THE COLLECTION OF MARYLAND FOLK-LORE.[1]
The Baltimore Folk-Lore Society has for its chief raison d’être the collecting of superstitions and tales still to be found existing in Maryland. This is an unexplored region, offering many inducements to seek for its scattered treasures ; especially for those vestiges of a savage race and a distant land found among the superstitions of the colored people.
This object of collecting has always been kept before the members. Lists of suggestive topics were distributed at the close of our first year, in the spring of 1895. The next year, large tabulated papers were prepared for use in collecting tales; others were arranged for customs and sayings. We separated hopefully at the close of the season’s work, expecting a good harvesting in the fall. But summer ease and folk-lore labors did not bring the anticipated results.
The next move was the usual recourse of a perplexed assembly, the appointment of a committee. This committee, composed of five, including the president, the secretary and the treasurer, met frequently in council, feeling that something was expected of them. But who would offer himself for this difficult work? Every one of us was occupied with professional duties or binding claims of society and home. Who would go out single-handed, to gather from the lips of the uninstructed folk the darling faiths and practices of their daily lives; and to do so by long, patient effort, helped by skilful address and pains to charm the secret from its jealous depths?
Time pressed. We knew that every day was causing us losses in traditional lore. We had heard of the rapid disappearance of tales in the Highlands of Scotland, in the thirty years between 1830 and 1860; for the minister had come to the Highlands, and the schoolmaster had followed close after. They had put a stop to the village gatherings, where old and young listened until daylight to the tales of a travelling tailor or shoemaker. "Not a tale since then have I heard," says Urquhart, a collector. "The old men had died or lost their memories, and the younger did not know the stories." Thirty years of education had wrought this loss of myth and fable.
Just such a condition is found here among the negroes. Since the war, they have had their thirty years of enlightenment. The old reeking driftwood from Africa is closely intermingled with our logs of European growth, and every day is carrying off some of those last old relics of the days of slavery, with their stores of folk-lore untold.
- ↑ Paper read at the Ninth Annual Meeting of the American Folk-Lore Society, Baltimore, December 29, 1897.
