written out of the need to be understood or just express their feelings about situations and issues. Some Blacks have written about their disappointments, while others have written about happy times—births, weddings, baptisms or any celebration which there is or was a coming together of Blacks in mass. Some situations and circumstances prompted literary explosions of feelings and emotions which eventually became best sellers and even movies.
The African storyteller began communicating thoughts and ideas as far back as slavery. The slaves communicated their thoughts and ideas many times through song. One can readily understand how a slave who had to work from approximately 4 o’clock in the morning until it became too dark for them to see, would have a story to tell. One can also understand how a slave who worked from four in the morning and was given only fifteen minutes at noon to swallow his or her cold bacon for lunch would have a story to tell. It is also understandable that a slave who went to work at four in the morning, was given ten or fifteen minutes for lunch and was made to work until the middle of the night when the moon was full, would have a story to tell.
Many Black writers approach their work with a zeal and sense of urgency that would make one wonder, “Will you be around next year?” Some Black writers feel they are obligated to “tell it like it is,” or to at least express another point of view.
There are some African-American writers who have approached their literary wonder or disaster with resentment, bitterness and even anger.
For some Black writersstorytellers, life’s experiences have left them with memories that only death can erase. Many times these kinds of memories are the ones that we read about or sing. These writersstorytellers sing what I will call the “I have something important to say” song. Some of the storytellers that fall into this category are Winnie Mandela, William H. Wiggins, Jr., and Kathryn L. Morgan to mention a few.
Black song had many functions both in Africa and America. In Africa, songs, tales, proverbs and verbal games served the dual purpose of not only preserving communal values and solidarity but also providing occasions for the individual to transcend, at least symbolically, the inevitable restriction of his environment and society by permitting him to express deeply held feelings which ordinarily could not be verbalized.
Among a number of African peoples, for example, periods were set aside when the inhabitants were encouraged to gather together and through the medium of song, dance and tales to openly express their feelings about each other and their leaders. William Bosman, the Dutch traveler and official who lived in Africa from 1688 to 1702, described a ceremony which he had twice witnessed on the Gold Coast as being a procession preceded by a Feast of Eight Days, accompanied with all manner of singing, skipping, dancing, mirth, and jollity. mockery or lampooning was allowed and scandal so highly exalted, that they could sing of all the faults, villanies and frauds of their superiors as well as Inferiors without punishment, or so much as the least interruption. More than two hundred years later the English anthropologist R. S. Rattray witnessed this same annual eightday Apo ceremony. All around him the Ashanti freely chanted some of their normally repressed feelings.
In the custom of bo akutia the Ashanti practiced an ingenious vituperation in which a person brought a friend to the home of a chief or some other official who had offended him but of whom he was afraid. In the presence of this personage the aggrieved individual pretended to have an altercation with his friend whom he verbally assailed and abused freely. Once he had relieved himself of his pent-up feelings in the hearing of the person against whom they were really intended, the brief ritual ended with no overt acknowledgment by any of the parties involved of what had actually taken place.
In the days of their kings, the Dahomeans too, had annual rites in which the subjects were encouraged to invent songs and parables mocking their rulers and reciting the injustices they had suffered. They possessed numerous additional outlets as well. Melville and Frances Herskovits witnessed the monthly social dance known as avogan in which the residents of a given quarter of the city of Abomey satirized those of another section. Crowds would gather to watch the display and the dancing, but most of all to listen to the songs and to laugh at the ridicule to which are held those who have offended members of the quarter giving the dance. Names are not usually mentioned.
The psychological release these practices afforded seems to have been well understood. An Ashanti high priest explains that everyone has a sunsum (soul) that may get hurt or knocked about or become sick, and make the body ill. Very often poor health is caused by the evil and the hate that another has in his head against another, 5 of something that person has done to you, and that, too causes your sunsum to fret and become sick. Our fathers knew this to be the case, and so they ordained a time, once every year, when every man, woman, and slave, should have freedom to speak out just what was in their head, to tell their neighbors just what they thought of them, and of their actions, and not to only their neighbors, but also the King of Chief. When a man spoke freely, he would feel his sunsum cool and be quieted and the sunsum of the other person would be quieted also. Utilization of verbal art for this purpose was widespread throughout Africa and was not confined to those ceremonial occasions when one could directly state one’s feelings. Through innuendo, metaphor, and circumlocution the Ashanti, Dahomeans, Chopi, Ibo, Ewe, Yoruba, Junkun, Bashi, Tiv, Hausa, and other African peoples could utilize their songs as outlets for individual release without disturbing communal solidarity.
The exact meaning of many of the songs that slaves sang were difficult to decipher and may be only a compilation of nonsense verses, but we should not come to this conclusion too easily as contemporary whites would do. Slaves frequently sang songs about each other which were incomprehensible to whites.
The slaves used the subtitles of their songs to comment on the whites around them in other forms of expression. Harriette Brent Jacobs recorded that during the Christmas season slaves ridiculed stingy whites by singing “Poor Massa, so dey say; Down in de heel, so dey say; got no money so day say” and so on.
8
According to William H. Wiggins, Jr., in African American culture, the black preacher is the master. His verbal art covers African American communal life like the brier patch did Brer Rabbit. And, like Brer Rabbit, their favorite trickster hero, African Americans have instinctively sought protection and reassurance from a hostile world and uncertain life in the myriad stories told by their ministers. The black preacher comforts bereaved families with pleasant anecdotes about the deceased family member. He also affirms those same families happiness and pride at weddings, anniversaries, baptisms, picnics, and countless other occasions of celebrations with remarks that also include well told jokes. The black preacher inspires his congregation to challenge the racial prejudice that they encounter everyday with a series of dramatically retold biblical stories. This verbal thicket is the first line of cultural defense against the racial and human problems of life for many African Americans.
The black preacher continually sows three types of narrative seeds in order to keep his oral edge impenetrable. First, there are personal narratives; these are stories that the black preacher fashions out of his own life. In many ways these stories are a variant of their testimonies that members of his congregation give during the Wednesday night prayer service. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., and the Reverend Jesse Jackson have been skilled sowers of this narrative seed. Dr. King referred on several occasions to the frustration he experienced while attempting to explain to his daughter Yolanda reasons why she could not attend Atlanta’s Fun Town amusement park. By the same token, Reverend Jackson cast some of the same narrative seeds during his address to the 1988 Democratic National Convention. In an attempt to inspire poor blacks to vote, Reverend Jackson returned again and again to the refrain: “I understand when ... ” Between each repetition he would tell his audience of his own personal encounters with poverty, hunger, despair, and the like.
Biblical stories are the second type of narrative seed sown by black preachers. Just as lawyers must learn the legal statues of the states in which they practice, and actors must memorize their scripts before stepping on the stage or going before a movie or television camera, so, too, must the black preacher master the Bible from cover to cover or “from Genesis to Revelation” as his congregation would say. The more familiar they become with the word the better they are at improvising, weaving a biblical character, familiar verse, and or story into their sermons. James Weldon Johnson captured the poetry eloquence of these stories in
God’s Trombones: Seven Negro Sermons in Verse
(1927), a collection of seven poems based on the black preachers dramatic retelling of such well known biblical stories as “The Prodigal Son” and “The Creation.” The Late Reverend C. L. Franklin, Father of Aretha Franklin, was a master teller of these types of tales.
Jokes are the third type of narrative sown by black preachers. Humor has always been a cultural element in the African American religious experience. Young black preachers are reminded of this fact by their elders who on occasion admonish them that it is just as important to make the people laugh as it is to make them cry. Ossie Davis who is a very well known playwright harvested some of the fruits from this verbal bush in order to write his popular Broadway musical,
Purlie Victorious
in 1963. The Reverend Ralph David Abernathy was a master teller of humorous tales or jokes. During the civil rights era he consistently demonstrated that narrative gift of being able to select and tell a joke that would lower the fears or raise the courage of the nonviolent demonstrators. Reverend Abernathy’s humorous depictions of “Miss Ann” and “Mr. Charlie,” African American folk designations of white women and white men, energized many meetings and marches of their civil rights movement.
The continuing fascination and enjoyment that many African Americans derived from listening to their pastors tell these types of stories is an irrefutable affirmation of the fact that the masses of black people are stuck as tightly to their storytelling black preachers as Brer Rabbit was to the Tar Baby.