About book Every Tongue Got To Confess: Negro Folk-tales From The Gulf States (2002)
Every one of the folk tales collected by Zora Neale Hurston for this volume is interesting and thought-provoking. A number of them are humorous. A surprising number of them are sad. All of them evoke truths about human existence, in the manner of folk tales throughout the world, even as they examine the historical circumstances and social realities confronting African Americans in the Deep South during the era of segregation.Hurston may be best known as a novelist, and particularly as the author of the classic Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937). Yet she was also a dedicated student of anthropology, focusing upon African-American folklore during her undergraduate and graduate studies at Barnard College of Columbia University. Admirers of Hurston’s work already know her book Mules and Men (1935), a collection of African-American folktales published during Hurston’s lifetime; the book is now widely taught, particularly in classes that focus on folklore or on ethnographic research. But Every Tongue Got to Confess, not published until 2001, offers Hurston’s readers something new.A helpful introduction by Hurston scholar Carla Kaplan explains how this manuscript came to be discovered in the archives of the Smithsonian Institution, and situates the work within the larger context of Hurston’s oeuvre. And a foreword by John Edgar Wideman – like Hurston, a writer who has excelled as an author of both creative and scholarly work – is particularly helpful in discussing how “talk functions in African-American communities as it does in Zora Neale Hurston’s life – as a means of having fun, getting serious, establishing credibility and consensus, securing identity, negotiating survival, keeping hope alive, suffering and celebrating the power language bestows” (p. xx).Every Tongue Got to Confess was not the original title of this volume. The work’s initial title, Negro Folk-Tales from the Gulf States, might have been acceptable as a title for a scholarly dissertation back in the 1930’s, but would not be suitable today; accordingly, a key phrase from one of the folktales collected by Hurston during her travels through the Deep South – a tale in which a preacher tells his congregation, “Every tongue got to confess; everybody got to stand in judgment for theyself; every tub got to stand on its own bottom” (p. 30) – is used as the title. I find the quote and the title to be well-chosen; the statement from the preacher in this folktale emphasizes the idea that language needs to be truthful, that each person is the ultimate judge of his or her own actions, that one must take one’s own stand as a free moral agent in a world of ambiguity. At the same time, in the best folkloric tradition, Hurston shows how folklore reminds its listeners not to take themselves too seriously; one petite woman in the preacher’s congregation responds to his exhortation that “every tub got to stand on its own bottom” by saying, “Lordy, make my bottom wider” (p. 30).The folktales are divided up by category: e.g., preacher tales, devil tales, witch tales, tall tales, mistaken identity tales, fool tales, woman tales, school tales, talking animal tales. I was particularly moved by the tales of the cultural hero John; set during slavery times, these folktales tell how an enslaved man named John uses his wits to outwit the slaveholder, and to help other enslaved people. There is a measure of wish-fulfillment in some of these tales; and at the same time there are many grim reminders of the cruelty and brutality of Deep South racism, whether in antebellum slavery times or in the early-20th-century segregation era when Hurston was collecting these folktales. Characteristic in that regard is this short tale: “In Mississippi a black horse run away with a white lady. When they caught the horse they lynched him, and they hung the harness and burnt the buggy” (p. 110).One feature of Every Tongue Got to Confess that may not work well for modern readers is the way in which Hurston uses phonetic misspellings to convey dialect: “wuz” for “was,” “dat” for “that,” “uh” for “a,” and so on. Such phonetic “transcriptions” of dialect were a popular feature of the “local-color” literature that was popular in post-Civil War America, but most of that literature has not aged well; Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1885) is one of the few such works that are still widely read today. As a number of commentators have pointed out, if a writer wants to convey the way a Southerner might say “I’ll be dogged,” it can work better to write not “Ah’ll be dawged!” but rather “I be dog.” It captures the idea of the person speaking in dialect, without the patronizing quality that the elaborate misspellings provide. In that regard, Every Tongue Got to Confess is a book of its time.It is also worth noting that Every Tongue Got to Confess does not try to provide any sort of interpretive synthesis of the larger meaning of the folktales; rather, Hurston provides us with the folktales, and that is that. Where Hurston in Mules and Men provided a framing introduction, and situated the folktales in a first-person narrative of the Florida and Louisiana travels through which she gathered the tales, there is none of that in Every Tongue. The folktales speak for themselves. Perhaps that is as it should be.I re-read Every Tongue Got to Confess while on a recent trip to the Florida Gulf Coast. If one is on the coast at, say, Fort Walton Beach or Destin or Panama City Beach, one has a definite sense of being among the kind of beach-resort culture that is much the same across the country. Yet one does not have to go very far north from the coast before gaining a sense of being within the kind of rural Florida setting that nourished Hurston’s creative imagination. It was easy for me to imagine Hurston driving the narrow roads, making her way from one small town or sawmill or turpentine camp to another, building rapport with suspicious informants, facing fearlessly the dangers attendant upon being an African-American woman alone in the Jim Crow South. What a courageous individual. And what a legacy she left us.Every Tongue Got to Confess, like Mules and Men before it, benefits from Hurston’s gift for conveying the nuances of language, character, and story. For admirers of Hurston’s work, and for students of folklore, African-American culture, and Southern culture, Every Tongue Got to Confess provides a powerful and evocative reading experience.
"A man who was down on his knees praying for God to forgive him for stealing hogs said: 'You might as well forgive me for that big ole turkey gobbler dat roosts in de chinaberry tree, too, Lord'" - Edward Morris, 15 years old, 8th grade, born in Mobile, AlabamaPutting all of the issues of authorship and anthropological ethics aside, this is an important collection of African American literary history and folk tale culture. Rescuing a lost manuscript from being forgotten in the Smithsonian, mixed in with the paperwork of American anthropologist William Duncan Strong, the estate of Zora Neale Hurston, John Edgar Wideman and Carla Kaplan published this collection in 2003, many years after Hurston's death. In her role as an anthropologist, Hurston captures the humor, grace, and original cadence of these tales, earning the trust of the people she interviewed by telling them that she was running from the law and becoming part of their community (Wall). This is a great read placed alongside her works of autobiography and fiction, including Mules and Men and Their Eyes Were Watching God.
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This is a collection of folk tales from the mostly rural South collected in the early part of the 20th Century. The language is intentionally accented and heavy with local sound. This made it slightly hard to understand sometimes, particularly in the quiet points, but also made it much more interesting. Folktales should be audiobooks it seems. I found myself wanting to speak with a Southern accent, or add a bit of a drawl to some words. It took the majority of the book for me to get used to the frequency of the word 'nigger' - but it's used self-referentially and not in the least derogatorily. Many many of the stories use the word, and are also slave stories, and that's an element of what interested me. Some of the stories are very repetitive, but there are a lot of them, and the minor variations between different stories are worth it. Also, the idea that the same story has many local touches in different areas is part of being folk tales I think. Many are funny, or tricky, and while there are some Brer Rabbit stories, this is a collection of far more than that style.
—Heidi
This was a series of folktales and folk stories, recorded just as told to ZNH, complete with the names of the people who told the stories. The book was divided by subject matter--God tales, Devil tales, Tall tales, etc., plus a fairly large miscellaneous section. They were great! As usual w/ZNH's stuff, you get a real sense of cadence and speech patterns, which I love. The mood of the stories was all over the place; lots of funny ones, some raunchy ones, some sharp ones, some sad ones. I didn't read the book cover to cover, but I dipped in and read a fair number of them--mainly the shorter ones.
—Francesca Forrest
SUMMARY: Every Tongue Got to Confess by Zora Neale Hurston is a funny folktale-filled book. In the late 1920s, Zora Neale Heaston went on a lot of travels in which she collected a lot of stories and opinions from other African-Americans like herself. Over 500 stories are in this amusing, thought-provoking collection of folklore about God, the Devil, talking animals, mistaken identities and more! :)ABOUT THE AUTHOR:Zora Neale Hurston knew how to make an entrance. On May 1, 1925, at a literary awards dinner sponsored by Opportunity magazine, the earthy Harlem newcomer turned heads and raised eyebrows as she claimed four awards: a second-place fiction prize for her short story "Spunk," a second-place award in drama for her play Color Struck, and two honorable mentions.The names of the writers who beat out Hurston for first place that night would soon be forgotten. But the name of the second-place winner buzzed on tongues all night, and for days and years to come. Lest anyone forget her, Hurston made a wholly memorable entrance at a party following the awards dinner. She strode into the room--jammed with writers and arts patrons, black and white--and flung a long, richly colored scarf around her neck with dramatic flourish as she bellowed a reminder of the title of her winning play: "Colooooooor Struuckkkk!" Her exultant entrance literally stopped the party for a moment, just as she had intended. In this way, Hurston made it known that a bright and powerful presence had arrived. (Read more at http://zoranealehurston.com/about/)MY OPINION:I really like how humorous this book was in parts, but had a good lesson and was thought-provoking in others. Just to let you know, if you're wondering, this story is an anthology--it's a collection of folktales told by different African-Americans when Ms. Hurston went on a trip through the Gulf States. That makes it interesting, with different writing styles and all. This book also does have some inappropriate content (not suitable for kids) and some cursing (the 'n' word).★★★★ 4/5 stars!SPECIAL THANKS:Special thanks to my Facebook fan, Joni Dischner, for suggesting this book as a must read for Black History Month. :)Blog: KBR and KKRhttp://amazon.com/author/kristinacardozawww.KristinaCardoza.comwww.facebook.com/KristinaCardozaChild...www.twitter.com/KristinaCardoza
—Kristina Cardoza
