Day 41: Supernatural Stories

One of the things that really struck me reading the Julius Lester Brer Rabbit books in December (the impetus for this whole project!) was the presence of supernatural stories together with the animal stories. I'm familiar with animal tales, but the supernatural stories are something new for me, and I'm finding myself more and more fascinated with all of that. I'm really glad that I will get to include some of the supernatural stories because Brer Rabbit is involved, like in the story today where Wolf steals Rabbit's lucky rabbit's foot (!) and he has to go to Mammy Bammy Big-Money in the swamp, the witch-rabbit, in order to get her help. Plus, Brer Rabbit involves himself in the story of the blacksmith and the devil, and he's even part of Taily-Po. Here the witch is shown in human form... but I prefer thinking of her in her rabbit form:

And of course there are those graveyard-rabbits:

As for the other supernatural ghost stories, they are just so cool, like the one where Daddy Jack is proud to be a witch, and explains how you can test your own witchly powers by riding on a heifer. Even better was the story about the witch-skin where the man dried and shrunk the skin so the witch could not put it back on. And then the story about stealing the coins off the corpse's eyes... eeek! That one is a like lot Taily-Po: give me back my taily-po! give me my money!

I've been thinking that this will be a great way to re-do the Brer Rabbit units that I have in the UnTextbook right now, getting rid of the Brer Rabbit unit with the stories in verse and replacing that instead with a unit of supernatural stories from Harris, both those with Brer Rabbit, and also the ghost stories that do not have any animal characters at all.

I've also been thinking in general about how I can use my Myth-Folklore reading assignments in the Fall semester to improve the Africa section of the UnTextbook. If I focus all my reading on those Africa units, I'll be able to read through and update/improve them all by the time we get to that part of the reading for the semester.

Meanwhile, I might be able to spend the rest of my reading time for the semester by exploring what other African "units" I would like to create in the next version of the UnTextbook which, presumably, I'll be building a real CMS like HAX if all goes well! I'll be learning about that next week at Domains, whoo-hoo!