Black Folklore: Why the Teller Keeps Stepping Out of the Story

Before the tale begins, the teller says a strange thing.

We do not really mean, we do not really mean, that what we are about to say is true.

That is an opening formula of Akan storytelling in Ghana, spoken in one form or another before a night of anansesem (ah-nahn-SEH-sem), the spider stories. The teller's first move is to step back from the story. It is one of the oldest habits in Black folklore, and it travelled everywhere the tradition went: to the Georgia Sea Islands, to Kingston, to a room in western North Carolina where somebody is about to tell you about a rabbit.

The question under the question

If you have sat through a telling, you have probably wondered some version of this: if the teller keeps saying the story isn't true and isn't hers, what exactly am I getting? And its sharper cousin, the one people think but rarely ask out loud — does it matter who is standing at the front of the room?

Those are fair questions, and this piece is an attempt to answer them honestly, including the places where the honest answer is it depends. The short version is that the stepping-back is not modesty and it is not hedging. It is a technique with a job to do, it is older than any of the collectors who wrote these stories down, and once you can hear it, you can also hear when it is missing.

The oldest disclaimer in the room

Among the Akan of Ghana — the Asante, the Fante, and their neighbors — folktales are not called folktales. They are called anansesem, spider stories, after Ananse or Anansi (ah-NAHN-see), the spider trickster who is small, hungry, and better at talking than anyone else in the story. The word covers the whole genre. Even a tale with no spider in it is a spider story.

The form comes with brackets on both ends. The opening formula disclaims the truth of what follows. The closing formula, recorded by collectors working in Asante country in the early twentieth century, does something subtler: this, my story, which I have related — if it be sweet, or if it be not sweet, take some elsewhere, and let some come back to me.

Read that again, because it is the whole argument of this article in one line. The teller does not say that was my story. The teller says take some of it away with you, and send some of it back. The tale is on loan. It arrives from somewhere, it goes on somewhere, and the person in the chair is a stop on the route rather than the origin. The disclaimer at the front and the handoff at the back are the tradition's way of saying so.

This is what folklorists sometimes call the teller's stance — how far the person telling stands from the thing told. In a tradition carried by mouth rather than by print, that distance is load-bearing. A story nobody claims to have written can be adjusted for the room, the season, the child who is frightened, the elder who remembers it differently. A story with an author is finished. A story with a teller is still moving.

How the spider bought the stories

The tradition has a story about this, and it is worth telling properly.

In one telling: in the beginning the stories did not belong to Anansi. They belonged to Nyame (NYAH-meh), the sky god, who kept them and did not share them. Anansi climbed up and asked to buy them.

Nyame named a price, and the price was an insult. Bring me Onini the python. Bring me Osebo the leopard. Bring me the Mmoboro, the hornets. Bring me Mmoatia, the small forest being nobody can catch. Great kings and towns had tried and failed; a spider was welcome to try.

Anansi went home to his wife, Aso, who told him how. He took a long palm branch to the python and argued out loud that the snake was surely shorter than the branch, until Onini stretched himself along it to prove otherwise and was tied to it. He dug a pit for the leopard and hauled him out. He carried a calabash of water to the hornets and told them the rain had come, and they flew in out of the weather. He made a small sticky figure for Mmoatia, who struck it and stuck fast.

He carried all four up to the sky. Nyame paid what he had promised. From that day the stories were Anansi's, and they have been called spider stories since.

Notice what the story is actually about. It is not about a clever spider — that is the surface. It is a story about who owns stories, told by people who knew the answer was complicated. Ownership had to be bought. The price was steep. The buyer did not manage it alone; his wife supplied the plan, a detail the tradition keeps and most retellings drop. And what he bought was not the right to hoard them. He bought the right to have them called his while they passed through everybody.

So what is Black folklore, exactly?

Black folklore is the body of stories, songs, sayings, beliefs, and jokes carried by Black communities in Africa and across the diaspora — the tale traditions of West and Central Africa, and everything made from them in the Caribbean, in Brazil, and in the American South. It is not one tradition. Anansi belongs to the Akan; Ijapa the tortoise belongs to Yoruba tellers in Nigeria; Br'er Rabbit was made in the American South out of materials carried from several African tale traditions at once, by people who had been forced to put them all in the same room. Saying "African folklore" as though it named one thing is like saying "European music" and meaning a specific song.

What these traditions share is not content. It is a delivery system. The tale lives in performance, gets its shape from the teller and the audience talking back, and is understood by everyone present to be a version. That shared quality is why the frame around a telling — who is speaking, on whose authority, with whose permission — is not a formality. It is part of the text.

What happens when the frame is wrong

In 1880 a white Atlanta newspaperman named Joel Chandler Harris published Uncle Remus: His Songs and His Sayings. The tales in it were not his. He had heard them as a young man from enslaved and formerly enslaved tellers in middle Georgia, and by most accounts he heard them accurately; folklorists have long acknowledged that the tale texts he set down are close to what was told.

The problem is the frame he built around them. Harris invented a narrator — a genial old Black man who tells stories to a white child on a plantation and who is, in the books, contented there. Every tale arrives through that filter. The real tellers, who had names, went unnamed. The context, which was slavery and its aftermath, was replaced with a warm hearth. And Br'er Rabbit, who in the tellers' own hands is a small creature surviving a world run by larger ones with nothing but nerve and misdirection, got read for a century as a nursery animal.

Alice Walker wrote an essay in 1981 titled "Uncle Remus, No Friend of Mine," about growing up in the same Georgia county as Harris and finding her own inheritance sold back to her in a costume. That is the cost of a bad frame. The stories survived. The tellers were disappeared into a character, and the tradition's own disclaimer — this is how it came to me — was replaced with an author's copyright.

What happens when the frame is right

Compare Zora Neale Hurston, who published Mules and Men in 1935. She had trained in anthropology at Barnard under Franz Boas, and she went collecting in Eatonville, Florida, the all-Black town where she grew up, and in the sawmill and turpentine camps of Polk County.

She did three things Harris did not. She named the tellers — real people, on porches, in their own words, interrupting each other. She used the community's own word for what was happening: these were lying sessions, and the tales were "lies," which is a joke and also a precise technical term, the same disclaimer the Akan formula makes, in Florida English. And she put herself in the book — the car she drove up in, the suspicion she met as a woman with a college education asking for stories, the moments she got it wrong.

Hurston wrote in her introduction that she could not see the tradition while she was inside it; she had to go away and come back with the spy-glass of anthropology to look at the garment she had been wearing all along. That admission is the distance done well. She is telling you exactly where she stood, so you can adjust for it. Black folklore has been served far better by collectors who declared their position than by collectors who hid behind an invented narrator.

It depends: three places the answer gets complicated

So far this is tidy. Here is where it stops being tidy.

First, lineage is often genuinely uncertain. Take the sticky-figure trap in the Anansi story — the same device that catches Br'er Rabbit in the tale usually called Tar Baby. Versions of that episode have been recorded across West Africa, and versions have also been recorded in South Asia and elsewhere, and folklorists have argued for over a century about which way they traveled and how many times. A teller who says "this came from Africa" is telling you something true in the broad sense and possibly unprovable in the specific one. A careful teller will say so. "Versions differ, and the route is disputed" is a real answer, not a dodge.

Second, who may tell it depends on what "it" is. A tale is built to travel; that is what the closing formula is for. A living practice is different. Ifá divination among Yoruba communities, ancestor veneration, the ceremonies of Vodou in Haiti — these belong to lineages, houses, and initiates, and they are not transferable by having read about them. The honest line runs between explaining what a practice means and claiming standing inside it. A teller can retell how Anansi bought the stories, in Waynesville, at a microphone, with no problem at all. A teller who presents themselves as an authority initiated into a tradition they were not initiated into has crossed a line that the tradition itself draws, not one imported by outsiders.

Third, some stories have occasions. Story traditions frequently carry rules about when a tale may be told — not decoration, but structure. In many Native communities in the Southeast, including among Cherokee tellers on the Qualla Boundary not far from Haywood County, certain stories belong to cold months and are not told in summer. Several West African traditions restrict particular narratives to night, or to a particular gathering, or to a particular relationship between teller and listener. If a story has an occasion, the occasion is part of it. The answer to "can this be told here?" comes from the tradition, and the only reliable way to know is that somebody inside it said so.

The mountains already know this move

None of this is foreign to western North Carolina, which is the part most likely to be missed.

Up on Beech Mountain, the Hicks and Harmon families kept the Jack tales for generations — Jack and the giants, Jack and the robbers, the same Jack who climbed the beanstalk, relocated to a mountain farm and made poorer and funnier. Ray Hicks, who died in 2003, told them in a dialect closer to the eighteenth century than to the interstate, and he told them the way tellers do everywhere: this is how my daddy told it, and he had it from his'n. That is the Akan closing formula in an Appalachian mouth. Not a citation. A handoff.

The mountains also know the other half of the story. Richard Chase published The Jack Tales in 1943, and the collection carried the tradition to a national audience — and folklorists have since documented how much Chase reshaped what he was given, smoothing the tellers' language and stamping the material with his own hand while the families who carried it stayed in the acknowledgments. It is a smaller version of the same problem Harris created, and it happened here, to neighbors.

So when a teller comes into a room in Haywood County with stories out of Ghana and Georgia, the local audience is not being asked to learn a new set of manners. They are being asked to apply the ones they already have. You already know the difference between somebody who says my grandmother told it this way and somebody who says the correct version is.

If you're deciding whether to go

A monthly storyteller series is an easy thing to skim past on a calendar. Here is a practical reason to sit in the room, and a practical way to judge what you get.

A speaker bio will tell you where somebody studied. It will not tell you whether they can tell. Those are different skills, and the second one is the one you came for. So listen for the frame rather than the résumé:

• Does the teller name the people and the place? Not "an African tale" but "an Akan tale, from Ghana." Specificity is the tell.
• Does the teller name where they got it? A book, a fieldwork recording, a person, a grandmother. All four are legitimate. Silence is the one to notice.
• Do variants get mentioned? "In one telling" and "some tellers end it differently" mean the person has met more than one version.
• Does the teller distinguish story from practice? Retelling a creation story is one thing; describing a living ceremony is another, and it should sound like description, not instruction.
• Does the room get to talk back? In the traditions these stories come from, the audience answers, corrects, and sometimes sings. A telling that permits that is closer to the real thing than a lecture with slides.

That is also why live matters. You can read every tale mentioned here tonight for free. What you cannot get from a page is the timing, the audience's noise, the pause a good teller leaves for you to get there first — the part of the tradition that was never written down because it cannot be. Bring a student if you have one. These tales were built for mixed-age rooms, which is what a community series usually is.

Names and terms

• Anansi / Ananse — the spider trickster of Akan tradition in Ghana; called Anancy in Jamaica and remembered as Aunt Nancy in parts of the American South.
• Anansesem — literally "spider stories"; the Akan word for the folktale genre as a whole.
• Nyame — the Akan sky god, who held the stories before Anansi bought them.
• Aso — Anansi's wife in many tellings, and the source of the plan that wins the stories.
• Br'er Rabbit — the trickster of African American tales in the South, built from several African tale traditions and sharpened by the conditions of slavery.
• High John de Conquer — a figure of Black Southern lore, a spirit of survival and outwitting, written about at length by Zora Neale Hurston.
• Lying session — the community's own name, recorded in Florida in the 1930s, for an evening of tale-telling.
• The Flying Africans — a tradition recorded along the Georgia coast in which captive Africans rose and flew home; in some accounts they walk into the water singing instead. Versions differ, and the difference matters to the people who keep them.
• Jack tale — the Appalachian tale cycle centered on the boy Jack, carried by families in the North Carolina mountains and told with the same source-naming habit.

The myth and the more accurate version

The myth: a storyteller who begins with this is only how I heard it is hedging — softening a tale they cannot prove and do not really own.

The more accurate version: the disclaimer is part of the tale, the tradition's own way of handing you something without pretending to have made it — and the teller who names the mouth it came through is not stepping away from the story but keeping it in motion, so that you may take some elsewhere, and let some come back.