[Autographed by Tad and Scip:] Congaree Sketches. Scenes from Negro Life in the Swamps of the Congaree and Tales by Tad and Scip of Heaven and Hell with Other Miscellany. [Autograph Edition]

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Autograph Edition of this “collection of authentic stories of Negro life in South Carolina” based upon African-American fables and songs told to this white folklorist by Blacks who worked his land.

Further autographed by African American storytellers Tad and Scip; Thaddeus Goodson (1869–1957) and Scipio Shiver. Adjacent to their autographs is an annotation (“The signatures of Scip and Tad themselves”) in Adams hand, signed at the end as “E.C.L.A.”

Tad was an accomplished rhythm bones player. His songs were recorded in 1939 by Charles Seeger for the WPA. Aesop Goodson, his father, served in South Carolina’s House of Representatives during Reconstruction. Scip was “a Gullah preacher and long-term worker on Adams’s farm.” (Meally, editor, 1987 ed.)

In addition to the author’s autograph on the limitation page, this copy warmly inscribed and signed by the author as Ned Adams, datelined Columbia, South Carolina, 1928. 

At the bottom of all, two handwritten lines read: “Tad says ‘Scip can not write Scip he can only sign what he write.’”

The Introduction by Paul Green is intriguing; it is less referential to the book and more so a lengthy essay celebrating the African American leaders, W.E.B. Du Bois and Booker T. Washington, and praising a world filled with the likes of Langston Hughes, Paul Robeson, Countee Cullen, Alain Locke, James Weldon, et al.

Price: $1,500.00