Jamaican Song and Story:Annancy Stories
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PUBLICATIONS OF THE FOLK-LORE SOCIETY LV. [1904] JAMAICAN SONG AND STORY: ANNANCY STORIES, DIGGING SINGS, RING TUNES, AND DANCING TUNES COLLECTED AND EDITED BY WALTER JEKYLL: 1VITH AN INTRODUCTION BV ALICE WERNER, AND APPENDICES ON TRACES OF AFRICAN MELODY IN JAMAICA I BY , C. S. MYERS, AND ON ENGLISH AIRS AND MOTIFS IN JAMAICA BY LUCY E. BROADWOOD. ' ' A few brief years have passed away Since Britain drove her million slaves Beneath the tropic's fiery ray : God willed their freedom ; and to-day Life blooms above those island graves!" Wkittier ^pttbliskel) for iht Jfolk-gjore §aa.ziyi hg DAVID NUTT, 57 — 59 LONG ACRE LONDON 1907 7 GLASGOW : PRINTED AT THE UNIVERSITY PRESS BY ROBERT MACLEHOSE AND CO. LTD. CONTENTS. lis IJiUJUUUl lUW \jt\l^iCli VVKKWliK Author's Preface, VI Contents. Contents. VII PART IV. : 117. When I go home, 118. Guava root a medicine, 119. Crahss-lookin' dog up'tairs, 120. Goatridge have some set a gal, I2J- Me carry me akee a Linstead market, - - - . 122. Since Dora Logan, 123. Fire, Mr. Preston, Fire ! 124. Tief cahfFee, 125. Fan me, soldierman, - 126. Manny Clark, - 127. Bungo Moolatta, 128. Bahl, Ada, 1 29. Rise a roof in the morning, 130. Oh we went to the river, 131. Aunty Jane a call Minnie, - 132. Marty, Marty, - 133. What make you shave old Hall? - - . 134. Run, Moses, run, 135. Whe you da do ? 136. Mother William, hold back Leah, - - - . 137. Oh, General Jackson ! 138. Soldier, da go 'way, - 139. Don't cry too much, Jamaica gal, 140. Dip them, - . - - 141. Very well, very well, - 142. Oh trial ! - 143. Father, I goin' to join the confirmation, - 144. Obeah down de, 145. The other day me waistcoat cut, - - . - 146. All them gal a ride merry- go-round, 147. Merry-go-round a go fall down, - . - - 148. Try, dear, don't tell a lie, - 149. Look how you mout', - 150. Breezy say him no want Brown lady. via Contents. DANCING ^:\5^ii^E.'S,— Continued. AGE 189. Come go da mountain, 272 190. Amanda Grant, - 191. Last night I was lying on me number, 192. Me lassie, me dundooze. — INTRODUCTION. Mr. Jekyll's delightful collection of tales and songs from Jamaica suggests many interesting problems. It presents to us a network of interwoven strands of European and African origin, and when these have been to some extent disentangled we are confronted with the further question, to which of the peoples of the Dark Continent may the African element be attributed ? The exact relationship between the "Negro" and Bantu races, which of them is the original and which the adulterated stock (in other words, whether the adulteration was an improvement or the reverse), — is a subject quite beyond my competence to discuss. It seems certain that the Negro languages (as yet only tentatively classified) are as distinct from the singularly homogeneous and well-defined Bantu family, as Aryan from Semitic. Ibo, at one end of the area, has possible Bantu affinities, which await fuller investigation; the same thing has been conjectured of Bullom and Temne at the other end (Sierra Leone) ; but these are so slight and as yet so doubtful that they scarcely affect the above estimate. The difference in West Coast and Bantu folk-tales is not so marked as that between the languages ; yet here, too, along with a great deal which the two have in common, we can pick out some features peculiar to each. And Mr. Jekyll's tales, so far as they can be supposed to come from Africa at all, are not Bantu. The name of "Annancy" alone is enough to tell us that. or Anansi is the Tshi (Ashanti)^ word for "spider" Annancy, ; and the Spider figures largely in the folk-tales of the West Coast ^Fanti is a dialect of this language, which is variously called Twi, Chwi, Otyi, and Ochi. ; X Jamaican Song and Story. (by which we mean, roughly, the coast between Cape Verde and Kamerun), while, with some curious exceptions to be noted later on, he seems to be absent from Bantu folk-lore. His place is there taken by the Hare (Brer Rabbit), and, in some of his aspects, by the Tortoise. We find the " Brer Rabbit " stories (best known through Uncle Remus) in the Middle and Southern States of America, where a large proportion, at any rate, of the negro slaves were imported from Lower Guinea. Some personal names and other words preserved among them {e.g. " goober " = nguba, the ground-nut, or " pea-nut ") can be traced to the Fiote, or Lower Congo language and some songs of which I have seen the words,^ look as if they might be Bantu, but corrupted apparently beyond recognition. But the British West Indies would seem to have been chiefly supplied from Upper Guinea, or the "West Coast" proper (it really faces south, while Loango, Congo, etc., are the " South-West Coast "—a point which is sometimes puzzling to the uninitiated). Among the tribes to be found in Jamaica, Mr. Jekyll tells me are the Ibo (Lower Niger), Coromantin (Gold Coast), Hausa, Mandingo, Moko (inland from Calabar), Nago (Yoruba), and Sobo (Lower Niger). Mr. Jekyll furnishes a bit of confirmatory evidence in the list of names (p. 156) given to children according to the day of the week on which they are born. These are immediately recognizable as Tshi. As given in Christaller's Dictionary of the Asante and Fante Language called Tshi (1881), the boys' names are identical or nearly so (allowing for the different systems of spelling) with those in Mr. Jekyll's list. They are : Kwasi, ' One is given by Mr. G. W. Cable in the Century Magazine, xxx. 820, as a Louisiana Voodoo song : H^ron mand^, tigui li papa, H^ron mand^, dos^ dan godo. Another by Mr. W. E. Burghart Du Bois in The Souls of Black Folk, p. 254—apparently a lullaby : Doha na coba gene me, gene me ! Ben d' nu li, nu li, nu li, nu li, bend'le. I can make nothing of these. In the latter case, uncertainty as to the phonetic system adopted complicates the puzzle. One might be tempted to connect the last two words with Zulu endhle or /a«rf^/e= outside, —but I can find nothing else to support this resemblance, and such stray guesses are unprofitable work. Introduction. xi Kwadwo, Kwabena, Kwaku, Kwaw (or Yaw), Kofi, Kwame. (Mr. George Macdonald, in The Gold Coast Past and Present, gives Kwamina, instead of Kwame, probably owing to a difference of dialect. The girls' names are less easily recognizable, but a careful scrutiny reveals the interesting fact that in some cases an older form seems to have been preserved in Jamaica. Moreover, the sound written w by Christ- aller approaches that of b, which seems to be convertible with it under certain conditions, all the girls' names being formed by means of the suffix ba = s. child. Conversely, ekpo in the mouth of a West Coast native sounds to a casual ear like ekwo. Akosuwa[ = Akwasiba] = Quashiba. Adwowa =Jubba. (Cf. dw = dj in "Cudjo"). Abeua = Cubba. Akuwa = Memba. Ya [ = Yawa] = Abba. Afuwa = Fibba. Amma [ = Amenenewa] = Beniba. The boys' names have " Kwa " ( = akoa, a man, slave) prefixed to that of the day, or, more correctly speaking, of its presiding genius. These latter are : Ayisi, Adwo, Bena, Wuku, Yaw, Afi, Amin. The names of the days appear to be formed from them by the omission of the initial A (where it exists), and the addition of the suffix da, with some irregularities, which no doubt a fuller knowledge of the language would explain : Kwasida, Dwoda, Benada, Wukuda, Yawda, Fida, Memeneda (Meminda). The week of seven days does not seem to be known else- where in Africa, except as a result of Moslem or Christian influence. The Congo week of four days is puzzling, till one remembers that it, too, rests on a division of the lunar month : 7x4 instead of 4 x 7.1 The Tshi, Ewe and Yoruba languages are genderless, like the Bantu. (The word ba has come to mean " a daughter " when appropriated as a suffix to feminine names; but, properly, it seems to mean "a child" of either sex.) This fact explains the appearance of such personages as "Brother Cow" (see also Mr. Jekyll's note on p. 107), and the wild confusion of pronouns ^ R. E. Dennett, Folklore of the Fjori, p. 8.