anyway life’s great.

shakira. thirty-something. bama.

[sh-kira]

Black Folklore Resource.

I’ve been thinking and researching a lot about the (Black) Southern Gothic style/aesthetic and African American folklore, so I put together a list of books for myself and thought it might be helpful to someone else. 

-;-;-

FOLKTALE COLLECTIONS

The People Could Fly: American Black Folktales by Virginia Hamilton | Thrift Books Amazon

Her Stories: African American Folktales, Fairy Tales, and True Tales by Virginia Hamilton | Amazon

Mules and Men by Zora Neale Hurston | Amazon Thrift Books

Every Tongue Got to Confess : Negro Folk-Tales from the Gulf States by Zora Neale Hurston | Thrift Books Amazon

Go Gator and Muddy the Water : Writings by Zora Neale Hurston from the Federal Writers Project by Zora Neale Hurston | Thrift Books Amazon

Lies and Other Tall Tales by Zora Neale Hurston and Joyce Carol Thomas | Thrift Books Amazon

FOLKLORE AND STORYTELLING

Black Culture and Black Consciousness: Afro-American Folk Thought from Slavery to Freedom by Lawrence W. Levine | Thrift Books

Shuckin’ and Jivin’: Folklore from Contemporary Black Americans | Thrift Books Amazon

A Treasury of Afro-American Folklore: The Oral Literature, Traditions, Recollections, Legends, Tales, Songs, Religious Beliefs, Customs, Sayings and Humor of Peoples of African American Descent in the Americas by Harold Courlander | Amazon

The Grey Album: On the Blackness of Blackness by Kevin Young | Amazon

Talk That Talk: An Anthology on African-American Storytelling by Linda Goss | Amazon

African American Folktales: Stories from Black Traditions in the New World by Roger Abrahams | Amazon

Deep Down in the Jungle: Black American Folklore from the Streets of Philadelphia by Roger Abrahams | Amazon

Singing the Master : The Emergence of African-American Culture in the Plantation South by Roger D. Abrahams | Thrift Books Amazon

From Trickster to Badman: The Black Folk Hero in Slavery and Freedom by John W. Roberts | Amazon

Black Folklore and the Politics of Racial Representation by Shirley Moody-Turner | Amazon

Black Folktales by Julius Lester | Amazon

Folk beliefs of the southern Negro (1926) by Newbell Niles Pucket | Amazon

Black Folklore and the Politics of Racial Representation by Shirley Moody-Turner | Amazon

HUMOR

African American Humor: The Best Black Comedy from Slavery to Today (The Library of Black America series) by Mel Watkins, Dick Gregory | Amazon

Honey, Hush!: An Anthology of African American Women's Humor by Daryl Cumber Dance, Nikki Giovanni | Amazon

STYLE

The Birth of Cool: Style Narratives of the African Diaspora by Carol Tulloch | Amazon

 Black Cool: One Thousand Streams of Blackness by Rebecca Walker, Henry Louis Gates Jr. | Amazon

MAGIC/MYSTICISM

African American Female Mysticism: Nineteenth-Century Religious Activism by Joy R. Bostic | Amazon

Working Conjure: A Guide to Hoodoo Folk Magic by Hoodoo Sen Moise | Amazon

Black Magic: Religion and the African American Conjuring Tradition by Ifalaye Books | Amazon

FOLK HEALING

Working the Roots: Over 400 Years of Traditional African American Healing by Michele Elizabeth Lee | Amazon

African American Slave Medicine: Herbal and nonHerbal Treatments by Herbert C. Cove | Amazon

African American Folk Healing by Stephanie Mitchem | Amazon

ADDITIONS: 7/27/2019 (NOTE: As I continue to add books, some of these may deviate from folklore and focus on Black history and/or Black experiences)

Fiction and Folklore: The Novels of Toni Morrison by Trudier Harris | Thriftbooks Amazon

The Skull Talks Back: And Other Haunting Tales by Joyce Carol Thomas & Zora Neale Hurston | Thriftbooks Amazon

Passed On: African-American Mourning Stories by Karla FC Holloway | Thriftbooks Amazon

Black Bodies and the Black Church: A Blues Slant by Kelly Brown Douglas | Amazon

This is absolutely not a definitive list and if you have more information or recommendations please feel free to add it! 

[frogus-deactivated20231111]

the entire point of life is to be silly, kind, and really weird btw.

[nostalgic-teddyy]

The 3 pillars of whimsy!

[morakh-deactivated20240304]

certified moon lover.

[fashion-runways]

ALÉMAIS Resort 2027 pls help me get out of debt donating to: ko-fi.com/fashionrunways or dinahlance-shop.fourthwall.com

[fluoresensitives]

as by Stevie Wonder you will always be famous and the greatest love song

[bonivers]

i’m boreddddd let’s forgive ourselves for our failures

[hazemsuhail]

If this page suddenly goes silent one day, know that my brother Samer didn’t make it. I will never forget those who saw him suffering from severe bombing injuries, lacking his vital medications, yet chose silence and kept scrolling.

[hazemsuhail]

I feel completely shattered and deeply ashamed begging strangers for help every single day. This endless nightmare has stripped us of everything, forcing me to sacrifice even my own dignity just to keep my brother and my family alive.

[hazemsuhail]

​I want nothing from this world except to see Samer healthy and free of pain, and to save my family from this slow death. Please donate so we can afford his essential psychiatric and medical treatments before it’s too late.

Please Please donate GoFundMe

[hazemsuhail]

Thank you, Maryam Ather, for the first donation! 🤍 I swear these donations are our only way out. Please keep supporting us to save my brother Samer.

[madamepestilence]

#75 Gazavetters and #171 PaliLiberation

[hazemsuhail]

Friends, thank you so much for the massive support and these 15 recent donations!

​While this high engagement gives us hope, we deeply wish to see more donations matching this incredible reach. Our lives and Samer's survival depend entirely on your financial help. Please keep this momentum going.

[hazemsuhail]

Thank you so much for the 12 additional donations! My family consists of 12 people. We have already lost my father and my brother to this war, and we cannot afford to lose Samer.

Please, keep donating and sharing.

[heartpdf]

[destinationpearlstreet]

[byseanbrown]

[justryingtovibe69]

[veryboringca]

[detectivehole]

"why do you know that" i am curious about the world around me

[butterflypeaflowertea]

ever since i was a little girl i knew i was doomed to take things too seriously and think about them forever

[cyanide-sippy-cup]

For anybody not caught up: Tennessee just passed a new map that pretty much makes it so black neighborhoods have no power in local votes. Two things about this. While protestors were chanting "No Jim Crow", white Tennessee lawmakers were caught laughing on video. On top of this, Representative Justin Pearson and his brother KeShaun Pearson were arrested for trying to give their takes on the matter (which is not only their legal right but literally his job). If you give a shit about black people, help fight this. We can't allow a return to Jim Crow.

[icemankazansky]

Heyyy guess where I live

A local paper had some great photographs, all taken by Nicole Hester:

The day before, Rep. Justin Pearson tries to attend a Senate Committee meeting and is barred access by the Sergeant at Arms.

Lawmakers and protesters link arms as the descend the capitol steps.

Once inside the chamber, Democratic representatives continued to stand together with arms linked.

They continued standing together with arms linked as votes were cast.

Democratic representatives take a group photo protesting the redistricting.

Rep. Justin Jones burns a photo of the Confederate flag with the words, We will not go back.

And stomps the ashes.

KeShaun Pearson being escorted from the building by the Staties.

KeShaun Pearson (left) being taken into custody. Rep. Justin Pearson (right) showing his support of his brother.

Additional information: State lawmakers have been gunning for Pearson and Jones nearly their entire terms. Most notably, in 2023, the House expelled them for participating in a protest at the Capitol. Their districts had to have special elections to have them reinstated.

Pearson is one of the plaintiffs of a lawsuit seeking an injunction against the redistricting.

The city most affected by the redistricting is Memphis, where locals are fighting against xAI's data center, which has been operating with very little oversight and is poisoning the people who live there. Here is a previous post on that with more information and more sources.

[vamptits]

I can't keep having the same conversations about love languages, mbti, iq, bmi, "brain fully formed at 25" and shit over and over again...

[vamptits]

these things exist on a spectrum from untrue to straightforwardly racist btw. so if we could retire them forever that'd be nice.

[hareofhrair]

“Love Languages” are just common couples therapy techniques mangled and repackaged by an unqualified homophobe. Relationships generally need all 5 love languages to be fulfilled, which is to say, everybody needs to communicate with, spend time with, and do things for their partners, and that’s got nothing to do with any special way you communicate affection.

MBTI has been proven completely ineffective at predicting anyone’s success at a particular job, and half the people who take it twice will get different results. Reputable psychologists do not recognize it, and the company that owns the rights to it uses it to scam people. People don’t adhere to strict binaries in basically anything. Very few people are going to be exclusively introverted or extroverted. It’s just astrology repackaged as pseudoscience. Shockingly enough, you can’t boil the complexity of the human experience down to a dozen Types of Guy.

The concept of IQ is flawed from the start— “intelligence” is an abstract concept that encompasses many different skills, from social intelligence to emotional intelligence to the very narrow kind of problem solving intelligence IQ tests generally measure for. It cannot predict how fast you learn, how much you know, or how logical and well read you are. It mostly measures how good you are at solving puzzles. Coincidentally, it’s also a pretty good predictor of income and education level, take a guess why. Most people’s IQ will change throughout their lives, because it’s inconsistent bullshit we’ve only held onto this long because we’re still kinda hoping we can breed the ubermensch. IQ tests and the way they attempt to categorize people are explicitly eugenicist and racist.

BMI was developed by a man known as the grandfather of eugenics, who first of all was a mathematician, not a doctor, and second never intended the formula to be used to categorize individuals. It’s intended to give a rough estimate of obesity in populations, and it’s not even good at that. It hangs around because of fatphobia and insurance companies who want it as an excuse to charge fat people more.

The study which determined people’s prefrontal cortex was still developing at 25… stopped measuring at 25. Evidence suggests your brain probably never stops developing. Stop infantilizing grown adults. This is a branch off from the larger mess of misinformation surrounding fMRIs.

If you haven’t put together what all these things have in common yet, here’s the moral of the story: STOP TRYING TO CATEGORIZE PEOPLE. STOP TRYING TO PUT PEOPLE IN A GODDAMN BIOLOGICAL HIERARCHY. EUGENICS IS BAD, AND WILL ALWAYS BE BAD, NO MATTER WHO’S DOING IT.

[mynorthernattitude]

"you need to let it go"

i'll actually take it to the grave, thanks