Folktales and Metaphor in Every Tongue Got to Confess

Zora Neale Hurston spent time in the gulf coast and the south collecting negro folk tales, which was a powerful oral tradition that had not yet been recorded when she went about the business of doing it. The book begins with tales about god, and it is in these tales we can see how different people took the bible stories that they had grown up with and used them to explain the world around them, a sort of narrative metaphor. This is a unique language that is the product of a distinctly oral tradition that lasted for hundreds of years before African-Americans were commonly educated. The oral aspect of these folk tales is what makes them special. 

Although each story is short and sometimes has biblical roots, the use of metaphor, both as explaining something in terms of another or by using a familiar story and laying a different cultural understanding on top of it. For example, in the story, “Why Negroes Have Nothing” the speaker, Larkins White, uses the familiar christian creation story and adds another layer to it. The story goes that god was giving all the nations of the earth different things and the negro man was nowhere to be found. So, he sent an angel to wake up the negro and the god offers him his chance to get something to which he says, “De nigger never moved out his tracks. He said, ‘Ah don’t want nothin’ and went back tuh sleep. Thass how come we ain’t got nothin’.”

In the section Heaven Tales, we have this gem from Davis Leverett, “There was a man went to heaven and a man who told him he start to stealing he would go to hell. And he said, “Each person in the world has a lamp, and if your lamp is low, you are going to hell.” the man seen that his lamp was low, and he went to stealing oil out of people’s mass, puttin it into his—and he went to hell.” In this story, we see a bible story juxtaposed against stories of the afterlife. Many of these folktales are grown out of stories that black people heard but did not read, as literacy rates remained low well after slavery ended. The context is wrong given the nature of the bible story but both in the retelling of the story and in the context of the story, the bible story is used to tell multiple layers of a moral. Early in the story, the lamp metaphor is used to show how to get into heaven and the man in the story interprets the moral wrong and steals oil thinking that is his ticket into heaven and of course, it isn’t because you can’t get into heaven by stealing. This narrative metaphor has three layers.

This sort of narrative metaphor is seen again in the stories about witches and the devil. In the story of High Walker, where a spirit can make bones rattle, you can see the foundation of voodoo magic and a deep sense of African animism that managed to survive through oral tales from mothers to daughters and fathers to sons. These stories, distinctively non-christian except for the liberal use of the world, “devil” are a way of explaining the “things that go bump in the night.” One can imagine a world in which the trees whistled in the wind, and it seemed like danger was all about. These stories were a way of explaining all those sounds.