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Fourteen years ago, folklorist Chuck Perdue met with one of Rappahannock’s most famous sous, John Jackson and his wife. Com, to attempt to write down some of the Black folktales of the region. They were collected in the Keystone Folklore Quarterly under the title "I Swear to God It's the Tndh If I Ever Told It. ”
Purdue records that there were iAJJ whites and !>\.* Negmes here at that time. He also makes an interesting commentary on Rappahannock’s Blacks between the time of the Civil War and the Second World War, saying that little changed during these years.
There was a paternalistic system which gave the Black man a house to live in, food to eat and a little money with which to buy sugar, coffee, clothing material,, tobacco, and such.
In the 19J0’s, Jackson's father was hiring out too farm fora house, 25 barrels of corn meal, 2 barrels of flour, .Inn pounds of cured meat, and $200 cash for a year's labor. In 1950, John was making $2.00 a day and losing $2.,'5 for each day he failed to show up for work.
Jackson said that there was a lot of socializing for Rappahannock Blacks: a party almost every weekend, church with preaching, praying and singing, traveling musicians and minstrel shows.
Telling tall tales was mostly done at night, after work, although some of the women’s work such as shelling peas, lent itself to story-telling.
Often the men sang while they worked, pitching hay while they sang:
“Gonna roll my wagon down in road.
My horses gettin’ along
Horses now make no noise.
My wagon keeps rollin on."
Many of the Jacksons’ jokes and stories they learned from John’s Aunt Nellie, who they said could tell more jokes than anyone in the area. John said that Nellie once not to tell some jokes to the butcher in the Culpeper A X- P and got the man to laughing so hard that he slipped and cut off a finger with a meat saw. Nellie was not allowed in the store after that. .
Several of Jolt n a tjrf Cora's styrt.es arc about the devil:
John’s Nightmare
“When we first moved to' "Fairfax... I had did a hard day’s work that day. I come on in and went to bed that nijfht and I’m just as wide awake as I am sitting here talking to
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