Page:Memoirs of the American Folk-Lore Society XVII.djvu/12

xii vividness with which these animal actors take part in the story springs from the idea that they really represent the dead in the underworld whose spirits have the power, according to the native belief, of taking animal form. The head-man on a Westmoreland cattle-pen even assured me that Anansi, once a man, was now leader of the dead in this land of shades. However this may be, the development of Jamaican obeah or witchcraft has been along the same two lines of interest. Magic songs are used in communicating with the dead, and the obeah-man who sets a ghost upon an enemy often sends it in the form of some animal; hence there are animals which must be carefully handled lest they be something other than they appear.

Riddling is a favorite pastime of the Jamaica negro. Much is preserved from old African originals in the personification of common objects of yard and road-side, much is borrowed also from old English folk riddling. That this spread has been along the line of a common language is proved by the fact that only a dozen parallels occur in Mason's Spanish collection from Porto Rico, at least ten of which are quoted by Espinosa from New Mexico, while of collections from English-speaking neighbors, fourteen out of fifty-five riddles collected in South Carolina and nine out of twenty-one from Andros Island are found also in Jamaica. Particular patterns are set for Jamaica riddling into which the phrasing falls with a rhythmical swing careless of rhyme,—"My father has in his yard" and "Going up to town." The giving of a riddle is regularly preceded by a formula drawn from old English sources—

generally abbreviated into

The art is practised as a social amusement, groups forming in which each person in the circle must propound riddles until his supply is exhausted or his riddle unguessed.

My own work as a collector in this engrossing field of Jamaican folk-lore owes much to those collectors who have preceded me and who have enjoyed a longer and more intimate acquaintance than has been possible for me with the people and their idiom;—to Monk Lewis, a true folk-lorist, whose "Journal" of 1816 is of the greatest interest to-day, to Mr. Walter Jekyll and