Folk Tales of the Bahamas — Part 1 (Playing Godfather · Tug of War · The Sillies · The Dog, the Cat, the Donkey, and the Rooster · The Escape · Feeding the Family)
Disclosure: this performance is narrated by AI-generated voices.
Part one — the premiere of a new shelf. Six folk tales from Andros Island in the Bahamas, taken down from Bahamian tellers by Elsie Clews Parsons and published in Folk-Tales of Andros Island, Bahamas (1918), heard here in a fresh telling in standard English from Parsons's dialect transcriptions. In Playing Godfather, Rabby invents summons after summons to name other people's children — Begin Um, Quarter Um, Half Um, End Um — and eats the shared keg of butter at every call. In Tug of War, the same little trickster ties Brother Elephant and Brother Whale to the two ends of one rope, and each giant marvels at his strength. In The Sillies, a mother and her three daughters stand at the well all evening asking what the suitor will be to them, until he comes and answers it himself. In The Dog, the Cat, the Donkey, and the Rooster, four travelling companions take their posts in the robbers' empty house and frighten the owners away for good. In The Escape, a singing fish talks its way puddle by puddle back to the sea, and a turtle swims out by degrees and does not come back. In Feeding the Family, Jane Bethel's one bird-sent pound of flour grows under her hands into fifteen barrels for her fifteen children. The episode opens and closes with its theme, Ancient Canopy, heard also briefly between the stories.
Chapters
0:38 Playing Godfather
4:02 Tug of War
6:48 The Sillies
9:20 The Dog, the Cat, the Donkey, and the Rooster
11:09 The Escape
13:46 Feeding the Family
Five further tales of the book are not read on this shelf, excluded by name after a full reading: Tar Baby · The Fig-Tree · The Dinner-Party · Pot and Whip · The Housekeepers. No claim of completeness for the book is made.
From Folk-Tales of Andros Island, Bahamas, by Elsie Clews Parsons (Memoirs of the American Folk-Lore Society, vol. 13, 1918), public domain — Internet Archive folktalesandros01parsgoog; the six tales complete and in book order, in a fresh telling in standard English. Narrated by Lulu. Theme: Ancient Canopy.
KacheliTV — world classics, read aloud.
