Folk Tales of Cabo Verde — Part 6. Two tales from Elsie Clews Parsons' Folk-Lore from the Cape Verde Islands (1923), collected from Cape Verdean storytellers in New England and first printed in 1923 — read aloud exactly as Parsons printed them, in the order she printed them.
Disclosure: this performance is narrated by AI-generated voices.
The Three Brothers-in-Law (No. 72): three sisters are married to enchanted husbands who can never stay; their young brother Anton, armed with a feather, a fish-scale and a horn, finds them one by one, and then frees the fairest face in the world from the devil who stole her as a child — by learning where the devil's life is hidden: in an egg, in a dove, in an iron chest at the bottom of the sea. Declared for this tale, in plain sight: the three marriages are made under the suitors' spoken threat to kill the father and end the city — a threat in words, never acted on; each husband, asked, refuses in so many words to harm Anton; and at the end Anton kills the dove to take out the egg, and breaks the egg on the devil's head, and the devil dies — two short clauses, the tale's one act of killing, done to a child-stealing devil. It stands as Parsons printed it, and it is declared here rather than softened.
As Broad as He Was Long (No. 81): Pedr' Quadrad', the schoolboy who learned nothing in seventeen years, breaks his father's trial casket to pieces, drinks forty-nine quarts of milk from a talking bull, turns the king's daughters into mares and back again with two kinds of apples, climbs a tower to heaven on a thousand nails, and wrestles the giant who drops down in quarters and forms fourteen heads. Declared for this tale: the king offers an overcoat of which he says that whoever wears it and wheels round makes five hundred persons drop dead — Pedr' takes it and never wheels round in it, and no one dies of it; and the giant's wrestling contract and Pedr's repeated "I am going to kill you" are spoken terms and threats only — the giant is thrown twice, begs, and is spared, and buys his life with the tower's diamond. No one is killed in this tale.
These are two 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
00:14 The Three Brothers-in-Law
08:34 As Broad as He Was Long
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: Violetta (KacheliTV). Music: a low instrumental bed under the reading.
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