Description
Book SynopsisYou ask for a story. I will tell you one, fact for fact and true for true." So begins ""Crook-Neck Dick,"" one of twenty-three stories in this beguiling collection of Charleston lore. Derived from African American legends, these fables have entertained generations of Charlestonians with sheer storytelling magic. To delight of folklorists, students of Charleston history, and all those who love a good ghost story, this treasure features photos of the storytellers who shared these remarkable stories with John Bennett.
Julia Eichelberger, the Marybelle Higgins Howe Professor of Southern Literature and an executive board member of the Center for Study of Slavery at the College of Charleston in South Carolina, provides a foreword.
Trade ReviewA collection of folk story, myth, drolleries, macabre unreason . . . old tales of death, mystery, bizarre incredibilities, diabolic influence, demanding ghosts, buried treasure, enchantments, miracles, visitations, and the dead that are not dead." —
Kirkus ReviewsTable of Contents
- Introduction: Remembering and Rewriting Gullah Narratives
- An Introductory Comment
- 1. The Doctor to the Dead
- 2. The Death of the Wandering Jew
- 3. Madame Margot
- 4. The Black Constable
- 5. Tales from the Trapman Street Hospital
- 6. All God's Chillen Had Wings
- 7. The Measure of Grief
- 8. The Enchanted Cloak
- 9. The Young Wife Whose Vine Meloned Beyond the Fence
- 10. Death and the Two Bachelors
- 11. When the Dead Sang in Their Graves
- 12. Rolling Rio and the Gray Man; Or, The Gift of Strength
- 13. The Remember Service
- 14. A Young Girl's Virtue Preserved by the Devil
- 15. Crook-Neck Dick
- 16. Louis Alexander
- 17. The Apothecary and The Mermaid
- 18. The Man Who Wouldn't Believe He Was Dead
- 19. Daid Aaron, I
- 20. Daid Aaron, II
- 21. Buried Treasure; Or, The Two Bold Fisherman
