A collection of Haitian folktales taken down from named tellers and printed in Creole with English translations alongside, so that the language of the telling survives with the story.

The tales turn on jealous brothers and a murdered sister, on a bone that sings its accusation as each member of the family walks past, on a disagreeable old woman in the woods outwitted by a boy who sings about fleas until she opens her door. Songs run through them, some with their melodies transcribed, and the collector marks which ones are sung in French dialect rather than Creole.

The footnotes carry the ethnography. They name the tellers and where they lived, gloss idioms word for word, explain terms such as the cooperative kumbit work party, and record honestly when an informant could not say what a word meant. Each tale closes with comparative references to versions in the Dominican Republic, Louisiana, the Lesser Antilles, Jamaica, Egypt, Algeria and further afield.