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"Get Your Ass in the Water and Swim Like Me is a brilliant, ground-breaking work in both the collection and analysis of African American oral culture. Indispensable to all students of American popular culture." -Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Harvard University "A stone cold classic! All you Hip Hop heads need to know this book if you want to know your roots." --Robin D.G. Kelley, author of Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination "Bruce Jackson's Get Your Ass in the Water and Swim Like Me is a pioneering work that is as fresh today as when it was first published. As this collection, and Jackson's astute analyses make clear, black oral poetry and folklore are great literature. Funny as all get out, full of biting wit and dazzling wordplay, this book drops more science than Einstein while proving the genius of black folk who created meaning and defended their lives through signifying words. I hope the hip-hop generation takes a look at this book that documents where it all got started!" -Michael Eric Dyson, author of Mercy, Mercy Me: The Art, Loves & Demons of Marvin Gaye Get Your Ass in the Water and Swim Like Me African American Narrative Poetry from Oral Tradition Bruce Jackson !l I~ ~?io~!!;~~:up (:) LONDON AND NEW YORK First published 1974 by Harvard University Press Published 2017 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN 711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017, USA Routledge is an imprint ofthe Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business Copyright © 2004 by Bruce Jackson The Open Access version of this book, available at www.tandfebooks.com, has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 license. Cover image from the collections of the Library of Congress. ISBN 978-0-415-96996-3 (hbk) ISBN 978-0-415-96997-0 (pbk) Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available from the Library of Congress. For Roger D. Abrahams and for Ira and Nina Cohen and, most of all, for Diane "But along with their scars, black people have a secret. Their genius is that they have survived. In their adaptations, they have developed a vigorous style of life. It has touched religion, music, and the broad canvas of creativity. The psyche of black men has been distorted, but out of that deformity has risen a majesty. It began in the chants of the first work song. It continues in the timelessness of the blues. For white America to understand the life of the black man, it must rec­ ognize that so much time has passed and so little has changed." William H. Grier and Price M. Cobbs, Black Rage, 1968 Preface This is a book of toasts-narrative poems from black American oral tradition. Along with black folk sermons and lyrics of work-songs, spirituals, and blues, the toasts comprise an extraordi­ nary body of folk poetry matched hardly anywhere in the world. I've never met anyone who knows why these poems are called toasts. The best guess I've heard is, "They're poems and most drinking toasts are poems," which is not true at all. Though these may be recited while drinking, there is no connection between the recitation and the lifting of glasses, there is none of the toasting ritual involving cooperation of others. Recitation of these toasts is a performer-audi­ ence event, not a communal ritual. A drinking toast is directed toward a third party or idea, but these toasts are directed to nothing, at least not overtly; they are there to be acted, heard, and experienced. Toast-telling situations are fun; the good performers recite in grand theatrical style. The audience often participates; a listener sometimes replies with a version he likes better, and other members of the audience comment on the differences in performance. They are dynamic events, full of sound and movement. Texts on a printed page are pale shadows, lacking for fine movements of the real events. The first time I ever heard toasts was at the Indiana State Peniten­ tiary in 1961. I had no idea what they were, but I knew here was a kind of poetry no one had ever told me about and which was worth telling other people about. I played some of the tapes for John Gagnon, senior research sociologist at the Institute for Sex Research (now professor of Sociology at SUNY/Stony Brook), and he told me about a recent University of Pennsylvania Ph.D. thesis by Roger D. Abrahams in which there were a number of similar texts. Abrahams' thesis was published the following year. It was an event of true scholarly impor­ tance, for not only did he include a number of obscene and erotic prose and poetry texts such as had rarely been published previously, but he drew attention to the fact and function of the rich body of black folk narrative that had survived and developed in the urban situation. His book-Deep Down in the Jungle ... Negro Narrative Folklore from the Streets of Philadelphia-deals with black folklore from one small neighborhood. He was interested in the range and function of narrative forms in that community, and one portion of his book had to do with toasts. Since it was first published in 1963, there has been some mention of toasts in articles, but no large group of them has been published, nor has anything appeared which gives any indication of the scope of the genre. That is what I attempt here. The variants published in this book are not all I collected but those that show the kinds of variation found in the toasts. Some have significant differences in plot and development, others vary in minor stylistic ways. At all times my interest was in showing the range of styles and the kinds of variation that do occur. None of the texts in this book come from women performers. According to the men I've interviewed, there are very few women who do know toasts, and though toasts were sometimes performed while women were present, they were most often recited in all-male groups. My field work focused on the lore of lower-class black men; though I accept their claim that the toast is male property, I hope some scholar investigates what narrative traditions are extant among black women in this country. The toasts are often extremely misogynic, so it seems unlikely women would learn or recite them; it would be interesting to know if women have narratives that are equally misandric. There are reasons why there may be more narrative lore among the men. Their society-as described by Hannerz (1969), Liebow (1967), Abrahams (1970), Reynolds (1974), and others-exists out­ side: on the streetcorner, in the bar, poolhall, place of transient employment. Women may visit those areas, but their domain is else­ where. Their turf is the household, which doesn't offer as much opportunity for performance as those transient locations, nor are there as many passing outsiders with new poems to recite, new tales to tell, new versions to offer. By saying the toasts are poems from oral tradition, I mean they may have had a number of authors rather than just one, or, to put it another way, various audiences have had an opportunity to modify the points or parts they didn't much like. The process of modification may have occurred over a considerable number of years, by different hands at different times. That is one of the major differences between written poetry and folk poetry; with written poetry, the audience makes its judgment after the fact; with folk poetry, the audience's judgment is part of the fact. viii Preface Folk audiences are no different from literary audiences, but they sometimes seem less pretentious about what they do. They do not pretend their decisions are based on high and immutable aesthetic values; they do not pretend they have no gut reactions to things; they do not pretend to like things which make no sense to them. In a way they are the harshest of audiences, for they are intolerant of what bores them and tend to discard boring things quickly and to reject boring performers immediately. The process of oral narrative is such that any active participant can change parts he doesn't like or under­ stand or redesign parts not meaningful to his immediate audience. Folk poetry is intolerant of private meanings, private construc­ tions, for to survive it must be as available to the audience as the stories in a tabloid newspaper. The vocabulary of folk poetry is the public vocabulary, and when a folk poem moves geographically its vocabulary usually changes to keep it consonant with the local vocab­ ulary. Often its characters are public characters whose roles are known well to the listeners. Such roles have no surprises, only articulations. Folk poetry depends on fulfilled expectations: the characters will be who they are supposed to be, the words will mean what they are supposed to mean. It is an open literature; all primary meaning is on the surface. Eric Auerbach's comments on the surface reality of the Homeric poems (1957:1-20) hold true for much folk narrative. The sort of complex meaning found beneath the surface of a written poem is meaning that is latent, present within it, but the kind of complex mean­ ing evoked from a folk poem is meaning about the way the poem relates to the tellers or the culture - little within the thing itself. Art poetry forges language into new frames to hold something that did not exist before the language was so shaped.

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