Jamaica Anansi stories

BY MARTHA WARREN BECKWITH WITH MUSIC RECORDED IN THE FIELD BY HELEN ROBERTS
NEW YORK PUBLISHED BY THE AMERICAN FOLK-LORE SOCIETY G. E. STECHERT & CO., Agents 1924
Copyright 1924 BY THE AMERICAN FOLK-LORE SOCIETY
All rights reserved
Printed in Germany Buchdruckerei und Verlagsanstalt Bad Wörishofen 1923
MEMOIRS OF
The American Folk-Lore Society.
VOLUME XVII.
The stories in this collection were taken down from the lips of over sixty negro story-tellers in the remote country districts of Jamaica during two visits to the island, one of six weeks in the summer of 1919, the other of five weeks in the winter of 1921. The music was all recorded during the second visit by Miss Helen Roberts, either directly from the story-teller or from a phonographic record which I had made. In this way the original style of the story-telling, which in some instances mingles story, song and dance, is as nearly as possible preserved, although much is necessarily lost in the slow process of dictation. The lively and dramatic action, the change in voice, even the rapid and elliptical vernacular, can not appear on the printed page. But the stories are set down without polish or adornment, as nearly as possible as they were told to me, and hence represent, so far as they go, a true folk art.
Although some story-tellers claimed to know “more than a hundred” stories, no one narrator gave me more than thirty, and usually not more than four or five at one interview.
Riddling is a favorite pastime of the Jamaica negro. Much is preserved from old African originals in the personification of common objects of yard and road-side, much is borrowed also from old English folk riddling. That this spread has been along the line of a common language is proved by the fact that only a dozen parallels occur in Mason’s Spanish collection from Porto Rico, at least ten of which are quoted by Espinosa from New Mexico, while of collections from English-speaking neighbors, fourteen out of fifty-five riddles collected in South Carolina and nine out of twenty-one from Andros Island are found also in Jamaica. Particular patterns are set for Jamaica riddling into which the phrasing falls with a rhythmical swing careless of rhyme,—“My father has in his yard” and “Going up to town.” The giving of a riddle is regularly preceded by a formula drawn from old English sources—