Tales and Talismans : TALK THAT TALK: An Anthology of African-American Storytelling <i> edited by Linda Goss and Marian E Barnes (Simon & Schuster: $22.95, cloth; $10.95, paper; 476 pp.; 0-671-67167-7</i> )

Linda Goss, the official storyteller of Philadelphia, and Marian E Barnes, a lecturer and founding member of the Austin, Tex., Storyteller’s Guild, have put together more than 100 narratives of storytellers from Africa, the Caribbean, and the Americas. This extraordinary effort has resulted in a wonderful collection.

The oral tradition was--and still is--a prominent component of African culture in which complete archives of an entire village were stored in the memory of a specific storyteller, or griot . The griot was entrusted with the duty of recalling through generational mists the histories of warriors and kings. In this way, a sense of continuity was maintained and custom and culture preserved within tribe and village.

Other storytellers, peripatetic professionals who traveled from village to village and festival to festival, also practiced the art. Though these stories were mainly for entertainment, they also were instructive, “usually pointing up human weaknesses and how we can be injured and destroyed by our greed or stupidity, or by placing confidence in the wrong people and things.”

Most of these tales revolved around animal and insect figures who relied on their wits to outsmart the larger predators who dominated the jungle. Other, more spiritual, stories voiced a reverence for the natural environment from which all things had come. Equally important was the veneration of and the sense of connection with ancestors, also expressed through the oral tradition.

When Africans were brought to the New World, those who had managed to survive the horrors of the “Middle Passage” were deliberately separated from their tribesmen and forbidden to speak their original languages.

But even separated as they were, and forced to endure an inhuman system, the African’s racial memory was not entirely erased. Instead the slaves embraced more fully the tradition of the griot and called up their past to serve as a bulwark against the hostile circumstances in which they suddenly found themselves.

The folk tales that figured so strongly in African culture were transformed in the New World. The “Trickster” character--usually a rabbit who used his cunning to evade life-threatening situations or to violate certain tribal taboos--was cast in a new role. In America, the Trickster became a symbol of resistance, a heroic figure capable of sabotage and revenge.

The tortoise, slow and implacable, became a symbol of endurance: “He moves with a painstaking slowness but with the sureness of the sun in motion across the streets of the world . . . (with) the unrelenting and invincible doggedness of an elemental force. The brooding silence and secrecy of the tortoise also invest him with a suggestion of craft and cunning and mystery. He hides his innards under a shell in the way the black man had to hide his true face and feelings in the Americas under shells and veils and masks of deception in order to carry and conceal the horror at the heart of his daily life.”

This collection offers widely diverse views of the African experience in the New World. In “History Remembered,” there are stories of aching despair, including the memoirs of an elderly couple--ex-slaves--who recall their treatment at the hands of their former owner. And there is the contemporary story of the disillusionment a young soldier experiences after fighting in Vietnam for certain principles to which he himself was not privy on his return to America.

There are narratives, told matter-of-factly by the participants, of incredible fortitude displayed on a blood-soaked bridge in Selma, Ala., and in a filthy, solitary cell in South Africa.

There are stories of home and families; “Just So” stories intended to explain the unexplainable, such as “how the snake got his rattle.” There are tales of witches and ghosts who travel by the name of Duppy, Jumbie, Socouyant or Cow Foot Mary, depending on which Caribbean island they chose to appear.

Some of the stories are heart-rending; others contain the wild streaks of humor that today inform the works of some our best actors and social critics.

As storyteller Beverly Robinson relates: The great comedian Bert Williams had an uncle called Sam who had an incredible memory. Sam was enslaved by a plantation owner whose memory was not so good, so he took Sam everywhere so that Sam could remember who said what, when they said it, how they said it, to whom it was said, and whatever the response was to what was said. When Sam was not remembering things for the plantation owner, he worked in the fields. One day the devil appeared and said to the plantation owner: “I got so many folks down below that I can’t remember who’s there, why they’re there, and what all I’m suppose to do with them. I need Sam.”

The plantation owner refused, saying that he also needed Sam, as his memory was better than that of anybody he knew. The devil struck a bargain. If it could be proven that Sam’s memory was failing, then the plantation owner must give him up. That particular day Sam was working in the fields. The devil appeared before him and asked, “Sam, do you like eggs?” and Sam replied, “Yes, sir.” Then the devil suddenly disappeared. Years later, after the Civil War, after the Emancipation Proclamation, after the death of the plantation owner and everyone else who had remembered Sam’s incredible memory, Sam was still around. He had merely gotten older. One day as he slowly plowed his one acre of land behind his broken-down mule, the devil appeared. “Sam,” the devil said, to which Sam replied, “Yes?” The devil asked, “How?” and Sam said, “Fried.”

Apart from its intended humor, this story has other implications: The Proclamation that freed Sam from the plantation owner’s control should have rendered the bargain with the devil null and void, the implication being that “the (black man) has no rights which a white man is bound to respect.” Equally important is the fact that at that point in American history, when slaves were prohibited by law to learn to read or write, the need for a remarkable memory became an imperative for survival and contributed greatly to the perpetuation of the oral tradition.

“Talk That Talk” is a most appropriate title for this remarkable collection. The phrase is the enthusiastic response a listener shouts, sighs or whispers when an orator has been especially effective.

Again I say: “Talk That Talk.”