Folk Tales of Cabo Verde — Part 3. Three tales from Folk-Lore from the Cape Verde Islands (1923) by Elsie Clews Parsons, collected from Cape Verdean storytellers living in New England in 1916–17 and printed in 1923 — read aloud exactly as Parsons printed them, in her English text. Seventeen minutes of story.
Disclosure: this performance is narrated by AI-generated voices.
THE BRAVE BOY. Jon Brandan kills seven with a blow and fourteen with a cut — seven flies, then fourteen more — but the boast chalked on his back carries him off to a war he knows nothing about, on a war-horse that knows everything.
WHO EATS MOST. Three brothers ride to the end of the world for their father's cure. At the Old Lady's house the eating contest is held under a death sentence for whoever eats less, and her house has seven keys. Mane Jose chooses his father's blessings over money, and brings his three dogs — Flower, Hour, and Moment. A note on this tale, in plain sight: the death stakes are the Old Lady's own stated premise, never carried out on the brothers, who are shut in her pit and let out again; and at the end the three dogs seize and kill the pursuing Old Lady — the blood-drinking ogress of her own song — and her buck. It stands in Parsons' text as printed, and it is declared here rather than softened.
WITHOUT FEAR. A boy who has never been afraid spends a night at the gallows — where he brings the hanged men down and warms them by his fire — and three nights in the king's treasure house, where a visitor arrives in two halves and leaves whole, and still he does not know what fear is, until his wife teaches him with a lapful of small fish. A note, likewise in plain sight: the gallows dead and the visitor in halves are the tale's supernatural scenery, played for wonder and comedy; threats are spoken in dialogue, none is ever carried out, and no one in the tale is harmed.
These are three of the tales that passed this shelf's reading gate for gentle listening; others in the collection did not, and are not read here.
CHAPTERS
00:15 The Brave Boy
04:12 Who Eats Most
11:42 Without Fear
Source: Elsie Clews Parsons, Folk-Lore from the Cape Verde Islands, Parts I–II (Memoirs of the American Folk-Lore Society, Vol. XV, 1923), public domain; lawful text via the Internet Archive. Narration by KacheliTV.
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