The Annotated African American Folktales

by Henry Louis Gates

  Harris’s daughter provides a more gentle scene of origins, depicting her father and his boyhood chums basking in the warm glow of a fire while entertained by stories told by adult “companions.” “When the work and play of the day were ended and the glow of the lightwood knot could be seen in the negro cabins, Joel and the Turner children would steal away from the house and visit their friends in the slave quarters. Old Harbert and Uncle George Terrell were Joel’s favorite companions, and from a nook in their chimney corners he listened to the legends handed down from their African ancestors—the lore of animals and birds so dear to every plantation negro.” Harris’s daughter fails to take note of but betrays through her words the disturbances in this idyllic scene. The talk of “work and play of the day,” “African ancestors,” the “plantation negro,” the “negro cabins,” and the “slave quarters” all give the lie to the notion of “friends” and “companions” (Julia Collier Harris 1918, 33–34). It may be true that the bond between Harris and Old Harbert and Uncle George Terrell was solidified by Harris’s role in helping a runaway slave, and it was said about the two elderly men that “there was nothing they were not ready to do for him at any time of day or night” (Hemenway 1982, 12). But even that episode is nothing but another stark reminder of the power asymmetries between black men in slave cabins and white boys in “the house.”

  Uncle Remus is “venerable enough to have lived during the period he describes,” Harris tells us. And, in a jaw-dropping statement that has led many readers to rub their eyes in disbelief, he adds that Uncle Remus is a man who has “nothing but pleasant memories of the discipline of slavery” (Harris 1955, xxvii). Hardly a trace of resentment, ill will, or antipathy mars his relationship to the adoring young white boy. Indeed, Harris often invoked the romance of the plantation, describing how the “new dispensation” had “hushed into silence” the poetry of the past, the stories and “songs of the negroes” (Bickley 1981, 110). He went even further in “Observations from New England” when he described slavery as “an institution which, under Providence, grew into a university in which millions of savages served an apprenticeship to religion and civilization” (Julia Collier Harris 1918, 166).

  This photograph of George Terrell was probably taken in the late 1800s. Harris credited “Uncle George Terrell” and “Old Harbert,” enslaved workers on the Turnwold Plantation, as sources for the tales in the Uncle Remus books and as models for the Uncle Remus character. Joel Chandler Harris Papers, Stuart A. Rose Manuscript, Archives, and Rare Book Library, Emory University.

  Did Harris ever stop to wonder why the tales Uncle Remus tells are so full of malice, greed, envy, hatred, and murder? They stand in so emphatically dissonant a relationship to the pastoral frame that it defies credibility to think that Harris could not detect trouble in his folkloric paradise. Brer Rabbit decapitates Fox, brings the head to Mrs. Fox, drops it into her cooking pot as “nice beef,” and lets the son discover his father’s head. Who can forget the inventory of possible executions (barbecuing, roasting, hanging, drowning, skinning, snatching out eyeballs) recited in “The Wonderful Tar-Baby Story”? Brer Rabbit scalds Wolf to death, calls a secret grove full of hornets his “laughing place,” and sets Possum on fire. When Brer Wolf screams “Ow-ow! I’m a-burnin’,” Brer Rabbit responds by dumping more leaves to fuel the fire where he has trapped Brer Wolf. He prides himself on the ability to lie, cheat, and steal in the competition for food and women. Although Harris at one point tells us that the tales depict nothing more than the “roaring comedy of animal life,” his preface to the collection tells us otherwise. “It needs no scientific investigation,” he asserts, “to show why he, the negro, selects as his hero the weakest and most harmless of all animals and brings him out victorious in contests with the bear, the wolf, and the fox. It is not virtue that triumphs, but helplessness. It is not malice but mischievousness. Indeed, the parallel between the case of all animals who must, perforce, triumph through his shrewdness and the humble condition of the slave raconteur is not without its pathos and poetry” (Julia Collier Harris 1918, 158). That Harris acknowledged the tales as allegories of enslavement makes it all the more troubling that he framed them as children’s fare.

  This group portrait is part of a collection of early-twentieth-century snapshots of the Turnwold Plantation, where Joel Chandler Harris worked as a printer’s apprentice and heard stories he would later use in the Uncle Remus books. The subjects of the photograph are identified in a caption as “The negro descendants of the Turner slaves,” the setting as the “Last of the Negro cabins at the Turner plantation.” Joel Chandler Harris Papers, Stuart A. Rose Manuscript, Archives, and Rare Book Library, Emory University.

  Uncle Remus himself disavows the notion that humor might be the chief ingredient in his tales. Why does he never smile? Tempy asks him. And he replies “with unusual emphasis”: “Well, I tell you dis, Sis Tempy . . . ef deze yer tales wuz des fun, fun, fun, en giggle, giggle, giggle, I let you know I’d done drapt um long ago. Yasser, w’en it come down ter gigglin’ you kin des count old Remus out” (Harris 1955, 331). In other words, humor is not his accomplice but his sworn enemy.

  What is it if not deadly malice—rather than lighthearted mischievousness—that leads Brer Rabbit to betray Brer Fox to a farmer and stand by while he is beaten to death? The helplessness emphasized in Harris’s introduction rarely produces the triumphant scenes of revenge we witness in one tale after another. Nature is red in tooth and claw in these stories, and so is human nature, the tales imply, even if almost all we see are animal actors. Unlike Aesop’s fables, which stage morality plays in the animal kingdom, these stories send the message that vice works best in a hostile world full of predators and false friends. Hypocrisy trumps almost every other trait, for it creates an advantage by lulling opponents into a feeling that all is well in the world. We may cheer Brer Rabbit on as he rides up the well in a bucket and sends Brer Fox to his doom, but we recognize that fortunes shift quickly—Brer Rabbit tells us as much—and every victory is merely temporary in these dog-eat-dog adventures.

  Joel Chandler Harris continued to publish Uncle Remus stories in Georgia newspapers, among them The Sunny South, which printed two Thanksgiving stories, “signed” by Harris.

  Joel Chandler Harris was a newspaper man, beginning his career as a printer’s devil, and working his way up to editorial writer at the Atlanta Constitution, where the Uncle Remus stories first appeared. Born in 1848, his father, an Irish railroad laborer, abandoned mother and child shortly after his son was born. (Many have speculated that Uncle Remus may be invested with all the paternal affection Joel Chandler Harris had missed out on as a boy.) Mary Harris, who kept her maiden name, settled in Eatonton, Georgia, with her mother and worked as a seamstress. Her son attended school until age thirteen, when he took an apprenticeship in the printing trade at the Turner plantation. It was at that plantation, called Turnwold, that the young Joel Chandler Harris heard the tales that would later enter the pages of the multiple volumes of the Uncle Remus stories.

  The immediate catalyst for collecting the tales can be traced to Harris’s review of an 1877 article by William Owens entitled “Folklore of the Southern Negroes.” There he came to the conclusion that the piece was “remarkable for what it omits rather than for what it contains” (Harris 1877, 2). Owens, he believed, lacked an understanding of the deep, lived experience and profound wisdom in the tales, and he also had no connection whatsoever to the dialect in which the tales were told. How could he possibly refer to Brer Rabbit as Buh Rabbit? There were already far too many “literary” treatments of these stories, along with shoddy versions distorted by presentations on the “minstrel stage.” In one of the deep ironies that marks the history of collecting African American folklore, Joel Chandler Harris felt compelled to respond with hard evidence about the true nature of these stories.

  Harris didn’t rely only on his own childhood memories. Like the Brothers Grimm before him in a very different cultural climate, he
issued an appeal to friends, family, and colleagues for recollections of stories from the oral tradition. In a newspaper ad placed in 1879, he solicited “Negro fables and legends” along with any “quaint myths” that were “popular on plantations.” We do not know much about the response, but we do know that Harris was deeply committed to oral storytelling, to the told tale rather than the one written down. Precisely because he was producing a work that would be an anthem to folkloric authenticity, he did not write the tales down verbatim at the site of the telling. Pen and pad would have had an inhibiting effect. Instead he relied on his own long-term and short-term memory, as well as the recollections of others. Over time his standards relaxed somewhat, but his resourcefulness remained compelling. When he met with reluctance to tell tales, he began reciting the stories out loud to validate their value: “I have found few negros who will acknowledge to a stranger that they know anything of these legends, and yet to relate one of the stories is the surest way to their confidence and esteem. In this way, and in this way only, I have been enabled to collect and verify the folk-lore included in this volume.” At one point, he sent out his children to collect stories from teenage boys, perhaps in part because he had such vivid memories of stories told to him at that age (Baer 1980, 22).

  In all he wrote down 263 tales, with nearly half featuring Brer Rabbit. There may be much to condemn and criticize not only in a frame narrative that turns African American tales into a white child’s cultural heritage but also in what can be seen as Harris’s own minstrel-like performance of a black voice. Harris insisted that he had done his best to remain faithful to the sources. On the tales in his collection, he noted: “Not one of them is cooked, and not one nor any part of one is an invention of mine. They are all genuine folk-tales” (Brookes 1950, 26). And part of that authenticity required capturing the rhythms and inflections of the language in which they were told. Ironically, the more authentic he tried to make the collection, the more troubling the entire project became.

  As artificial and constructed as the voice of Uncle Remus may be, the use of that voice still pays tribute to the power of performance and to the importance of how a tale is told as well as the actual source for the tale. That the masquerade was too complete is revealed by Mark Twain’s report that New Orleans schoolchildren were deeply disappointed when they welcomed Harris to their city: “Why, he’s white!” they intoned in chorus. It was Twain who believed that only one white person had mastered the “negro dialect,” and that was Joel Chandler Harris (Bickley 1981, 53). In his own defense of the use of black vernacular speech, Harris wrote that “old man Chaucer was one of the earliest dialect writers” (Brasch 2000, 153). Keith Cartwright has argued persuasively that Nights with Uncle Remus, the second installment to the tales, shows that Harris’s storytelling style evolved in ways that revealed a new thoughtfulness about the performance elements to the tales and a nuanced understanding of different dialects that allowed different voices to emerge, including the Gullah-speaking African Jack (2002, 115).

  Both Uncle Remus and Joel Chandler Harris have their defenders. “Remus’s innocence is more strategic than pastoral; he is never as guileless as he seems,” one critic asserted. Another critic raised the ante by concluding in his analysis of the collection that “Brer Rabbit is a trickster disguise for Remus, who in turn is a trickster disguise for Harris himself.” A third agreed, adding that Harris’s strategies as a writer are much like those used by Uncle Remus and Brer Rabbit: “Each presents himself as a benign figure in full compliance with expected mannerisms and behaviors. . . . Meanwhile, behind the smiles, the same threesome busies itself, each on his own level, with the exposure and demolition of . . . stereotypes” (Hedin 1982, 84; Sundquist 1993, 343; Cochran 2004, 22).

  Joel Chandler Harris’s On the Plantation: A Story of a Georgia Boy’s Adventures during the War (1892) was dedicated to Joseph Addison Turner, who owned the Turnwold Plantation. Harris described the account as a “mixture of fact and fiction.” The volume included an advertisement for the Uncle Remus stories.

  Harris deserves some credit for his efforts to validate the vernacular and to offer stories that complicate lore, putting us into a dizzying hall of mirrors that creates indeterminacy when it comes to meaning. Who can decide what anyone really thinks, when the narrator, Uncle Remus, and Brer Rabbit are all world-class experts in trickery? Harris can also be commended for acknowledging early on the African origins of the tales, in a move that was at the time contested by many folklorists. While some scholars believed that “Negro tales” were “borrowings” from North American Indians, others thought that they came from Europe, and only a few, like Harris, were persuaded that they were related to African prototypes (at least half of the tales derive from African sources according to one folklorist [Roberts 1990, 107]).

  The distinguished folklorist Alan Dundes declared some years ago that the time for guesswork was over: “There are a limited number of possibilities” about the origins of African American tales, he stated. “(1) The tale came from Africa. (2) The tale came from Europe. (3) The tale came from American Indian tradition. (4) The tale arose in the New World as a result of the Afro-American experience there” (1965, 207). Dundes neglects to mention a fifth possibility, which would be all of the above, and Harris himself recognized a certain syncretic quality to his collection, which drew on multiple sources, traditions, and experiences, while retaining a strong African core.

  After publishing the first volume of Uncle Remus stories, Harris found himself the recipient of letters from all over the world. “Fellows of this and professors of that, to say nothing of doctors of the others” wrote to make inquiries about matters philological, linguistic, and folkloristic. Harris had become an instant authority not only on “negro dialect” but also in the field of folklore, and he signed up to become a charter member of the American Folklore Society and subscribed to the British Folk-Lore Journal. But he quickly became disillusioned with the scientific approach to storytelling. In a work of fiction called Wally Walderoon and His Story-Telling Machine, Harris had one character make the following pronouncement, one that he no doubt endorsed: “It was one of the principles taught in the university where I graduated that a story amounts to nothing and less than nothing, if it is not of scientific value. I would like to tell the story first, and then give you my idea of its relation to oral literature, and its special relation to the unity of the human races” (1903, 180).

  In the early 1930s, the Coca-Cola Company produced a children’s cutout inspired by A. B. Frost’s illustrations for the Uncle Remus stories. Harris’s widow sued the company for copyright infringement, and the courts ruled in favor of Coca-Cola, which had negotiated the rights to the illustrations with Appleton, the publisher of the stories. Coca-Cola Archives.

  One of the ironies of Joel Chandler Harris’s project is that it paradoxically both preserved and destroyed the stories. To understand exactly how Uncle Remus “killed” African American folklore, it is important to return to Alice Walker and the disappointments of Song of the South, a film that expanded Harris’s frame to include a narrative about crisis in a white family and planted Uncle Remus squarely in an Arcadian South. It was also the film that transformed Remus’s stories into cartoonish versions of themselves, with a grim undercurrent to be sure.

  Brer Rabbit’s name has come to be associated with various products, but at no time more frequently than with molasses. This 1920 magazine advertisement presents a romantic image of Southern plantation life where young boys glimpse farm labor from the field’s edge, while the masters of the house enjoy food served by a figure reminiscent of Uncle Remus.

  “I’m just a worn out old man what don’t do nothin’ but tell stories,” Uncle Remus tells the boy Johnny in Song of the South, and that is exactly how he is portrayed. Bearing little resemblance to the West African Griot, who is the keeper of cultural knowledge in a community, Remus has been reduced to a lumbering fellow who takes in and nurtures young Johnny at a time when his fam
ily is experiencing some mysterious domestic disturbances. (He is no longer “the busiest person on the plantation,” as Joel Chandler Harris described him.) His storytelling voice has transmogrified into a cartoon that gives us a top-down, mass-produced corporate version of Brer Rabbit’s antics. No longer an active storyteller, he gains an iconic significance as a comforting mediator, a garrulous and harmless presence that bears little resemblance to the characters in the cartoons.

  Set in the Reconstruction era, Disney’s Song of the South was released in 1946. “Ever since I have had anything to do with the making of motion pictures, I have wanted to bring the Uncle Remus stories to the screen,” Walt Disney reported. The books came out in print when he was a boy, and the young Walt read every single one of them. These tales were “the greatest American folk stuff there is.” When the Golden Books edition of Walt Disney’s Uncle Remus appeared, the preface explained that Disney had made a film about Harris’s stories because of their “universal appeal . . . and their place in the heritage of this country” (Russo 1992, 20). Before making the film, Walt paid a visit to Wren’s Nest, Harris’s home, “to get an authentic feeling of Uncle Remus country so we can do as faithful a job as possible to these stories” (Watts 1997, 273; Gabler 2007, 433).

  Song of the South is hardly “faithful” to its source material, nor does it offer historical authenticity. Brer Rabbit is no longer a complex and vexatious mythical trickster figure, but what Walt Disney called “the naïve, happy-go-lucky little hero of the Tales—protagonist of the human race, actually—who stumbles into one kind of trouble after another, always managing through belated thought, courage and a bit of ‘footswork’ to squeak through” (Brasch 2000, 275–76). And the frame narrative gives a romantic portrayal of the Reconstruction era, with African Americans singing mellifluous melodies (“I’m going to stay right here in the home I know”) on their way to the cotton fields and back again.