The black preacher is the master storyteller in Afro-American culture. His verbal artistry covers Afro-American communal life like the brier patch did Brer Rabbit. And, like Brer Rabbit, their favorite trickster hero, Afro-Americans have instinctively sought protection and reassurance from a hostile world and an uncertain life in the myriad stories told by their ministers. The black preacher comforts bereaved families with a pleasant anecdote about the deceased family member; he affirms those same families' happiness and pride at aweddings, anniversaries, baptisms, picnics, and countless other occasions of celebration with a few "remarks" that invariably include a well-told joke; and he inspires his congregation to challenge the racial prejudice that they encounter every day with a series of dramatically retold biblical stories. This verbal thicket is the first line of cultural defense against the racial and the human problems of life for many Afro-Americans.
The black preacher continually sows three types of narrative seeds in order to keep his oral hedge robust and impenetrable. First, there are personal narratives; these are stories that the black preacher fashions out of his own life. In many ways these stories are a variant of the testimonies that members of his flock give during Wednesday night prayer meeting. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., and the Reverend Jesse Jackson have been two skillful sowers of this narrative seed. For example, Dr. King referred on several occasions to the frustration he experienced while attempting to explain to his daughter the reasons why she could not attend Atlanta's Fun Town amusement park. By the same token, Reverend Jackson cast some of these narrative seeds his address to the 1988 Democratic National Convention. In an attempt to inspire poor Blacks to vote, Reverend Jackson returned again and again to the refrain: "I understand when..." Between each repetition he would tell his audience of his own encounters with hunger, poverty, despair, and so forth.
Biblical stories are the second type of narrative seed sown by black preachers. Just as lawyers must learn the legal statutes of the states in which they practice and actors must memorize their scripts before stepping on stage or going before a movie or televison camera, so, too, must black preachers master the Bible "from cover to cover" or "from Genesis to Revelation,: as his church members would say. The more familiar they become with the word, the better able they are to improvise, weaving a biblical character, familiar verse, and/or story into their sermons. James Weldon Johnson captured the poetic eloquence of these stories in God's Trombones: Seven Negro Sermons in Verse (1972), a collection of seven poems based on the black preacher's dramatic retelling of such well-known biblical stories as "The Prodigal Son" and "The Creation." The Reverend C. L. Franklin, the father of soul singer Aretha Franklin, was a master teller of these tales. His recordings of these and other biblical stories are still being sold.
Jokes are the third type of narrative sown by black preachers. Humor has always been a major cultural element in the Afro-American religious experience. Young black preachers are reminded of this fact by their elders who occasionally admonish them that "it is just as important to make the people laugh as it is to make them cry." Playwright Ossie Davis harvested some of the fruit from this verbal bush in order to write his popular Broadway musical, Purlie Victorious (1963). The Reverend Ralph D. Abernathy is a master teller of these tales. During the civil rights era he consistently demonstrated that rare narrative gift of being able to select and tell a joke that would lower the fears or raise the courage of the nonviolent demonstrators. Reverend Abernathy's humorous depictions of "Miss Ann" and "Mr. Charlie," Afro-American folk designations of white women and white men respectively, energized countless mass meetings and marches of the civil rights movement.
The continuing fascination and enjoyment that many Afro-Amercans derive from listening to their pastors tell thee three types of stories is an irrefutable affirmatin of the fact that the masses of black people are stuck as tightly to their storytelling black preachers as Brer Rabbit was to the Tar Baby.
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