The Annotated African American Folktales

by Henry Louis Gates

  The U.S. Post Office memorialized Joel Chandler Harris on a postage stamp for his one hundredth birthday in 1948.

  “I think Remus is a great character, a strong character. He is the dominant force in the story. There is no reason for Negroes to take offence,” Disney declared at the same time that he worried about making “booboos” (Rapf 1999, 130). At the 1946 premiere in Atlanta, a segregated city, James Baskett, who had played Uncle Remus, was absent, because, like Hattie McDaniel and other African American cast members, he would not have been able to book a room in any of the nearby hotels. In addition, he would have had to sit in the balcony, had he attended. At theaters in New York, Los Angeles, and San Francisco, the National Negro Congress staged demonstrations, with protesters chanting, “Disney tells, Disney tells / Lies about the South. / We’ve heard those lies before / Right out of Bilbo’s mouth.” (Theodore Bilbo had been governor of Mississippi and later worked hard as a senator against voting rights for African Americans.) At the New York premiere in Times Square, demonstrators emphasized just how insulting the film was to African Americans returning from service in World War II: “We fought for Uncle Sam, not Uncle Tom” (Snead 1994, 92).

  Disney’s 2007 decision not to rerelease the film was applauded by the Los Angeles Urban Policy Roundtable on the grounds that “the film depicts blacks as happy-go-lucky, submissive, storytelling servants and helpmates.” Or as Sterling A. Brown put it more generally about cultural products like Song of the South: “the grown-up slaves were contented, the pickaninnies were frolicking, the steamboat was hooting around the bend, God was in his heaven, and all was right with the world” (1969, 18). Maurice Rapf, who was hired to work on the screenplay, had already set off alarm bells about Uncle Remus as a condescending stereotype, a black man who is able “to forgive all the injustices of slavery in his Christian forbearance, and not only love his white masters, but remain eager to please them” (I. Thomas 2012, 223).

  Disney gives us a dehistoricized South, “not your time, not my time, but sometime.” Its opening titles about how the tales of Uncle Remus have come out of a “humble cabin, out of the singing heart of the Old South” and how the stories are “rich in simple truths, forever fresh and new” underscores the determination to create a South untouched by the suffering of slaves and unscarred by a destructive Civil War. Black children frolic around a wagon that pulls up to the mansion, and the melodies of spirituals create a sense of utopian plenitude at evening campfires. Bosley Crowther of the New York Times called the film “the most meretricious sort of slush” and denounced an Uncle Remus who is depicted as “just the sweetest most wistful darky slave that ever stepped out of a sublimely unreconstructed fancy of the Old South” (1946). Crowther, like many other viewers, was unaware that the film was set in the Reconstruction Era, most likely because the film is encoded with scenes of field hands singing on their return from work with loads of cotton on their backs. They cook, drive wagons, hoe, and engage in labor that enables the lavish life style of the white grandmother in the film. Ebony magazine expressed outrage at the “Uncle Tom–Aunt Jemima caricature” in the film, “complete with all the fawning standard equipment thereof—the toothy smile, battered hat, gray beard, and a profusion of ‘dis’ and ‘dat’ talk” (Cohen 1997, 61). The NAACP noted that the production helped to “perpetuate a dangerously glorified picture of slavery.” The film was condemned for its exploitation of African American folklore, which was instrumentalized to give the “impression of an idyllic master-slave relationship.” As the actress Fredi Washington wrote in the People’s Voice, the film “perpetuates the idea that Negroes throughout American history have been illiterate, docile, and quite happy to be treated as children—without even the average child’s ambition and without thought of tomorrow” (Cohen 1997, 60–61; Washington 1946).

  Song of the South begins with a melody about the music of Dixie and how it weaves a “magic spell.” Its visual evocation of a bleached-out landscape (cottonwoods / moonlight / field of white) is remarkable, disrupted chromatically only by a cabin door:

  Song of the South, I see

  The scenes I know so well.

  Cottonwoods in blossom

  over my cabin door.

  Pale moonlight on a field of white.

  The suggestive melody effaces the historical record, substituting sentimental scenes of communal labors for the backbreaking work carried out by men, women, and children. We do not see the large sacks, weighing up to one hundred pounds when full, that they dragged behind them. We do not see hands bloodied from the sharp spikes on the cotton plant. All is well in this still pastoral setting, awash in soft moonlight, melodies, and fragrances.

  Joel Chandler Harris put Uncle Remus up front and center, but Song of the South subordinates the source of storytelling to a nostalgic vision of plantation life, a whitewashed vision that serves as a powerful defense against harsh historical realities. In this faux South, Uncle Remus will play the very real domestic role historically taken on by house slaves, rescuing and healing Johnny, the white child traumatized by the departure of his father while the family is staying at the impressive estate of his grandmother. We never learn much about the exact nature of the domestic disturbances in the family, but Uncle Remus steps in as surrogate parent, telling Johnny stories that are cheerfully didactic as well as diverting. The first story he tells the boy, for instance, is designed to deter him from running away from home. After all, when Brer Rabbit left “his old troubles behind,” it turned out that he was just “headin’ straight for a whole mess o’ bran’ new troubles.”

  With one stroke of the Disney wand, African American folktales, which were encoded with complex cultural signs and functioned as carriers of wisdom and tradition, were transformed, much like their European counterparts, into “simple truths” designed to teach children morals and lessons. Never mind that Brer Rabbit has to endure capture and dangle from a trap set by Brer Fox or that Brer Bear is tricked by Brer Rabbit into taking his place in the trap, this first story is flattened out into a cautionary tale about the perils of running away from home. Uncle Remus’s stories are reduced to innocuous fare for children.

  Even the “Wonderful Tar-Baby Story” becomes a tutorial for Johnny, who learns to use reverse psychology on the boys who are trying to reclaim their puppy. “Ain’t dat what Brer Rabbit did to Brer Fox?” the African American Toby asks Johnny, the boy who has been put in his charge for the duration of his visit (both are the same age yet one takes care of the other). And Johnny reveals his powers to abstract a larger lesson from the tale: “Sh, Sh! Bein’ little an’ without much strength, we s’posed to use our heads instead of our foots,” mimicking Toby’s speech with creepy precociousness. The appropriation is complete, with the white boy instructing his black counterpart about the wisdom embedded in the tales and later trying to comfort his friend Ginny with a story about the “bodacious” Brer Rabbit. Brer Rabbit seems fully tamed, domesticated, and appropriated.

  Johnny’s mother feels sure that Uncle Remus’s stories are making it “difficult” to bring Johnny up to be “obedient and truthful,” and she places a moratorium on his storytelling, one that is violated almost immediately when Uncle Remus, who cannot stop himself from dispensing wisdom, tells the story about Brer Rabbit’s Laughing Place to comfort Johnny’s friend, Ginny.

  Brer Rabbit, up until this moment, seems fully assimilated to the culture of childhood, until we hear a story about the Laughing Place—the most violent of all the tales—with Brer Fox determined to barbecue Brer Rabbit for dinner and getting his comeuppance when he is chased out of Brer Rabbit’s Laughing Place by a swarm of bees. The Laughing Place, as it turns out, is a trap designed to torture everyone but Brer Rabbit. His gleeful laughter becomes tainted by sadism in unsettling ways, especially when we see Brer Rabbit’s grinning face dissolve into Uncle Remus’s chuckling features. The film at first disavows the violence of the cartoon sequence in Johnny’s realization that his “Laughing Place” is Uncle Remus’s
cabin. But Disney then pulls out all the stops to suggest that Uncle Remus’s Laughing Place may be just as perilous as Brer Rabbit’s. Distraught that Uncle Remus has been “sent away” by his mother, Johnny races across an enclosed field to keep him from leaving. He is gored by an enraged bull. Only the healing hymns of the field hands and the soothing voice of Uncle Remus (never mind that he was the immediate cause of the accident) reciting a tale to the boy revive him from his delirious state.

  The happy ending to Song of the South reconstitutes the white family, but at a price. Crucial to the successful reconciliation of the parents and the rescue of the child is another family, one that stays fragmented and dismembered. Uncle Remus, Aunt Tempy, and Toby might be said to mirror the trio of Johnny and his parents but these three figures all play supporting roles, independently of one another—roles that enable the white nuclear family to stay intact as a unit. Despite a faint whiff of romance in Uncle Remus’s love of Aunt Tempy’s cooking, the two live under separate roofs, standing in no kinship relation to each other. Toby, moreover, assigned to care for Johnny, has no parents at all to look out for him. And both Remus and Tempy worry far more about Johnny than they do about Toby, who is constantly marginalized, even by the film’s sightlines. In the film, the actor who plays Toby even appears “somewhat annoyed at his systematic exclusion,” as one critic points out (Snead 1994, 98).

  The film not only dismembers the black family but also renders Uncle Remus superfluous. In its musical coda, Johnny leads his friends Ginny and Toby, as they skip down the road and are greeted by Brer Rabbit, who is joined by other woodland creatures. He can now conjure the African narratives out of his own imagination. “As he romps up the hill,” James Snead writes, “we see that he has learned to ‘tell Uncle Remus Stories’—an art defined in the film as the ability to conjure up cartoons—without blacks” (Snead 1994, 96). Uncle Remus has been “made obsolete” and “Johnny can now bring the cartoon animals to life independently.”

  The film becomes a self-reflexive allegory of cultural appropriation, with Johnny as a kind of stand-in for Joel Chandler Harris, who listened to tales as a boy, wrote them down, and published them under his name (to be sure with a title that attributes them to an “Uncle Remus” who, in the final analysis, received neither real credit nor royalty checks).

  Is it any wonder then, to return to Alice Walker, that the tales told by Uncle Remus become, in their new form, less a source of communal pride than a badge of shame. “The worst part of being in an oppressed culture is that the oppressive culture—primarily because it controls the production and dispersal of images in the media—can so easily make us feel ashamed of ourselves, of our sayings, our doings, and our ways. And it doesn’t matter whether these sayings, doings, or ways are good or bad. What is bad about them, and, therefore, worthy of shame, is that they belong to us” (Dummy in the Window, 32).

  Joel Chandler Harris himself never understood how his appropriation of the tales might have done violence to stories that, with astonishing economy, encapsulated folk wisdom with a vital social and cultural function. For him, the goal was to “preserve the legends themselves in their original simplicity, and to wed them permanently to the quaint dialect . . . through the medium of which they have become part of the domestic history of every Southern family.” It never occurred to him that the tales might have emotive weight as the simple expression of complex thought. Perhaps Uncle Remus’s “quaint dialect” preserves mysteries that are not necessarily the cultural property of “every Southern family.”

  Today, Song of the South has been placed in the Disney vault, yet it continues to have a robust afterlife in the theme park attraction Splash Mountain, which features a flume ride. Uncle Remus has disappeared, and all that is left are the animated characters of Brer Rabbit, Brer Fox, and Brer Bear, along with a host of cartoon characters from the bayou. The chirpy melody “Zip-a-Dee-Doo-Dah” fills the air as visitors reach the end of the ride. By fragmenting the narrative line of the film into bits and pieces and removing all reference to its frame, Splash Mountain provides visceral thrills that culminate in a “fall” mimicking Brer Rabbit’s drop into the briar patch, followed by an upbeat serenade of happily-ever-after. Uncle Remus is gone, Tar Baby has been turned into a pot of honey, and the cinematic inspiration has been transformed into a garish pantomime featuring “critters” that chase Brer Rabbit only to be outsmarted by him.

  Ripe for parody, Uncle Remus’s name comes up in popular television entertainments (in The Office one of the workers refers to Stanley as “Uncle Remus”), in novels (Jason Bourne plays Brer Rabbit to a character named Uncle Remus in Robert Ludlum’s The Bourne Connection), and in films. The 1989 Fletch Lives reveals that Uncle Remus and his tales have been pretty much “killed” for everyone, black and white. In it, I. M. Fletcher, played by Chevy Chase, falls asleep on an airplane and dreams about the Louisiana plantation he has just inherited. Chase is surrounded by white field hands and servants who serenade him and are about to dance for him, when he announces “Dance for me? Why I’ll dance for them!” “Zip-A-Dee-Do-Dah” is the song to which he and field hands dance and sing. Defamiliarizing the conditions of slavery with white “slaves” dressed in elaborate white costumes and serving a white master, the film makes a mockery of the Disney tune by literally whitewashing plantation life.

  Alice Walker describes the “vastly alienating” effects of the “second interpretation of our folklore” in Song of the South: “Our whole town turned out for this movie, black children and their parents in the colored section, white children and their parents in the white section.” The film was “vastly alienating” in two ways: “not only from the likes of Uncle Remus—in whom I saw aspects of my father, my mother, in fact all black people I knew who told these stories—but also from the stories themselves, which, passed into the context of white people’s creation, the same white people who, in my real everyday life, would not let a black person eat in a restaurant or through their front door, I perceived as meaningless” (Dummy in the Window, 31–32). The road to respectability would be a long one for African American folklore, and many of the figures that took center stage, thanks to the work of Joel Chandler Harris and Walt Disney, are now still impatiently waiting for their second acts.

  UNCLE REMUS INITIATES THE LITTLE BOY 1

  One evening recently, the lady whom Uncle Remus calls “Miss Sally” missed her little seven-year-old boy. Making search for him through the house and through the yard, she heard the sound of voices in the old man’s cabin, and, looking through the window, saw the child sitting by Uncle Remus. His head rested against the old man’s arm, and he was gazing with an expression of the most intense interest into the rough, weather-beaten face, that beamed so kindly upon him. This is what “Miss Sally” heard:

  “Bimeby,2 one day, arter Brer Fox bin doin’ all dat he could fer ter ketch Brer Rabbit, en Brer Rabbit bin doin’ all he could fer to keep ’im fum it, Brer Fox say to hisse’f dat he’d put up a game on Brer Rabbit, en he ain’t mo’n got de wuds out’n his mouf twel3 Brer Rabbit come a lopin’ up de big road, lookin’ des ez plump, en ez fat, en ez sassy ez a Moggin hoss4 in a barley-patch.

  “ ‘Hol’ on dar, Brer Rabbit,’ sez Brer Fox, sezee.

  “ ‘I ain’t got time, Brer Fox,’ sez Brer Rabbit, sezee, sorter mendin’ his licks.

  “ ‘I wanter have some confab5 wid you, Brer Rabbit,’ sez Brer Fox, sezee.

  “ ‘All right, Brer Fox, but you better holler fum whar you stan’. I’m monstus full er fleas dis mawnin’,’ sez Brer Rabbit, sezee.

  “ ‘I seed Brer B’ar yistiddy,’ sez Brer Fox, sezee, ‘en he sorter rake me over de coals kaze you en me ain’t make frens en live naberly, en I told ’im dat I’d see you.’

  Den Brer Rabbit scratch one year wid his off hinefoot sorter jubously,6 en den he ups en sez, sezee:

  “ ‘All a settin’, Brer Fox. Spose’n you drap roun’ termorrer en take dinner wid me. We ain’t got no great doin’s at our house, bu
t I speck de old ’oman en de chilluns kin sorter scramble roun’ en git up sump’n fer ter stay yo’ stummuck.’

  “ ‘I’m ’gree’ble, Brer Rabbit,’ sez Brer Fox, sezee.

  “ ‘Den I’ll ’pen’ on you,’7 sez Brer Rabbit, sezee.

  “Nex’ day, Mr. Rabbit an’ Miss Rabbit got up soon, ’fo’ day, en raided on a gyarden like Miss Sally’s out dar, en got some cabbiges, en some roas’n-years,8 en some sparrer-grass,9 en dey fix up a smashin’ dinner. Bimeby one er de little Rabbits, playin’ out in de backyard, come runnin’ in hollerin’, ‘Oh, ma! oh, ma! I seed Mr. Fox a comin’!’ En den Brer Rabbit he tuck de chilluns by der years en make um set down, en den him and Miss Rabbit sorter dally roun’ waitin’ for Brer Fox. En dey keep on waitin’, but no Brer Fox ain’t come. Atter ’while Brer Rabbit goes to de do’, easy like, en peep out, en dar, stickin’ fum behime de cornder,10 wuz de tip-een’ er Brer Fox tail. Den Brer Rabbit shot de do’ en sot down, en put his paws behime his years en begin fer ter sing:

  “ ‘De place wharbouts you spill de grease,

  Right dar youer boun’ ter slide,

  An’ whar you fine a bunch er ha’r,

  You’ll sholy fine de hide.’

  “Nex’ day. Brer Fox sont word by Mr. Mink, en skuze hisse’f kaze he wuz too sick fer ter come, en he ax Brer Rabbit fer to come en take dinner wid him, en Brer Rabbit say he wuz ’gree’ble.

  “Bimeby, w’en de shadders wuz at der shortes’, Brer Rabbit he sorter brush up en sa’nter down ter Brer Fox’s house, en w’en he got dar, he hear somebody groanin’, en he look in de do’ en dar he see Brer Fox settin’ up in a rockin’ cheer all wrop up wid flannil, en he look mighty weak. Brer Rabbit look all ’roun’, he did, but he ain’t see no dinner. De dishpan wuz settin’ on de table, en close by wuz a kyarvin’ knife.