After Tio Tigre passes, Conejo takes a shortcut through the forest, runs ahead, and lies in Tio Tigre’s path a second time.  Again, Tio Tigre leaves the rabbit. Conejo tries a third time.  This time, Tio Tigre decides that three dead rabbits are too many to bypass.  He puts down his baskets to retrace his steps and pick up the other rabbits.  While he is gone, Conejo steals the baskets.

The story I know involves Brer Rabbit, Brer Bear, and a pair of shoes.  Brer Rabbit similarly tricks Brer Bear out of a load of fish by leaving first one shoe in the road and then the other.  Brer Bear ignores the first shoe but, when he sees its mate, is unable to resist owning the pair.  He too puts down his load, and the rest is folktale.  Harold Courlander (1976) recounts a Gullah tale, featuring Brer Rabbit and called “Playing Dead in the Road,” that is almost identical to Garcia’s “Tio Tigre y Conejo.”

I had heard my story from other African American storytellers in the United States; the Gullah live in the Sea Islands off the coast of South Carolina, and Garcia had collected his story in Ecuador.  Yet these stories obviously shared the same source.  They are linked by a common African heritage.

Anansi tales in ihe Western Hemisphere

The population of Ecuador is ethnically mixed.  About 5 percent of the population is descended from African slaves, some of whom were Maroons, escaped slaves.  Richard Price states that the word maroon comes from the Spanish word cimarron, which originally was applied to cattle that had wandered into the hills.  At first the word maroon was applied to escaped American Indian slaves, but by the end of the sixteenth century it almost exclusively referred to African and African American escapees.  Slave owners frequently attacked the Maroon settlements in an effort to reclaim the slaves.  To deter attacks from slave-owners bent on reclaiming their “property,” Maroon communities were located in isolated and inaccessible territories.  This situation contributed to the preservation of the people’s traditions.

Most Afro-Ecuadorians live in the northern coastal region of Esmeraldas Province; approximately 85 percent of the province’s population is of African descent.  In addition, there is a small community of black people living in relative isolation in the Andes Mountains, in the Chota valley of Imbabura Province.  These people are descendants of African slaves who chose to remain on the haciendas after the Jesuits were expelled from Ecuador around the end of the nineteenth century.

Garcia, from Esmeraldas, is of Spanish and African descent.  His father was a refugee from the Spanish Civil War and died when Garcia was eight years old.