Day 78: beginning of the end (of summer)

I'm back from a week in Austin... and this is the last bit of summer before I have to start preparing for classes August 5 to get ready for Week 0 on August 12, and the official Week 1 on August 19. I would gladly take another few months of summer, full of stories... but this has worked out really well in terms of having accomplished one really big thing (editing all of the Harris stories) while also having establish some good routines that I can carry on with when school gets started.

So, for this last phase I'm just doing the Baer notes on Harris; all the other Harris work is done. Plus I'm carrying on with the other related tasks: adding books to the Freebookapalooza, bookmarking stories in Diigo, plus writing up story summaries in Diigo, and transcribing actual stories in Google Docs (hoping that eventually HAX will be able to handle some actual site management; I'll check in with them again when I hit 200 stories).

On the plane back from Austin, I read Roger Abrahams's African American Folktales: Stories from Black Traditions in the New World. It was exciting to read this now that I have a good sense of orientation in the different story traditions, recognizing familiar stories, but sometimes in new versions I had not read before. He did not pick the same stories that I would have picked, so that gives me confidence that I can create a really useful book of my own. He also had the luxury of being able to get copyright permissions through his publisher for stories collected by Hurston, et al., along with stories he collected himself in the West Indies, but he is also relying heavily on the same public domain sources that I have access to, and I know I can create a good book using just those public domain resources.

Abrahams published this book as a companion to his excellent book of African stories: African Folktales. Yet even though he sees that book as a companion, I'm not sure people will read both books or even see how they fit together since they do not have cross-references. So, that's another dimension I want to emphasize when I go to write a book next summer: putting the African American stories side by side not just with Caribbean stories, but also with the African stories.

To a limited extent, Henry Louis Gates and Maria Tatar did that with their book, The Annotated African American Folktales. Yet even though they included some actual African stories, their annotations were not consistent about exploring the African analogues. In fact, if anything, the annotations were overly skewed to the European side, and I imagine that is because Maria Tatar was writing the annotations. In any case, that book has some wonderful features of its own, but the book I would like to write will definitely be different in contents and structure.

Just what will it look like? I don't know yet... but one important decision I've made is to not let Harris determine the contents of the book. Yes, I will be starting from Harris and building out from there, but the real thread I want to follow is Brer Rabbit, so when there are stories about Brer Rabbit that are not in Harris, I will not hesitate to include them, especially if I can find good African analogues.

Anyway, I am sad about the summer ending, but as the summer ends, that will be a chance to shift into more story-focused research. That's something I can do in bits and pieces as time allows, and I am so excited about following up on the patterns I've discovered this summer, seeing where that will lead.