Folklore: U.S. Folk Heroes and Characters

Throughout U.S. history, the African-American folk hero has appeared in related incarnations that reflect both the enslaved Africans' cultural heritage and the shifting American sociopolitical landscape that produced them. The cunning animal and slave tricksters, represented by Brer Rabbit and John the slave, the defiant slave ancestors who risked death to flee North, the indomitable Moses figure of Harriet Tubman, the moral hard man John Henry, and the badman Stagolee represent African-American folk heroes whose tales have been passed on through the oral tradition for over six centuries. These folk heroes represent, according to the folklorist John Roberts, historical figures who stand as cornerstones in the foundation of African-American culture: "In this regard, heroic creation is a process very much like culture building—the means by which a group creates and maintains an image of itself to proclaim difference from others by objectifying in its institutions the ideals it claims for itself" (Roberts, 1989, p. 1).

Subversive Heroes

Personified within African-American folk heroes are the cultural ideals that led to their creation. Subversion, confrontation, and resistance against racist oppression are thematically embedded within these tales. These ideals emboldened enslaved Africans in the antebellum South to survive and eventually free themselves from bondage; moreover, the sense of sociocultural distinction provided by folk heroes instilled pride and perseverance among African Americans during the Reconstruction era, when a combination of legislative, economic, and social controls were established to perpetuate a de facto state of slavery following Emancipation. Thus the African-American folk hero emerges as a cultural hero who consistently challenges the forces of racist domination to emerge victorious and who simultaneously recontextualizes American history in a manner that highlights the ingenuity, fortitude, and resilience of the African-American people.

During slavery, animal and slave trickster tales were prevalent. Enslaved Africans embraced the diminutive Brer Rabbit because he continually outsmarted his fiercer animal rivals through his innate intelligence and guile. According to several folklorists, Brer Rabbit should be viewed as an African diasporic folk hero since rabbit and other animal trickster tales may be found on the African continent, in the Caribbean, and in South America. On Brer Rabbit's African roots and subsequent New World incarnations, Jacqueline Shachter Weiss notes:

In the African folktales, small animals, such as the turtle or praying mantis, were praised for what they did well. Among the Ashanti of West Africa, the hero was the spider, Anansi…. Though Anansi is a well-known folk character in Guyana, Jamaica and the Virgin Islands, the rabbit is appreciated more in the Americas. Brer Rabbit is his name in most English-speaking lands. In Venezuela, where he is especially popular today, as well as Colombia and Panama, he is called Tio Conejo ("Uncle Rabbit"). In Cuba, he is Hermano Rabito ("Brother Rabbit") and in Brazil, o coelho ("the rabbit"). (Weiss, 1985, p. 3)

Most folklorists consider Brer Rabbit's trickster-hero ethos of survival integral to the enslaved Africans' self-conceptualization. Robert Hemenway notes, "The point cannot be overemphasized that black people identified with Brer Rabbit. When Brer Rabbit triumphed over a physically superior foe, black people fantasized themselves in an identical situation" (1982, p. 19). Furthermore, through the oral performance of Brer Rabbit tales, enslaved Africans found diversion from the backbreaking labor of slavery and simultaneously created a distinctly African-American cultural tradition that celebrated their identity. As Roger Abrahams comments in the introduction to Afro-American Folktales, "Told at night, for entertainment as well as instruction, in the traditional African style…these stories…provided entertainment by which the community could celebrate its identity as a group" (1985, p. 18).

Enslaved Africans in the United States reveled in the exploits of Brer Rabbit, but it is important to note that these trickster tales diverge greatly from the Indo-European and Euro-American folktale tradition. In considering Brer Rabbit's place within the Western canon of fairytales, Abrahams further advises readers:

Contrast this with the intent of the usual Indo-European fairytale, where action is initiated by an individual seeking to better herself or himself and advance to the point of happily-ever-aftering. We also fail to find the style of story, so common in Euro-American traditions, that conveys the message that moral violations be punished. The African and Afro-American stories more commonly chronicle how a trickster or a hero uses his wits to get something he wants. (Abrahams, 1985, p. 18)

Brer Rabbit's predominance in the folktales of the Americas is a testament to the trickster's African cultural roots and the enslaved Africans' need for an unlikely hero; this animal trickster's implausible victories seem to have enabled slaves to insert themselves into the trickster tale. From this root, the slave trickster in the person of John was born.

In many of the John-Master tales, John is cast in the role of ego-affirming sidekick. He is forced to reaffirm his owner's precarious sense of superiority while the plot reveals John's innate intelligence. To bolster his owner's insecure sense of self, John must wear the dual mask of ignorance and stupidity to ensure his survival.

Ancestors, Liberators, and Insurrectionists

Unlike the implicitly subversive Brer Rabbit and John-Master tales, histories of slave ancestors, liberators, and insurrectionists were explicit, and they were prevalent in antebellum and postbellum American society. The descendants of slaves kept tales of defiant runaway ancestors alive through the oral tradition and wore their ancestors' rebellion as a badge of pride. In Black Culture and Black Consciousness, Lawrence Levine relates the experience of folklorist Richard Dorson, who collected tales of runaway slaves from their descendants in Michigan in the twentieth century:

On my first meeting with E. L. Smith…he recited the superhuman adventures of his maternal grandfather, Romey Howard, in escaping from the patterollers and bloodhounds that pursued runaway slaves….Mr. Smith told them for truth, having heard them firsthand from his grandfather, a self-made folk hero, who thwarted and rendered ridiculous the white oppressor. (quoted in Levine, 1977, p. 387)

The descendants of slaves embraced their ancestors as heroes because they risked torture and death to obtain their freedom. Outstanding among the enslaved Africans who cast their lot with flight and rebellion was Harriet Tubman. Known as the Moses of her people, Tubman led enslaved Africans from bondage in the American South to freedom in the North. According to historian Vincent Harding, biblical stories recounting the trials and tribulations of the Israelites were a source of great encouragement, for Tubman, who "grew up on stories of the Hebrew children, sang the songs of impossible hope….She prayed and talked with God and became fully convinced that her God willed her freedom" (quoted in Roberts, 1989, p. 162). In accepting her role as the liberator of her people, Tubman came to see her mission as identical to that of Moses. Her life was significant to the extent that she used it to exercise the will of God, a will that included freedom for her people: "Like Moses, Harriet Tubman risked her own freedom to answer the call of God to lead her people out of slavery" (Roberts, 1989, p. 161). Harriet Tubman's proto-emancipatory legacy has become an integral part of most secondary-school and college curricula, but her contribution also lives on in the African-American oral tradition, in the Negro spiritual of the nineteenth century, and in the rap song of the twentieth century.

According to Eric Sundquist, "Steal Away" is one of the most evocative sorrow songs in the catalogue of Negro spirituals due to its use in the surreptitious planning of slave meetings, resistance, and flight: "'Steal Away,' as countless former slaves recalled the phrase, was a thinly coded song used to announce secret religious service or secular celebration; it could also act as a profession of rebellion, a call used by Nat Turner and Harriet Tubman…to organize slave resistance and plans of escape" (1993, p. 511). That this spiritual is still sung today recalls the power and continuity of the African-American oral tradition. It is a tradition that recalls the dualistic nature of the American slave past: a highly oppressive socioeconomic system that simultaneously engendered an irrepressible spirit of resistance within Tubman and other insurrectionists like her.

In the twentieth century, Tubman's historical role has not been lost on younger generations of African-Americans; the socially conscious rappers Nas and Rah Digga keep her memory alive. In the introduction to his 1996 platinum-selling compact disc It Was Written, Nas honors Tubman: "Man, damn dis place, damn dese chains. Harriet done gone de night befo', it's time we go. Dis ain't no place for black people; de promised lan' callin'." And in 2000 the rapper Rah Digga explained that she titled her album Dirty Harriet to honor Tubman's commitment to freedom and to warn female rappers against exploiting their sexuality in order to be marketable.

The defiance of Tubman and other slave ancestors stands in stark opposition to the white stereotype of the Sambo figure: "The docile, infantile, lazy, irresponsible personality…the product of a system of slavery that required absolute conformity" (White, 1985, p. 17).

The Hard Man and the Badman

The survival of enslaved Africans required a degree of conformity that was tested by countless runaways and rebels, but the years following Emancipation provided no relief. On the contrary, Reconstruction perpetuated chattel slavery's theoretical underpinnings of African-American disenfranchisement, oppression, and exploitation. As Jerry Bryant writes, "De facto slavery replaced the 'peculiar institution' in the form of Jim Crow, sharecropping, and a carefully controlled labor market that forced black men and women into the worst and lowest paying jobs" (2003, p. 9).

During the years following Reconstruction, African Americans were not only prevented from exercising the basic rights of citizenship, they were terrorized by the Ku Klux Klan and other bands of marauding whites who in some cases pillaged entire African-American communities. Levine writes, "What were referred to as race riots in the last half of the nineteenth century and the early years of the twentieth would be more accurately described as pogroms. Whites attacked, murdered, and pillaged blacks" (1977, p. 439). It was during these tumultuous decades that the African-American folk ballad emerged; this lyrical narrative extolled the virtues of the moral hard man John Henry and the legendary badman Stagolee.

John Henry, the steel-driving man who died proving that his natural might could surpass the manufactured power of the machine (the steam engine), is one of the greatest folk heroes in American history. In John Henry: Tracking Down a Negro Legend, Guy Johnson writes, "There is a vivid, fascinating, tragic legend about him which Negro folk have kept alive and have cherished…and in doing so they have enriched the cultural life of America" (1969, p. 151). The John Henry legend has indeed deepened the breadth of the American folk tradition, for in the many variants of John Henry lore Americans have, knowingly or unknowingly, embraced a folk hero whose initial declaration of humanity was formed by rejecting the white societal expectation of African-American subservience, even upon pain of death.

John Henry's first assertion of his manhood and his equality—his single most dominant characteristic…comes when he refused to continue picking the white man's cotton….The point made in this episode is that blacks must not allow white intimidation to prevent them from asserting themselves, even when they know there is the risk that they might be killed. (Thomas, 1988, p. 58)

Thus began the career of John Henry, a career built on the consistent expression of both moral and physical intractability in the face of white domination. In several different versions, his famed battle against the steam drill at Big Bend Tunnel spread to every region of the land. According to Daryl Cumber Dance, the numerous variants of the John Henry ballad, work song, and tale provide unique insight into the collective ethos of African Americans.

A tale's growth and continued existence is contingent upon its acceptance by a larger group. The modifications it undergoes will reflect the soul of the group within which it circulates, so that when a tale can be properly called a folk-tale—when it exists in variant forms—we should be aware that it is thereby an item of some significance in understanding something about that group. (Dance, 2002, p. xxvii)

Although the widespread circulation of John Henry lore throughout the country seems to attest to the African-American community's admiration for those who openly challenged white intimidation, John Henry's victory over the steam engine also reflects the actual and symbolic triumph of man over machine. His was an impossible feat that held even greater implications for the African-American workingman's place in an increasingly industrialized society. As Nigel Thomas writes, "John Henry's conquest of the white machine could be interpreted as his triumphing over white intelligence and capitalist indifference, a feat all oppressed blacks would want to perform" (Thomas, 1988, p. 57).

Although this analysis of John Henry's import for African Americans seems accurate, Thomas fails to acknowledge that the ubiquity of John Henry lore in America is indicative of the folk hero's legendary status beyond the African-American community. To this day, Henry remains one of the best-known American folk heroes; he is a universal symbol of the intrepid American laborer who strove to maintain his dignity in the face of obsolescence brought on by the industrial age.

From within the same ballad tradition that spawned the lore of John Henry, the steel-driving man, sprang narratives about a different type of intractable African-American man—the badman. Perhaps the most famous of these is Stagolee, whose multiple eponyms (comparable to Brer Rabbit's) testify to how deeply his legend has become embedded within the collective African-American consciousness. "Stagolee—a.k.a. Stacker Lee, Staggerlee, Stackalee, Stackolee, Stack-O-Lee, Staggalee, Stack-O, and Stack-Lee is the star of the badmen. The several forms his name takes suggest the numerousness of the versions of his story" (Bryant, 2003, p. 13). In several versions of the Stagolee tale, the hero shoots Billy Lyons, a suspected professional gambler on the grift, after a gambling match in which Lyons wins Stagolee's magic Stetson hat. While Stagolee has clearly committed murder, John Roberts advises readers to note that "in the badman folk heroic tradition, those individuals who served as a focus for folk heroic creation were not the professional criminals, but rather their victims who responded to victimization with violence" (1989, p. 207). Seen in this manner, Roberts argues, Stagolee's act of murder is an act of retaliation against a conman who attempted to dupe him. Viewed in a broader historical context, Stagolee and others in the badman tradition should be considered outlaw rebels who disregarded the law specifically because it was representative of—and was in most cases equivalent to—the existing white power structure that brutalized and oppressed African Americans in the decades following Emancipation.

Throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, African-American folk heroes have embodied the ideals of resistance that enabled African Americans to rebel against slavery and following Emancipation to overcome the slave system's legacy of racist oppression and disenfranchisement. The guile of Brer Rabbit and John, the death-defying bravery of slave ancestors and liberators, the intractability of John Henry, and the iconoclasm of the badman all reflect a collective African-American will to resist racist domination. This collective will is an aspect of the African-American cultural tradition that reflects the indomitable nature of the human spirit. These heroes, both actual and fictitious, personify the struggle for self-definition, self-determination, and self-actualization that lies at the heart of the human condition.

See also Black Arts Movement; Comic Books; Comic Strips; Drama; Folklore: Latin American and Caribbean Culture Heroes and Characters; Folklore: Overview; Literary Magazines; Literature of the United States

Bibliography

Abrahams, Roger D., ed. Afro-American Folktales: Stories from the Black Tradition in the New World. New York: Pantheon, 1985.

Bryant, Jerry H. Born in a Mighty Bad Land: The Violent Man in African-American Folklore and Fiction. Bloomington: University of Indiana Press, 2003.

Dance, Daryl Cumber, ed. From My People: Four Hundred Years of African American Folklore. New York: Norton, 2002.

Hemenway, Robert. "Introduction." In Uncle Remus: His Songs and His Sayings, by Joel Chandler Harris. New York: Penguin, 1982.

Johnson, Guy B. John Henry: Tracking Down a Negro Legend (1929). New York: AMS Press, 1969.

Levine, Lawrence W. Black Culture and Black Consciousness: Afro American Folk Thought from Slavery to Freedom. New York: Oxford University Press, 1977.

Nas (Nasir Jones). "Introduction." It Was Written (audio CD). New York: Columbia, 1996.

"Rah Digga: Biography." Hiponline.com. Available from <http://www.hiponline.com/artist/music/r/rah_digga>.

Roberts, John W. From Trickster to Badman: The Black Folk Hero in Slavery and Freedom. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1989.

Sundquist, Eric J. To Wake the Nations: Race in the Making of American Literature. Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1993.

Thomas, H. Nigel. From Folklore to Fiction: A Study of Folk Heroes and Rituals in the Black American Novel. New York: Greenwood, 1988.

Weiss, Jacqueline Shachter, comp. Young Brer Rabbit, and Other Trickster Tales from the Americas. Owing Mills, Md.: Stemmer House, 1985.

White, Deborah Gray. Ar'n't I a Woman?: Female Slaves in the Plantation South. New York: Norton, 1985.

larose t. parris (2005)