Folk Tales of Cabo Verde continues with four more tales from Elsie Clews Parsons' Folk-Lore from the Cape Verde Islands — the great collection she made from Cape Verdean storytellers in New England and published in 1923 — read in her own English, exactly as printed.
Disclosure: this performance is narrated by AI-generated voices.
Kidnap. A mother leaves her little son with her comadre, and the comadre sells him to the King of Bandera. The mother walks the roads singing her lament — "Did you not see my son, Bindima di Leila?" — to a goatherd, a cowherd and a donkeyherd, until she finds the boy safe and brings him home to a feast. One honest word about this tale: its premise is a child sold. Nothing cruel is done to him in the telling — he is found, embraced and feasted — and the flag is named here so no listener is surprised.
The Interrupted Dinner. A discharged soldier shelters in a stable and watches a wife lay out a hidden feast — roast beef, turkey, chicken, bread and wine. His little book of army regulations becomes a "divining book," the feast is his, the book is sold for seven donkeys loaded with money, and the duped husband ends up kneeling in the road, holding the soldier's hat down over a pile of dung while the soldier rides off with his horse.
The Master Thief. Jose wants only one schooling: to learn to steal. With a silver shoe he takes a man's ox; in the ox's hide he takes his sheep; as a cat, and then in a borrowed dress, he takes his salted pork; and a dance invitation parts Wolf from twelve hundred cattle, driven home to the mother who raised him in poverty. One clause is flagged by name: Jose kills the stolen ox to wear its hide. The rest is disguise and sleight, in the old trickster manner.
The Riddle Test. A king mistakes a priest's shaved crown for a diviner's gift and demands three riddles answered: how much the earth weighs, how much the king is worth, and what the king is thinking. The priest's servant goes in his master's collar and gown — and the third answer is the best of the three.
What stands around these four is not hidden. Much of Parsons' collection is the Wolf-and-Nephew trickster cycle, and a great many of those tales turn on killings, beatings and burnings; under this library's standing rule they are excluded, not softened, and the shelf makes no claim to the whole collection. Part 2, like Part 1, tells the tales that stand clean.
Chapters
00:14 Kidnap
02:24 The Interrupted Dinner
07:44 The Master Thief
13:09 The Riddle Test
From Folk-Lore from the Cape Verde Islands (1923) by Elsie Clews Parsons — public domain. The tales were collected from Cape Verdean tellers in New England; the Creole texts printed beside the English are not read here. Music: gentle instrumental bed under the narration.
KacheliTV — world classics, read aloud.
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