What’s Not Going Bump in the Night?: The Missing Folklore of Supernatural [TV Correspondent Tryout]

By Guest Contributor Kendra James

There are five stories I would love to see added to Supernatural Canon:

• A Gettysburg battlefield ghost haunting focusing on one of the many Civil War era tales.
• Anything dealing with the Salem Witch Trials and Tituba.
• A Gullah or Southern African-American story, like The Talking Eggs that takes Sam and Dean to the Cape Fear region or lower, into South Carolina.
• Anything that deals with a haunting dating back to the days of slavery, in the vein of The Legend of Pin Oak.
• A trickster story where the trickster isn’t a white male, but some personification of Anansi, or Br’er Rabbit. (Or, in my wildest dreams, a Heyoka personification, but that is neither here or now and probably far too complicated for network television…)

Unfortunately, after six seasons I’ve given up on ever seeing these or anything that reflects the folklore and legends I grew up with as an African-American kid.

For those of you not in the know, Supernatural is a show about two brothers, Sam and Dean Winchester, who travel across America with an arsenal in the back of their old ’67 Impala so that they can battle various supernatural beings across the country. Aside from the good looking male leads  — a staple of any CW show, here played surprisingly well by Jensen Ackles and Jared Padalecki — the thing that kept me coming back when I started watching was the focus on playing around with American Folklore and its use of America itself as a setting. For a show shot in Vancouver it captures the essence of the country with a surprising attention to detail. From the fabled western highways to the roadside diners to the small country towns, America is as much of a character as the characters from her folklore.

Well, part of America, anyway, and therein lies my problem.

When I was younger, I was terrified of the Boo-Hag, and even after devouring pages of folklore and horror tales, I still found them scarier than anything Anne Rice could come up with. Curious about Tarbaby and Br’er Rabbit, I sought out the rest of the Uncle Remus stories after being introduced to them by my mother. Somewhere in my search for tales of supernatural, I vividly remember reading that one might meet the devil at the crossroads to make a deal for all the riches in the world in exchange for your soul. But I also remember laughing to myself when I got to the end of the story only to find out that the devil could be so easily fooled, handed the sole of a shoe instead of the soul he really wanted. The lesson that the devil could only take your soul once stuck with me throughout childhood.

Most of the folklore I could retell came directly from Southern African-American or Gullah Island culture and a lot of it was first recorded during or soon after The Civil War. I was a reader growing up and had books full of folklore and supernatural stories collected by Patricia McKissack, Virginia Hamilton, and Zora Neal Hurston, but having family history solidly rooted in both cultures and a mother who actively read and told me the tales certainly helped ground my interest. Though the themes explored in each of the stories mentioned are somewhat universal in the realm of folklore, fables and morality tales, I enjoyed them because they were all about characters who shared my history and looked like me.

Though they shared lessons with the lore of other cultures, these stories were often collected, written and told in dialect (perhaps more accurately when Hurston was collecting folklore with the Federal Writers Project during the Depression, than when Br’er Rabbit’s scribe, Chandler Harris, took the job upon himself according to some like author Alice Walker. Her ‘Uncle Remus, No Friend of Mine’ is an excellent read) unique to the African-American South. Combined with the dialect, the period of enslavement the stories emerge from make them uniquely American. It’s safe to say that without the American history of slavery, the former slave Uncle Remus would not have become quite the character he did.

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