The Palm-Oil Seller and the Goblin
A co-wives tale in which a girl short-changed by an ìwin follows him to the land of the dead, passes tests of humility and obedience, and returns rich, while the head wife's daughter repeats the journey dishonestly and is killed.
This is a tale about a poor subordinate wife's daughter who is short-changed one cowry by an ìwin, a goblin or spirit, follows him to the land of the dead to collect it, passes a series of tests by giving away the good part of everything she is offered, and comes home rich. The head wife then sends her own daughter to do the same. The second girl cheats at every step and is killed at her own doorstep. Recorded in English by A. B. Ellis in 1894 .
It is the first tale in Ellis's folklore chapter and one of two co-wives tales he prints. Ellis notes of the second that "the discomfiture of an ìyálé is a favourite theme" , which is a collector's observation about frequency and is the closest thing this section has to a statement about which human-world tales were common.
The household
The tale is unintelligible without the compound structure, and Ellis glosses it in a footnote: ìyálé, which he derives as ìyá-ilé, mistress of the house, is the head wife; the subordinate wives, of which the first girl's mother is one, are ìyá-ìwó . owe-family-lineage-compound treats the household, and women-marriage-from-the-womans-side treats the position from the woman's own side.
What matters here is that these are two children of one man in one compound, and that the rivalry driving the plot is between their mothers rather than between them.
The tale
Ellis's teller opens: "My alo is about a woman whose little girl made palm-oil" .
One day when the girl had made palm-oil she took it to market to sell, and stayed there selling until it was quite dark. When it was dark an ìwin, which Ellis glosses as goblin, spirit or ghost , came to buy palm-oil and paid her in cowries.
When the girl counted them she found one short, and asked the goblin for the missing cowry. The goblin said he had no more cowries, and the girl began crying: my mother will beat me if I go home with a cowry short.
The goblin walked away, and the girl walked after him.
Go away, said the goblin; turn back, for no one can enter the country where I live.
No, said the girl; wherever you go I will follow, until you pay me my cowry.
So she followed a long, long way, until they came to the country where the people stand on their heads in their mortars and pound yams with their heads. Then they went on a long way further and came to a river of filth. And the goblin sang.
The Yorùbá is not given. Ellis prints this song in English only .
No Yorùbá text in source; literal morpheme gloss unavailable.
Idiomatic English (Ellis's rendering, as printed) Translator: A. B. Ellis
Goblin: Oh! young palm-oil seller, you must now turn back.
Girl: Save I get my cowry, I'll not leave your track.
Goblin: Oh! young palm-oil seller. Soon will lead this track, To the bloody river, Then you must turn back.
Girl: I will not turn back.
Goblin: See yon gloomy forest?
Girl: I will not turn back.
Goblin: See yon craggy mountain?
Girl: I will not turn back. Save I get my cowry I'll not leave your track.
No Yorùbá survives and nothing is reconstructed. Ellis has rendered the exchange as rhymed English verse, back/track, and the rhyme is his: a Victorian translator's convention for marking that something was sung. What can be observed structurally is the antiphonal shape, a warning that escalates through four terrors and a refusal that does not change. The girl's line is a fixed response against a varying call, which is the àlọ́ àpagbè mechanism described in yoruba-alo, and it is very likely the part the audience sang, though Ellis does not say so.
They walked on a long, long way, and at last arrived at the land of dead people.
There the goblin gave her palm-nuts to make palm-oil, and said: eat the palm-oil and give me the ha-ha. Ellis glosses ha-ha as the stringy remains of the pulp of the nut after the oil has been expressed . But when the oil was made, the girl gave the oil to the goblin and ate the ha-ha herself. And the goblin said: very well.
By and by the goblin gave her a banana and said: eat this banana and give me the skin. But the girl peeled it, gave the banana to the goblin, and ate the skin herself.
Then the goblin said: go and pick three ado. Ellis glosses ado as a very small calabash, commonly used for keeping medicinal powders . Do not pick the ado which cry "pick me, pick me, pick me," but pick those which say nothing, and then return home. When you are half-way back break one, break another at the house-door, and the third when you are inside.
She picked as she was told and went home. Half-way, she broke one, and many slaves and horses appeared and followed her. At the door she broke the second, and sheep and goats and fowls appeared, more than two hundred. Inside the house she broke the last, and the house filled to overflowing with cowries, pouring out of the doors and windows.
Then the girl's mother took twenty country-cloths, twenty strings of valuable beads, twenty sheep and goats and twenty fowls, and went to make a present to the head wife.
The head wife asked where all these things came from, and when she had been told, she refused to accept them. She said she would send her own child to do the same, and could easily get as much.
So the head wife made palm-oil and sent her own daughter to sell it in the market. The goblin came and bought and paid the proper number of cowries, but the girl hid one and pretended he had not given her enough.
What am I to do, said the goblin. I have no more cowries.
Oh, said the girl, I will follow you to your house, and then you can pay me. And the goblin said: very well.
On the road the goblin sang as before, and the girl answered, but the exchange is shorter this time and her refusals are flat. Then the goblin said: very well. Come along. And they walked on till they reached the land of dead people.
There the goblin gave her palm-nuts and said: when the oil is made, eat it yourself and bring me the ha-ha. And she ate the oil and brought him the ha-ha. And the goblin said: very well.
Then he gave her a banana and said: eat the banana yourself and bring me the skin. And she ate the banana and carried him the skin.
Then he said: go and pick three ado. Do not pick those which cry "pick me, pick me, pick me," but pick those which say nothing.
She went. She found ado which said nothing, and left them alone. She found others crying "pick me, pick me, pick me," and picked three of those.
Half-way home she broke one, and lions and leopards and hyenas and snakes appeared, and ran after her and harassed her and bit her until she reached the door. At the door she broke the second, and more ferocious animals came upon her and bit and tore her. The door was shut, and there was only a deaf person in the house. The girl called to the deaf person to open the door, but he heard her not. And there, upon the threshold, the wild beasts killed her.
The gift refused
The plot's hinge is a refusal that a modern English-speaking reader will misread, and Ellis anticipated this precisely. He footnotes the moment the head wife declines the present:
From the European point of view this would appear to be a good trait on the part of the iyale, for the inference would be that she did not wish to deprive the sub-wife of so much property, but that is not the native view. To the native mind a person only refuses a present when he is nurturing rancour against the donor, and to refuse a gift is regarded as a sign of enmity .
This is the most useful footnote in Ellis's non-tortoise material, because without it the tale's turn is invisible. The subordinate wife's gift is an act of deference from a junior to a senior in the compound, and accepting it would have settled the matter and confirmed the hierarchy. Refusing it is a declaration. owe-gratitude-ingratitude-reciprocity collects the proverb material on gifts and their obligations.
Two cautions on how the corpus uses this note. The observation about gift-refusal is ethnographically specific and load-bearing, and it is retained. The framing, "the native view," "the native mind," is period generalisation of the kind described in alo-ellis-1894-as-a-source, and is quoted here as an artifact rather than adopted as a way of speaking.
What the tale does
The mechanism is a test that is invisible as a test, run twice with the answers in plain sight. Nothing in the goblin's instructions tells the first girl to give away the good part. He tells her to eat the oil and give him the dregs, and she does the opposite. He tells her to eat the banana and give him the skin, and she does the opposite. She is not obeying, and that is the point: what she is doing is deferring, taking the worse portion in the presence of someone owed respect, which is ordinary conduct toward an elder in the compound she comes from. Her reward is not for cleverness or for obedience but for habit.
The ado test is the reverse. Here the instruction is explicit, pick the silent ones, and the first girl follows it exactly. The second girl inverts both: she takes the good portion when told to take it, which is obedience, and she picks the calabashes that cry out, which is disobedience. She is punished for the disobedience, but the corpus notes as analysis that her real failure comes earlier and is characterological. She takes the oil because she was told to, having no instinct that would make her do otherwise, and she picks the shouting ado because a thing announcing its own value must be the valuable one.
That last is the tale's sharpest single idea and it is worth stating plainly: the calabashes that advertise themselves are the ones full of lions. owe-pride-humility-self-knowledge carries the proverb material on self-advertisement.
The ending is not softened. A child is killed on a threshold by animals while a deaf person fails to hear her calling. The corpus records that Yorùbá cautionary tales for children are frequently this severe, and alo-cautionary-tales-and-what-they-threaten treats the pattern across the section.
Note finally who is punished. The head wife instigates everything and loses her daughter; the daughter cheats and dies. The tale does not distribute the consequence proportionately, and the mother, whose refusal of the gift began it, is left alive to have lost a child. Whether Yorùbá tellers understood that as her punishment, the record consulted does not say.
Variants
Ellis's own Tale II, alo-the-poor-woman-and-the-aranran-bird, is a second co-wives tale with what Ellis calls a resembling plot : a poor woman is enriched by a supernatural encounter, the head wife tries to repeat it, and the attempt ends in a child's death. The two are best read together, and Ellis's note that this is "a favourite theme" indicates they represent a type rather than two isolated tales.
No Yorùbá-language version was located by this compiler. yorubatales.com carries a tale titled "The Two Wives" , indicating the type still circulates, but the site carries no per-tale attribution and nothing is quoted from it.
Performance context
Evening telling, treated in yoruba-alo. The song recurs, in full on the first journey and abbreviated on the second, and the audience hearing the shortened version already knows the road it describes. The journey itself is built as a sequence of marvels, the people pounding yams with their heads, the river of filth, the gloomy forest, the craggy mountain, the land of the dead, and each is a place for the teller to stop and elaborate.