two hundred years prior to the emancipation. . Under duress, humans adapt quickly or they perish, and this adaptation is quite evident in the stories that the black slaves shared with one another.
While the stories may have borrowed extensively from characters in Africa, and their telling, the oral tradition that was part and parcel of the black experience from the time their ancestors were herded into the slave ships and across the Atlantic, the stories that gradually developed were born of their conditions in the New World. "Regardless of where slave tales came from, the essential point is that, with respect to language, delivery, details of characterization, and plot, slaves quickly made them ...
... The naturally tense situation of being a slaved subjected to a master made survival a tricky business, requiring much instruction, which made the folklore extremely pragmatic. "It was this perhaps as much as feelings of Christian humility that led to the stress on the pitfalls of aspiring too high. It was dangerous for black men and women to forget who or where they were, and this danger constituted a motif running through Negro tales." (p 97)
While tales of freedom were not plentiful, and they rarely addressed the freedom of the next world that the spirituals did, they did exist. Many were the stories of Abe Lincoln secretly coming to the black people ...
black women slaves