KacheliTV stays in Jamaica, and in Martha Warren Beckwith's Jamaica Anansi Stories of 1924 — tales Jamaican storytellers told her, their names kept. Part Eight closes the book's second country, the Old Stories, Chiefly of Sorcery, with the tellings banked at the last gate: hidden names, singing cures, and one very tired bird.
Disclosure: this performance is narrated by AI-generated voices.
In "Bird Arinto" a lame boy sings the great bird up and down his underground passage for weeks, until it falls from its roost worn out, and Anansi tries to steal the wedding with a head that has no tongue. "Anansi and Mosquito" tells how the hidden name Zegrady was won — and why the mosquito still sings at every ear. In the two "Anansi Plays Baby" tellings, a feigned baby with a mouthful of teeth outs the name Agumma, twice over, and a nursling's long hair outs poor Tom Goody to the whole town. Anansi's fiddle carries him up to the yard no one could enter in "The King's Three Daughters," and in "The Dumb Child" the same fiddle draws a golden-tongued child from a smile to full song before the king. "The Dumb Wife" is woken by a funeral procession for a husband who is not dead at all. In "Leap, Timber, Leap" Old Conch's song walks a mile-long timber two miles at a leap, and in "The Water Crayfish" a river-child goes home to the water that is her mother.
One passage stands as told: Arinto is a bird that fed on human flesh — its nature, stated and never enacted on anyone in the telling; worn out by the boy's song, it falls from the roost one night, and its death stands off the page. Every tale of this stretch was read in full at this shelf's gate. Excluded at the gate, recorded plainly: "Tiger Softens His Voice"; the first telling of "Anansi plays Baby," in which the spoken names kill; "Anansi and Mr. Able"; and "The Boy Fools Anansi" — each turning on an enacted killing. One telling of this stretch stands banked untouched as a fragment the book itself prints: "Grass-quit." No completeness is claimed for this stretch of the book.
The book's storytellers, kept with honour: Mrs. Ramtalli of Maggotty ("Bird Arinto"); George Parkes of Mandeville ("Anansi and Mosquito" and "The Dumb Child"); Henry Spence of Bog, Westmoreland ("Anansi Plays Baby: Agumma"); Richard Morgan of Santa Cruz Mountains ("Anansi Plays Baby: Tom Goody"); Vincent Morrison of Mandeville ("The King's Three Daughters"); Thomas White of Maroon Town ("The Dumb Wife"); Emanuel Johnson of Brownstown ("Leap, Timber, Leap"); and Moses Hendricks of Mandeville ("The Water Crayfish").
Chapters:
00:37 Bird Arinto
02:39 Anansi and Mosquito
04:28 Anansi Plays Baby: Agumma
05:40 Anansi Plays Baby: Tom Goody
06:38 The King's Three Daughters
07:44 The Dumb Child
10:16 The Dumb Wife
12:27 Leap, Timber, Leap
15:47 The Water Crayfish
Source: Martha Warren Beckwith, Jamaica Anansi Stories, Memoirs of the American Folk-Lore Society, Vol. XVII (1924) — the tales told by the Jamaican storytellers credited above; public-domain 1924 edition (Project Gutenberg eBook #72735). Our telling is a fresh in-house rendering of the 1924 text. Music: gentle instrumental bed under the narration.
Thank you for listening — with Part Eight the Old Stories, Chiefly of Sorcery are told; the Jamaican tales continue on this shelf.
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Jamaican folk tales, Anansi stories, Jamaican folk tales audiobook, Jamaican folklore, Martha Warren Beckwith, Caribbean folk tales, world folk tales, free audiobook
