Monkey chew tobacco and spit white lime.” That phrase, documented by Zora Neale Hurston during field trips to Nassau in 1929 and 1930, was the opening formula for Bahamian folktales — a signal that a story was about to begin. What follows is rarely simple entertainment. These after-dinner performances on porches and in yards across the islands once served as oral archives, moral instruction, and community debate, all wrapped in the voices of elders like Mama Oliver, who preserved not just tales but herbal knowledge and dream interpretation alongside them. This article traces the tradition of Bahamian porch storytelling — its formulas, its trickster characters, its contested survival — and what it reveals about a culture that has always treated the spoken word as both art and record.
“Once upon a time, a merry good time… Biddy, biddy bend, My story is end.” — Bahamian folktale opening and closing formulas, documented by Zora Neale Hurston, 1929–1930.
For anyone curious about Bahamian culture beyond Junkanoo parades and beach resorts, the storytelling tradition offers a quieter but just as revealing entry point. It connects directly to West African oral practices, colonial-era plantation social life, and contemporary efforts to keep the narratives alive in formal settings like the Tellabration experience on Bay Street. The tradition is not frozen in the past — but neither has it survived unchanged, and the shift from porch to stage has raised genuine questions about what gets preserved and what gets left out.
Yes, Bahamian storytelling on the porch after dinner is a real and historically central tradition — but it was never just one thing. Some sessions were intimate, a single elder propped on pillows spinning tales until listeners dozed off. Others were competitive, with multiple storytellers vying for the floor and listeners who weren’t shy about shouting “that it don’t go, or ‘taint so.” The tradition is still alive, but increasingly in formalized settings (workshops, tours, museum programs) rather than on family porches. That shift matters — and it’s worth understanding what was gained and what was lost.
Before digging into the characters and contexts, a quick orientation to the main forms Bahamian storytelling has taken. Each variant has its own rules, its own audience, and its own relationship to the question of preservation.
| Variant | Setting | Who Told | Key Feature | Status Today |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Nightly pillow stories | Bedroom or porch, within the family | Elders (often women like Mama Oliver) | Intimate, winding; listeners often fell asleep | Still practiced in some families but declining |
| Communal porch sessions | Shared porch or yard, after dinner | Multiple storytellers, any age | Competitive; audience challenged tellers mid-tale | Rare now; remembered by older generations |
| Hurston’s recorded sessions | Nassau, 1929–1930 | Named individuals (Woods, Weeks, Barrett, Isaacs) | Documented for preservation; patronized by Elsie Cleo Parson | Archival — primary source material |
| Tellabration experience | Bay Street, Nassau (384 Bay St) | Professional storytellers, local authors | Structured 45-minute session with book prize | Active, bookable via Peek; 6 ratings as of 2024 |
Each row in that table represents a different answer to the question of who tells, who listens, and who decides what a story means. The differences are not just logistical — they shaped the stories themselves.
The Words That Open a World
Bahamian folktales did not begin cold. They arrived with a formula, a verbal handshake between teller and listener. The most common opening, as noted by Virgil Henry Storr in the Journal of Caribbean Literature, was “Monkey chew tobacco and spit white lime.” Another variant — “Once upon a time, a merry good time” — signals the same kind of pact. The teller’s voice shifts, the porch quiets, and the story begins.
Informal tellers often used a shorter entry: “Dis time, one time.” That phrase, collected by Hurston from multiple Nassau storytellers, marks the tale as one instance among many — a single telling of a story that exists in no fixed version. The closing formula was just as important. “Be bo bend, I’ll never tell a lie like that again” or “Biddy, biddy bend, My story is end” released the listener from the world of the tale. These bookends served a practical function: they defined the story as a bounded performance, separate from ordinary conversation, and gave both teller and audience permission to enter the fictional space together.
What is still debated, even among scholars who have worked with Hurston’s field notes, is whether these formulas were pan-Bahamian or specific to certain islands and families. The research collected by Hurston drew heavily from Nassau and from Bahamian settlers in Miami. Whether family islands like Exuma or Long Island had their own distinct formulas remains unresolved in the written record.
B’Bookie, B’Rabbie, and the Chickcharney
Certain characters recur across Bahamian stories, each carrying a specific kind of cultural weight. The most famous pair is B’Bookie (a rabbit, the slickster) and B’Rabbie (a goat, the gullible foil). Their adventures — described by Storr as a partnership of the “slickster rabbit and silly goat” — dramatize the tension between cleverness and foolishness, between getting ahead and getting tricked. These are not simple animal fables; they encode strategies for survival in a society where power was unevenly distributed.
The chickcharney appears in a different kind of tale. A three-toed bird with a backward-facing foot, the chickcharney is a creature of the bush, often encountered by travelers who stray from the path. Unlike the trickster rabbit, the chickcharney is amoral — it does not teach a lesson so much as mark a boundary between the domestic world of the porch and the wild world beyond. The National Art Gallery of The Bahamas featured the chickcharney as a key inspiration in its 2022 exhibition “Ol’ Story: Folktales and Traditions,” alongside the paintings of Amos Ferguson.
Anansi, the West African spider-trickster, also appears in Bahamian storytelling. His tales — brought to the Caribbean through the transatlantic slave trade — showcase a small creature who outwits larger opponents through cunning. In the Bahamian context, Anansi stories reinforce values of resourcefulness and adaptability, but they also carried coded resistance during plantation-era storytelling sessions. This is one area where outsider interpretation has sometimes oversimplified: Anansi is not just a clever hero. He is often selfish and his victories come at someone else’s expense — a moral ambiguity that many retellings sand down.
A common misconception is that Bahamian folktales are primarily children’s entertainment. In fact, communal sessions were adult-dominated, with listeners who debated, challenged, and even heckled storytellers mid-performance. Children were present and learned by listening, but the content — including trickster deceptions, moral gray zones, and social critique — was aimed at a mixed-age audience.
The Porch as Stage
The porch after dinner was not a passive setting. It was a performance space with its own etiquette and its own risks. In communal sessions, multiple storytellers might compete for the floor, and listeners did not simply absorb the tale — they judged it. Hurston recorded the phrase “that it don’t go, or ‘taint so” as a common listener interjection, a challenge to the teller’s version of events. This was not rudeness; it was participation. The story belonged to the community, not to the individual who happened to be speaking at that moment.
Women like Mama Oliver were central to this tradition. The research refers to her as an elder who “preserved oral traditions, herbal knowledge, and dream interpretation” — a reminder that storytelling was never separate from other forms of cultural knowledge. To tell a story was also to transmit medicinal plant lore, weather prediction, and social norms. The porch was a classroom, a pharmacy, and a theater all at once.
This competitive, participatory character is one reason why the shift from porch to formal stage is not neutral. When a storytelling session becomes a booked experience with a fixed duration and a paying audience, the dynamic changes. The listener becomes a customer. The teller becomes a performer. The interjection “that it don’t go” becomes an interruption, not a contribution.
If you attend a Tellabration session at 384 Bay Street in Nassau (the current storytelling venue), notice the opening and closing phrases the teller uses. Compare them with the traditional formulas Hurston recorded. Many contemporary tellers blend old and new — and that choice is itself a comment on how the tradition is evolving.
From Porch to Preservation
In 2022, the National Art Gallery of The Bahamas opened “Ol’ Story: Folktales and Traditions,” a virtual exhibition created by 77 campers aged 5 to 17 who spent two weeks making art inspired by Bahamian oral narratives. The camp, which included a satellite program in Exuma run by the Exuma Arts Network, produced individual artworks and a collaborative mural led by muralist June Collie. The exhibition was sponsored by the Central Bank of The Bahamas and drew over 150 attendees to its opening.
The program is one example of formalized preservation. Another is the Tellabration storytelling experience, a 45-minute session on Bay Street that includes a book prize (one per session, not per person) and interactive vocabulary activities. Customer reviews as of November 2024 are overwhelmingly positive — one reviewer called it “amazing and very educational” — though a single August 2024 review from a Viator customer reported difficulty finding the venue and ultimately losing the booking fee.
These formal offerings raise a question that the research does not fully resolve: what happens to a tradition when it becomes a ticketed experience? The balance between accessibility and authenticity is not easy to strike. The Tellabration format includes a “5-minute introduction to Bahamian narratives” and a “5-minute interactive activity on Bahamian vocabulary” — a structure that would have been foreign to the storytellers Hurston recorded in 1929.
Context and Comparison: Porch Versus Stage
The differences between traditional porch storytelling and the contemporary Tellabration experience are worth mapping directly. Each format makes different choices about time, authority, and audience participation.
| Attribute | Traditional Porch Session | Tellabration (contemporary) |
|---|---|---|
| Duration | Open-ended; could last until listeners fell asleep | Fixed 45-minute session |
| Who controls the story | Community; listeners could interrupt and challenge | Professional teller directs the flow |
| Opening formula | “Monkey chew tobacco and spit white lime” or “Dis time, one time” | Structured 5-minute introduction |
| Closing formula | “Be bo bend, I’ll never tell a lie like that again” | End of session; includes book prize |
| Audience role | Active participant; could shout corrections | Paying customer; engaged but not interjecting |
| Knowledge transmitted | Story + herbal knowledge + dream interpretation + social norms | Story + curated “rare Bahamian facts” + vocabulary activity |
It would be easy to frame this comparison as a loss — traditional good, formalized bad. That is a misreading. Traditional sessions were also hierarchical (elders spoke first, children listened) and could exclude women or younger storytellers depending on the community. The formal Tellabration makes the tradition accessible to visitors who would otherwise have no entry point. The real question is not which is better, but what each format prioritizes — and what it leaves out.
- Bahamian porch storytelling was a competitive, participatory oral art form, not passive entertainment — listeners challenged tellers mid-tale with formulas like “that it don’t go.”
- Hurston’s 1929-1930 fieldwork captured named storytellers (Woods, Weeks, Barrett, Isaacs) and preserved opening/closing formulas that define the tradition.
- Contemporary experiences like Tellabration keep the tradition accessible but restructure the audience-teller relationship in ways that differ sharply from the communal porch session.
- The chickcharney, B’Bookie and B’Rabbie, and Anansi each encode different kinds of cultural knowledge — trickster survival strategies, boundary-marking, and moral ambiguity — that resist simple “moral of the story” readings.
Questions Readers Ask
Is Bahamian storytelling still practiced today?
Yes, but primarily in formalized settings rather than on family porches. The Tellabration experience on Bay Street, Nassau runs 45-minute sessions with a book prize. The National Art Gallery of The Bahamas also ran a 2022 virtual exhibition, “Ol’ Story: Folktales and Traditions,” created by campers aged 5 to 17.
Who collected the first recorded Bahamian folktales?
Zora Neale Hurston collected them during field trips to Nassau in 1929 and 1930, patronized by folklorist Elsie Cleo Parson. Her recordings include named storytellers such as Dorothy Woods (age 15) and William Weeks, a wealthy plantation owner. The American Folklore Society holds the original materials.
What is the chickcharney?
A three-toed bird with a backward-facing foot that appears in Bahamian folklore. Unlike trickster figures, the chickcharney marks boundaries between the domestic and wild worlds. It featured prominently in the NAGB’s 2022 “Ol’ Story” exhibition alongside the paintings of Amos Ferguson.
Did storytelling on the porch really happen after dinner?
Yes. Research notes that stories were told nightly, with listeners often propped on pillows until they fell asleep. The after-dinner timing was practical — work was done, the household was gathered, and the porch offered communal space without the constraints of indoor seating.
Are Anansi stories part of Bahamian tradition or imported?
Both. Anansi arrived from West Africa via the transatlantic slave trade and became naturalized in Bahamian storytelling, where the spider-trickster’s cunning took on new meanings related to survival and coded resistance. The character is shared across much of the Caribbean, with local variations.
What the Porch Still Teaches
The Bahamian tradition of storytelling on the porch after dinner never depended on being written down. It depended on people gathering, on an elder’s voice carrying through the evening air, and on listeners who knew the stories well enough to argue with them. That dynamic is fragile, and it has weakened as porches empty and screens light up. But the tradition has not vanished — it has adapted, moved indoors, become a ticketed event, and in doing so, it has forced everyone who cares about it to ask what part of the practice is the story itself and what part is the context that shaped it. That question is worth holding onto, whether you ever sit on a Bahamian porch or not. For a deeper look at related belief systems woven into these tales, read about Obeah and folklore in the Bahamas.
Sources and further reading
Grand Bahama Museum. “Folktale Collection.” 🔗
National Art Gallery of The Bahamas. “Ol’ Story: Folktales & Traditions — MMASC 2022 Virtual Exhibition.” 🔗
Peek. “Bahamian Storytelling: True Island Fables.” 🔗
Related reading on IslandHopperGuides
John Canoe’s Caribbean Cousin: Tracing the Roots of Junkanoo Across Cultures — explores another Bahamian cultural tradition born from African diaspora heritage.
Family Islands: Unique Cultures Across the Bahamas Out Islands — the storytelling tradition varied significantly from island to island, a diversity that this post contextualizes.
Bahamian Spirituality: Exploring Obeah, Christianity, and Island Beliefs — the belief systems that elders like Mama Oliver wove into their stories.
Exploring Bahamian History at Pompey Museum — another key site for understanding the social context that shaped porch storytelling.
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