AMERICAN NEGRO FOLK LITERATURE
Arthur Huff Fauset
Most people are acquainted with Negro Folk Literature even if they do not recognize it as such. There are few children who have not read the Uncle Remus stories of Joel Chandler Harris, which were based upon the original folk tales of the African slaves. But the great storehouse from which they were gleaned, that treasury of folk lore which the American Negro inherited from his African forefathers, is little known. It rivals in amount as well as in quality that of any people on the face of the globe, and is not confined to stories of the Uncle Remus type, but includes a rich variety of story forms, legends, saga cycles, songs, proverbs and phantastic, almost mythical, material.
It simply happens that the one type of Negro story has struck the popular fancy, and becoming better known, blurred out the remaining types. For this result, we are indebted to Joel Chandler Harris, who saw the popular possibilities of the “B’rer Rabbit” tales, and with his own flair for literature, adapted them with such remarkable skill and individuality that to-day they rank with the best known and most highly appreciated works of American literature.
Familiar as he was with his material, and with an instinct for its value—even in his day these tales were fast disappearing among “modern” colored folk—his approach was nevertheless that of the journalist and literary man rather than the folk-lorist. “Written,” as has been said, “with no thought of the ethnological bearing which critics were so quick to discern in them, they established themselves at a bound as among the most winsome of folk tales.” There is some possibility of their having passed out unnoticed and thus being lost to
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