Folk Tales of Cabo Verde — Part 5. Three tales from Elsie Clews Parsons' Folk-Lore from the Cape Verde Islands (1923), read aloud exactly as Parsons printed them (a single exception is declared in the reading notes below), in the order she printed them.
Disclosure: this performance is narrated by AI-generated voices.
Uncle Caramba (No. 63): a man who owns nothing but a scrap of land sells it, ships as a sailor who works only in bad weather, and makes his fortune diving for a sunken treasure chest and out-guessing three servants. Declared for this tale: the fall from the mast and the diving wager are the hero's own bluff — no one is harmed; the closing joke is coarse, and stands as Parsons printed it — the captain, asking who has been fouling the pump, is handed his own faeces wrapped in paper. One change from the printed page, made under this shelf's standing rule for period terms: the 1923 text names the captain's other diver with a period racial word; here he is simply "the diver" throughout. The story is unchanged.
The Doctor and the Devil (No. 64): Dr. Lelexe of Brava buries the devil in a gourd of milk, then makes his fortune curing the Princess of Lisbon — twice — by calling the devil out of her. Declared for this tale: the devil is bound by a bargain struck in words, and the belly-opening that frightens him off the second time exists only in the doctor's warning; it is never done. The doctor's fear that they will kill him at Lisbon is likewise only what he tells his wife.
Mr. May (No. 65): a seventh son who can become normal or invisible at will, and his mother, are taken in by a rich man — until seven robbers come for the house, and Mr. May sends them packing with a slapstick they never understand. Declared for this tale: the robbers' flight ends in one passage of farce — bites, scratches, eyes blinded in the brambles and a fall from a tree; the kill-threats spoken in the tale are threats only, and come to nothing. The coarse humour of the telling stands as printed.
These are three of the tales that passed this shelf's reading gate. The rest of Parsons' collection is being read in full, tale by tale; the tales that do not pass are named, with the reason, in the collection's written register. Nothing violent is framed or softened — it is left out, and the register says so.
CHAPTERS
00:19 Uncle Caramba
04:56 The Doctor and the Devil
08:35 Mr. May
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; text from the Internet Archive.
Narration: Mira (KacheliTV). Music: a low instrumental bed under the reading.
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