A field study of the Haitian folktale, built from recordings taken from named tellers in Nippes, Plaisance and elsewhere, and concerned less with the stories than with how they work.

Comhaire-Sylvain separates the sung part from the spoken part. Songs are the conservative element: they hold onto Creole forms that everyday speech has dropped, and onto words nobody can translate any more, some of which she traces to African languages. Their meaning is often deliberately veiled, so that a tortoise's complaint about thorns and fruit turns out to be a warning about a dangerous man. The spoken portion varies with the teller, though set phrases, proverbs and metaphors recur at fixed points.

She catalogues the openings and closings — the exchange of cric and crac, the mock quarrel with the hero at the end — and sorts the tales by kind: origin stories, anecdotes, animal tales where cunning is the only virtue, realistic episodes, and marvels both Christian and pagan.