Day 18. Impty-Umpty!

I've done two of the (long) stories from Uncle Remus Returns now, with the spelling regularized... and it was so much fun, especially Impty-umpty and the Blacksmith. It also features this great illustration of Brer Rabbit peeking into the blacksmith's shop... it's really a Devil folktale, but Brer Rabbit is part of the story also:

The other story is Brother Rabbit's Bear Hunt. And next up tomorrow... Taily-po! That one is a personal favorite. It even has a Wikipedia article: Tailypo.

I'm now feeling confident that I really can get through the whole Harris "corpus" by the end of the summer, creating versions of the stories that still have a strong sense of style, but without the eye-dialect. I came up with my (current) strategy of freely using apostrophes in direct speech just to separate it out a bit from the narrative. I might change my mind about that later, but I am really liking how it sounds/looks right now; I got the idea from Patricia Glinton-Meicholas's story collection An Evening in Guanima: A Treasury of Folktales from The Bahamas where she uses dialect in the direct speech but literary English for the narrative.