A Story a Story
by Gail E. Haley
Summary
Gail Haley retells a West African tale about how Anansi, a small, cunning spider who is really a trickster in disguise, first brought stories down to earth. All the world's stories belong to the Sky God, Nyame, who agrees to trade them to Anansi only if the spider can capture three creatures everyone else considers impossible to catch, a leopard with terrible teeth, a hornet swarm that stings anyone who comes near, and a fairy that no one can ever quite see coming. Anansi succeeds through cleverness rather than strength each time, tying the leopard up by his feet with a vine creeper, luring the hornets into a hollow gourd with the promise of shelter from rain, and catching the fairy with a sticky gum doll the fairy angrily punches and gets stuck to. Pleased with Anansi's cunning, Nyame hands over the stories as promised, and the book closes by explaining that this is why, ever since, all stories told the world over are still called Anansi's stories, no matter who tells them.
Haley developed the book after spending a year researching the African roots of Caribbean folklore in the Caribbean, and she illustrates it in woodcuts, a relief printing medium she returned to across her career, giving the leopard, hornets and fairy a carved, textured weight against bold, flat backgrounds. It works well read aloud to children around four to eight, its three part structure of impossible task after impossible task giving even a first time listener an easy shape to follow and predict.
Historical Context & Significance
A Story, A Story, published by Atheneum in 1970, won Haley the 1971 Caldecott Medal. That year's Honor books were Blair Lent's The Angry Moon, Arnold Lobel's Frog and Toad Are Friends and Maurice Sendak's In the Night Kitchen. She went on to win Britain's Kate Greenaway Medal in 1976 for The Post Office Cat, becoming the only illustrator to hold both the American and British medals for illustration.
Gene Deitch adapted the book into an animated short for Weston Woods in 1971, filmed in Prague with narration by the Sierra Leonean broadcaster John Akar, and the film was named to the American Library Association's Notable Children's Videos list in 1973, extending Anansi's own reputation as a story that keeps getting passed along into a second medium not so different from the oral tradition the book itself describes. Haley kept returning to relief printing across the decades that followed, using wood engravings again for Mountain Jack Tales in 1992, more than twenty years after A Story, A Story first won her the medal.