Folk Tales of Cabo Verde, Part Eight. Three 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 as Parsons printed them, in the order she printed them.
Disclosure: this performance is narrated by AI-generated voices.
The Princess Who Groans (No. 90): a prince dreams of Aldraba Juliana, enchanted at the bottom of the sea, and will not eat until he sees her. With a bottle of sweet-oil and three kerchiefs — the color of the sky, the color of the stars, the color of the moon — he rides through the parted sea to her door, and brings her home; but she will not speak until his violin asks her what her three groans were for. Declared for this tale, in plain sight: running to praise the last kerchief, the servant "broke a leg and did not feel it" — folk-tale hyperbole in one clause; and the prince takes the princess by the hand through her window, as the tale tells it — everything she groaned for, her servant and her sewing-basket, is fetched for her before the wedding.
Dutiful and Undutiful: The Princess Who Groans (No. 91): Paul' and Anton choose cuscus over their father's blessing; Pedr' chooses the blessing, shares his cuscus with a hungry child, and takes the poorest horse in the herd — a horse that shines with light, and talks. Declared for this tale: each elder brother, asked by an old man to let him hold on to the horse's tail, dismounts and beats him — one clause each, the unkindness Pedr's kindness answers; and the last task the horse sets is spoken, not shown — cut off the shark's head, and the ring the princess dropped will be in its belly. Pedr' brings the ring back; the cutting itself is never described.
The Shoes That Were Danced to Pieces (No. 95): a boy sets out to learn how the princess wears out seven pairs of shoes in a night, and on the road his three loaves buy him an invisible coat and a magic whip from San Anton, the Virgin Mary and God themselves. Declared for this tale: his mother put poison in the loaves so that he would die on the road rather than at the king's house — the loaves are given away on the road, and nobody is harmed by them; the king's terms are death for failure, stated as the stakes and never carried out; and the boy cracks the whip over the head of the old man dancing with the princess, and he disappears — nobody is killed.
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
00:00 Opening Theme
00:56 The Princess Who Groans
07:55 Dutiful and Undutiful: The Princess Who Groans
19:53 The Shoes That Were Danced to Pieces
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: Madame de Pamplemousse (KacheliTV). Music: opening and closing theme, "Glacial Forest 3" — heard at the introduction and the close, and briefly between the tales; the tales themselves are read dry.
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