Bruh Rabbit and the Rock Soup
You may have heard the story of Stone Soup: a stranger shows up in a hungry village with nothing but an empty pot and a plain stone, and talks the townspeople into each adding "just a little something" until there's a full pot of soup for everyone. It's told as a lesson about what happens when people share what they have. There's an another story that follows almost the same setup, a trickster, a "magic" rock, a pot that slowly fills up with other people's ingredients, it's called Bruh Rabbit and the Rock Soup. It's a Gullah folktale from the coast of Georgia and South Carolina, first written down by Charles C. Jones Jr. in 1888, in the actual dialect it was told in. What you'll read here is my own retelling of that story. If you'd like to read Jones's original version, you can click the link at the bottom of this post.
This version doesn't end the way you think. Rabbit's trick works on two neighbors without a hitch, but the third one sees right through him, and there's no warm group realization about sharing waiting at the end of this pot. Read the full story below to see who finally catches Rabbit, and how.
Bruh Rabbit and the Rock Soup
Bruh Rabbit had always been quick with a story, and one spring when his own kitchen was looking a little bare, he found a smooth, gray rock about the size of an egg and decided it was exactly the thing he needed. He washed it off, tucked it in his pocket, and set out visiting, telling anyone who'd listen that this was no ordinary rock. It was a soup rock, he said, the only one of its kind, and once it got going in a pot of boiling water, it turned out the richest, most delicious soup anybody had ever tasted.
His first stop was Bruh Bear's house. Bear, who had never heard of such a thing, was curious enough to let Rabbit try it. Rabbit set a pot of water to boil, dropped the rock in, and let it simmer a while before mentioning, that the soup always came out better with a bit of meat in it. Bear fetched some meat. A little later, Rabbit mentioned that greens would round it out nicely, and then a few vegetables, and then a pinch of this seasoning and that one, until the pot held everything a proper soup needed besides the rock, which wasn't doing anything but taking up space at the bottom. When the soup was done, Bear tasted it and declared he'd never had better, certain the rock was the secret. Rabbit ate his fill and complimented Bear generously on supplying such fine ingredients for his famous recipe.
Rabbit tried the very same trick at Bruh Cooter's house next, and it worked just as well. Cooter supplied the meat and the vegetables one request at a time and sent Rabbit off with a full belly and his reputation as a remarkable cook growing by the week. Rabbit kept at it, house to house, never cooking a thing himself beyond stirring the pot, and never buying a single ingredient.
Then he came to Bruh Fox's door, and Fox saw through the whole business almost right away. But he didn't let on, he played along, fetching whatever Rabbit asked for, same as Bear and Cooter had, and waited while the pot simmered. When the soup was ready, Fox took a slow taste and found it was good soup, the same good soup anyone could make with meat, greens, and seasoning. The rock had nothing to do with it.
Fox didn't make a scene. He reached into the pot, fished out the rock, and walked it over to the well and dropped it in. Then he told Rabbit plainly, in front of his whole family, that he'd been living off other folks' kitchens with nothing but a rock and a good story, and that the game was over. Rabbit, with no rock and no excuse left, had nothing to do but leave Fox's house hungry.
Source: Charles C. Jones Jr., Negro Myths from the Georgia Coast, Told in the Vernacular (1888).
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