Afrocentric process or the ways in which Africans in America trans-
formed their cultural forms and created a dynamic folk tradition in
America. The dynamic character of African American folklore, how-
ever, can only be revealed when we demonstrate an equal concern
with the factors which shaped both the creative product and the proc-
ess of creativity. We must envision, from an Afrocentric perspective,
the creative center of both the product and the process as African
culture and cultural forms.

In the following chapters, I examine the folklore surrounding the
trickster, conjurer, biblical figures, and the badman from the vantage
point of African cultural values and forms as transformed under the
conditions of slavery and in the socio-cultural environment of the late
nineteenth century. I approach black folk heroic creation as a con-
tinuous process -- one intimately related historically to black culture
building. The process began in Africa and continues in America as a
dynamic creative activity aimed at facilitating and enhancing the
adaptability of certain behavioral patterns traditionally accepted by
African people as advantageous for maintaining and protecting their
identity and values in certain types of situations. I argue that, in trans-
forming African culture and cultural forms in America, African
people were influenced not merely by surface differences in their life-
style in America from that they had known on the continent but
equally, if not more so, by their perceptions of the deep structural
similarities in the factors -- social, economic, and political -- influ-
encing its structure. In essence, Africans in America, in creating a
lifestyle and expressive forms supportive of culture-building, were
influenced less by surface differences in what they experienced in the
New World than by the concrete realities they faced on a day-to-day
basis which facilitated their clinging tenaciously to a value system
both recognizable to them and alternative to that imposed on them.
In freedom, African people in America did not abandon this value
system as an influence on folk heroic creation, but rather trans-
formed it to reflect new realities and insights about the shape of both
time and history as they perceived it from their vantage point on the
society.

The study of African American folklore in general and folk heroic
literature in particular has suffered too long under the weight of a
conceptual framework which envisions the idealized values of western
Europe as transformed in America as the basis for evaluating them.
While historians have for some time now recognized the value of folk-
lore in recovering the past of African Americans, folklorists have been
far more reluctant to use historical insights and realities as aids in the

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