User:FlareNight/sandbox

Tricksters in folk stories are commonly amoral characters, both human and anthropomorphic animals, who 'succeed' based on deception and taking advantage of others weaknesses. They tend to use their wits to resolve conflict and/or achieve their goals. Two examples of African-American tricksters are Brer Rabbit and Anansi.

Tricksters in African American folktales take a comedic approach and contain an underlying theme of inequality, compared to other folktales that label their tricksters as menaces. The National Humanities Center notes that trickster stories "contain serious commentary on the inequities of existence in a country where the promises of democracy were denied to a large portion of the citizenry, a pattern that becomes even clearer in the literary adaptations of trickster figures".

The folktales don't always contain an actual 'trickster' but a theme of trickery tactics. For example, Charles Chesnutt's collected a series of stories titled The Conjure Woman (1899). One of the story trickster tactics is "how an enslaved man is spared being sent from one plantation to another by having his wife, who is a conjure woman, turn him into a tree...the trickery works until a local sawmill selects that particular tree to cut".

During this period of slavery, "and for decades thereafter, trickster tales, with their subtly and indirection, were necessary because black peoples could not risk a direct attack on white society".