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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.
Parkes gave me the only version I got of this good story in Jamaica; he heard it in the parish of St. Ann. Barker, 181–184, tells the same for “Farmer Mybrow,” but only to the harvesting. In Cronise and Ward, 152–159, a man tries to harvest rice in Devil’s Town. The Devil does all the work, but eventually the pot of rice runs back to the Devil. [263]