Page:The New Negro.pdf/283

Rh is distinctively African. Æsop, it is claimed was African, but any folk-lorist knows that the African folk fable of indigenous growth outmasters Æsop over and over. Africa in a sense is the home of the fable; the African tales are its classics.

It is interesting, in this connection, to consider the case of the rabbit, which figures so largely in Negro Folk Lore. It was the belief of Harris, and still is the belief of many, that the Negro chose the weak rabbit and glorified him in his stories because this animal was a prototype of himself during slavery times; according to this theory, the stronger, more rapacious animals such as wolves, foxes, etc., represented the white masters. But this cannot be so, for as Ambrose E. Gonzales aptly points out in his volume entitled, Æsop Along the Black Border, these stories, or their types at least, came with the Negro from Africa where they had existed for centuries. In the African tales, the hare is the notable figure. Surely, then, the rabbit is none other than the African hare. As a matter of fact, the "B’rer Rabbit” character simply confirms the opinion that Negro Folk Lore is a genuine part of world folk literature, for we find the hare one of the animals most frequently encountered in folk lore the world over. Scottish and Irish Tales he is associated with witches. In the ancient Druidical mysteries the hare was employed in auguries to indicate the outcome of war. Chinese and East Indian stories feature the hare, and he is common even in the tales of the American Indian. The Easter "bunny" shows the hare cropping up in a Teutonic atmosphere. So that when all these instances are added to the African and American Negro we may be reasonably safe in assuming that “B’rer Rabbit” comes into American lore from the level of true primitive folk material.

The antiquity and authentic folk lore ancestry of the Negro tale make it the proper subject for the scientific folk-lorist rather than the literary amateur. It is the ethnologist, the philologist and the student of primitive psychology that are most needed for its present investigation. Of course no one will deny or begrudge the delightful literary by-products of this material. Negro writers themselves will shortly, no doubt,