Jamaica Anansi stories

Chapter 268: 4. Tiger’s Sheep-skin Suit. [Story]

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About This Book

A collection of Jamaican folktales gathers short animal and trickster narratives centered on the spider Anansi alongside tales about tigers, monkeys, goats, and birds. Stories account for curious animal traits, stage comic reversals, and probe themes of cunning, justice, and social order through episodic plots and origin motifs. The volume also presents riddles, dance and song materials, and field-recorded music, arranged in thematic sections that compile variants, brief notes, and folkloric context for each tale.

[Contents]

4. Tiger’s Sheep-skin Suit. [Story]

Parkes heard this story in St. Ann Parish. Wona, 62–67, tells how Anansi steals Monkey’s clothes and passes the theft off on “Bone.”

Compare: Tremearne, FL 21:352; Harris, Nights; 68–74; Parsons, Sea Islands, 145; JAFL 32:366.

The common theme of teaching to an unsuspecting comrade an incriminating song (as in Parsons, Sea Islands, 145) is here emphasized by a second intrigue, that of the sheep-skin suit. The idea seems related to the next number. In Wona, 30–36, Tacoomah puts on a sheep-skin and hides in the fold from which the sheep are being stolen, Anansi ties and accuses him because he wears the sheep-skin. [236]