Every family has its own version of the warnings passed down to children — don’t go past the fence, don’t talk to strangers, don’t wander off after dark. Most of us hear them as simple caution. Few of us stop to ask what they were really protecting us from.
Brown-Skinned Boy, Ira Harris’s memoir of growing up in Jim Crow-era North Carolina, opens with a quote comparing fairy tales to natural law — the idea that folklore isn’t decoration but instruction, a way of teaching children the rules of a dangerous world before they’re old enough to understand why the rules exist. For Harris, that idea wasn’t abstract. It was how his grandmother raised him.
As a boy, he was told about jack-o’-lantern lights — glowing orbs said to lure people off the path and into rivers, holding them under until they drowned. He was warned to stay on the side of the road, to never wander too far into the woods alone, to be careful of what he picked and where he stepped. On the surface, these sound like the kind of gentle superstitions grandparents tell to keep restless children close. But as Harris grew older, the warnings took on a second, harder meaning. The lights that could lead a person astray and hold them under water became, in his mind, inseparable from the real danger of being a Black boy in a place built to destroy him — violence that could show up on a school bus, in a hallway, on a dark road at night.
That’s the quiet power of the folklore Harris grew up with. It wasn’t a distraction from the real threats his family faced; it was a way of preparing him for them without having to name the full weight of that danger to a child too young to carry it. A warning wrapped in myth is still a warning. It still teaches a child to be watchful, to respect boundaries, to move carefully through a world that does not have his safety in mind. Long before he had language for racism or injustice, he had a grandmother’s stories teaching him instinctive caution — and, just as importantly, giving him something to hold onto besides fear.
There’s something worth sitting with here beyond one family’s history. Folklore, in many cultures, has always done double duty: it entertains, and it instructs. It gives children a framework for danger that doesn’t require adults to say the unsayable out loud. For families living under real and constant threat, that framework isn’t quaint. It’s survival technology, refined over generations and handed down at bedtime.
It raises a question worth carrying into our own lives, wherever we come from: What stories were we told as children that we dismissed as superstition, without ever asking what real danger they were quietly preparing us to face? Sometimes the fairy tale isn’t hiding the truth from us. Sometimes it’s the only way the truth could reach us at all.
Amazon Book Link: https://www.amazon.com/dp/1968966099