Negro myths from the Georgia coast, told in the vernacular

Chapter 2: PREFATORY NOTE

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About This Book

This collection assembles short folktales and tall tales drawn from the coastal rice- and swamp-region oral tradition, rendered in local vernacular speech. The pieces range from animal trickster episodes—featuring a clever rabbit, alligator, wolf, turkey, and other creatures—to human-centered anecdotes about conjuring, superstition, plantation life, and humorous misadventures. Arranged as many brief numbered stories, the volume preserves regional expressions, rhythm, and humor while alternating fables, jokes, and supernatural accounts. Recurrent themes include cunning over brute strength, community memory, survival in marshland settings, and the interplay of practical wit and folkloric belief.

PREFATORY NOTE

Mr. Joel Chandler Harris has, in an admirable way, commended to public notice the dialect and folk-lore in vogue among the Negroes of Middle Georgia. With fidelity and cleverness has he perpetuated the legends and songs once current among these peoples, and now fast lapsing into oblivion. There is, however, a field, largely untrodden, in which may be found ample opportunity for the exhibition of kindred inquiry and humor. We refer to the swamp region of Georgia and the Carolinas, where the lingo of the rice-field and the sea-island negroes is sui generis, and where myths and fanciful stories, often repeated before the war, and now seldom heard save during the gayer moods of the old plantation darkies, materially differ from those narrated by the sable dwellers in the interior.

In confirmation of this suggestion we record the following Negro Myths from the Georgia Coast.

Augusta, Georgia, March, 1888.