Black Ethos in Folktales

Abstract

The environment that contributed most to what is distinctive about Afro-American culture and that influenced the development of the slave's character was the slave's quarters (Blassingame, 1972). From the quarters came Black folktales, which helped to guide, control, entertain, and instruct slaves in everyday lives (Bascom, 1954). Folktales served as a form of communication to articulate the slave's interests, needs, beliefs, values, experiences, and thoughts (Ben-Amos, 1971). The tales attested to practices and habits that Blacks taught each other in the relative privacy and freedom of quarters. The majority of Black stories are merely collections of folk items, with little analysis added. Recently, researchers have begun to examine folklore for the insights it provides about the choices and acts of Black slaves. Investigators have used two basic approaches when analyzing folklore. One group examines folktales for the slave's (Levine, 1977; Welsh and Asante, 1981; Roberts, 1982; Okeke-Ezigbo, 1982). The other analyzes the tales for the slave's ethos (Geertz, 1978; Stuckey, 1968). The differences between the two approaches are specified by Clifford Geertz (1978: 303), who notes that a people's world view is their picture of the way things, in sheer actuality are, concepts of nature, of self, of society. It contains