Most readers are familiar with Zora Neale Hurston as author of the 1937 novel Their Eyes Were Watching God. However, those readers who enjoy Hurston’s novel are often unfamiliar with her work as an anthropologist and folklorist, who published two collections of folktales Mules and Men (1935) and Tell My Horse (1938). Prior to publishing these collections of folktales, Hurston traveled to the Gulf States to document rural Black life. Her plans were to publish three separate volumes of folktales collected during this trip. Instead, her patron, Ms. Osgood, tabled the project, and the manuscript remained buried in the archives of the Smithsonian Institution until 1991.

Every Tongue Got to Confess: Negro Folk-Tales from the Gulf States (2002) introduces tales of Blacks persevering and using subversive measures to survive in a hostile, white society and culture. Organized thematically, these tales conjure up the voices of animals, witches, preachers, devils, John and Massa. In most of the tales, a trickster figure emerges to outsmart the stronger animal or the threatening master.

While the majority of the tales involve the trickster figure, some of them attest to Black heterosexual love and the strength of Black relationships. In each type of tale, the speaker--whether man, woman or child--emerges as an empowered member of the community, transmitting knowledge that often means survival for the central character in the tale. The central character, whether it is human or animal, often engages trickery in order to overcome adverse circumstances imposed by either nature, man, or both. Although these tales are reminiscent of other tales attributed to African American communities, they feel unmediated by a need to be non-threatening to white readers. In fact, the tales often represent manipulation of white folk that incites both laughter and wonder. The ring of authenticity in these tales can mostly be attributed to not only Hurston’s skill as an anthropologist, but also the fact that she was in her own element, in familiar territory, as a southern-born girl from northern Florida.

Despite Hurston’s plans to publish three volumes of folklore that could stand on their own and also accurately document Black folklife, the one volume that we have here gives us a glimpse into her skill as a recorder of rural, Black southern life. Every Tongue reacquaints contemporary readers to the voices of those generations who were born post-slavery but for whom the impacts of slavery, Jim Crow and racism largely shaped their understanding of the world. Therefore, it is common to find tales where slaves outwit masters, and Black men and women use their survival skills to negotiate a complex agrarian and exploitative culture.

Although Every Tongue records the folktales with no editorial comment by Hurston, the foreword written by John Edgar Wideman and Dr. Carla Kaplan’s introduction provide ample context for delving into these wonderful and rich folktales. For those readers yearning for an understanding of early twentieth-century southern Black, rural folklife, this collection stands as a rich repository of a people and lifestyle that is almost nonexistent today.