The Annotated African American Folktales

by Henry Louis Gates

  Women work while a suited figure oversees their labors in a cotton field on the Retreat Plantation in Port Royal Island, South Carolina, in the 1860s. Stereograph Cards, Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress.

  Agricultural workers take a break from their labors as a child playfully peeks out from a barrel that has been turned into a plaything (1868–1900). Robert N. Dennis Collection of Stereoscopic Views, The Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Division of Art, Prints and Photographs: Photography Collection, The New York Public Library.

  Captioned “We’se done all dis’s Mornin,’ ” this photograph is a heartbreaking depiction of youthful pride in carrying out labors (1868–1900; published 1905). Robert N. Dennis Collection of Stereoscopic Views, The Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Division of Art, Prints and Photographs: Photography Collection, The New York Public Library.

  A well-dressed couple, most likely the owner of the plantation and his wife, stand before fields populated by agricultural workers, whose labors will produce the bales of cotton loaded on the wagon to be taken to market (1884). Popular Graphic Arts, Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress.

  The cover illustration for Edward Clarkson Leverett Adams’s Nigger to Nigger (1928) shows Scip and Tad in conversation, anticipating the exchanges that constitute the bulk of the sketches in the book.

  The photographer Ben Shahn captured this scene of workers in Arkansas waiting for transport to the cotton fields. Note the size of the sacks slung over arms and shoulders (1941). Farm Security Administration, Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress, LC-DIG-fsa-8a16196.

  Richard Wright’s 12 Million Black Voices included these two photographs showing well-dressed agricultural workers chopping cotton and picking it (circa 1930s; published in 1941).

  Jacob Lawrence’s The Migration of the Negro (1940–41) documented the flight of African Americans in the 1930s from the rural South to the industrial North in search of jobs and homes. In this third of sixty panels, the pyramid of human figures takes its inspiration from a flock of migratory birds. The Phillips Collection, Washington, D.C. © 2017 The Jacob and Gwendolyn Knight Lawrence Foundation, Seattle / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

  Allyn Cox (1896–1982) designed three corridors on the first floor of the U.S. Capitol building and painted wall and ceiling murals that depict portraits, historical scenes, and maps. Among those he designed was this scene of picking cotton in the postbellum era, one that creates an idyllic rural scene without any signs of the massive discomfort and pain of the labor involved. This painting was completed by EverGreene Painting Studios in 1993–1994. Architect of the Capitol.

  A man and a mule are captured in Dorothea Lange’s photograph of 1937. The sharecropper has one mule and the land he can cultivate with the plow. As part of the postbellum agrarian reform, slaves had been promised forty acres and a mule by Union general William T. Sherman in 1865. Farm Security Administration, Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress.

  Thomas Hart Benton’s Cotton Pickers (1945), despite its aestheticizing touches, reveals some of the heartrending aspects of labors in the field, with a child sleeping under a makeshift shade and backbreaking postures. © T. H. Benton and R. P. Benton Testamentary Trusts / UMB Bank Trustee / Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY.

  John T. Biggers’s Cotton Pickers (1947) preserves the beauty and dignity of the laborers even as it does not mask the depleting effects of the work they carry out. © John T. Biggers Estate / Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY. Estate represented by Michael Rosenfeld Gallery.

  IMAGE GALLERY C

  Illustrated Poems by Paul Laurence Dunbar

  Paul Laurence Dunbar was born in 1906 in Dayton, Ohio. He began writing at a young age and published his first poems as a teenager in The Herald, a newspaper published in Dayton. His first collection of poetry, Oak and Ivy, included poems in standard English as well as in dialect. He was working as an elevator operator at the time of the book’s publication and sold copies of it to riders. By 1897 Dunbar had become well enough established to embark on a reading tour in England, and in the years that followed he wrote poetry, novels, and short stories. Dunbar was diagnosed with tuberculosis in 1900 and returned to Dayton in 1904 to live with his mother. He died in 1906 at age thirty-three. James Weldon Johnson praised him as “the first poet from the Negro race in the United States to show a combined mastery over poetic material and poetic technique.”

  Candle-Lightin’ Time (1901) was the second in a series of six volumes, published by Dodd, Mead and Company and marketed as gift books, that combine Paul Laurence Dunbar’s poems, photographic illustrations by the Hampton Institute Camera Club, and page decorations by Alice Morse, Margaret Armstrong, and other artists. It is likely that these publications were initiated by the Hampton Camera Club, an extracurricular group formed in 1893 that counted among its predominantly white members faculty and staff who were also active in the Hampton Folklore Society. Hampton Camera Club members produced over 450 images to illustrate dialect poems by Dunbar, and they also contributed photographs to the Folklore and Ethnology section of the Southern Workman, recording people, homes, and landscapes in the rural areas neighboring the Institute.

  In Dunbar’s controversial poem “The Deserted Plantation,” reprinted in the illustrated book Poems of Cabin and Field (1900), a nostalgic black narrator laments the passing of plantation life, including the departure of those who told stories.

  In the title poem of Candle-Lightin’ Time, a father returns home at the end of the workday to regale his children with tales of Mistah Rabbit. The sequence of images depicts the storytelling scene minute-by-minute.

  The photograph illustrating “A Cabin Tale: The Young Master Asks for a Story” in Joggin’ Erlong (1906) employs the trope, used to memorable effect by Joel Chandler Harris, of the young white “master” soliciting tales from an elderly black man, who first protests and then complies. The photographs in Joggin’ Erlong are attributed to Leigh Richmond Miner, a leading figure in the Hampton Camera Club.

  This image of two young men gathered around an older man appears in Poems of Cabin and Field, after the title page for the poem “Time to Tinker ’Roun’,” which celebrates the leisure time afforded by a rainy day.

  IMAGE GALLERY D

  Joel Chandler Harris and the Uncle Remus Tales

  Frederick Stuart Church (1842–1924) was an American illustrator. Born in Grand Rapids, Michigan, he served in the Union Army at age nineteen. He attended art school at the National Academy of Design and became a member of the Art Students League. His work appeared in Harper’s Bazaar, The Ladies’ Home Journal, and many other magazines. Specializing in depicting animals, both in their natural state and as anthropomorphized creatures, he illustrated Aesop’s Fables as well as Chandler’s Uncle Remus stories.

  James H. Moser (1854–1913) was born in Canada and moved to the United States at age ten. He studied at the Art Students League in New York City, and his work was published in Harper’s and The Atlantic Monthly, among other magazines. He worked as art critic and illustrator for The Washington Times.

  Frederick Stuart Church photographed by Napoleon Sarony. Macbeth Gallery Records, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution.

  Portrait of James Henry Moser drawn by Joel Chandler Harris. Collection of Samuel S. Fetherolf.

  Cover illustration for Joel Chandler Harris’s Uncle Remus, His Songs and His Sayings: The Folk-Lore of the Old Plantation, 1880. The golden rabbit, smoking his pipe peacefully in a meadow, will be up to no good in the stories contained within the book.

  The title page illustration for Harris’s book won the author’s approval as a “perfect” representation of Uncle Remus. F. S. Church made an engraving of the portrait executed by James Moser. In the frontispiece, Uncle Remus visits the editorial offices of “The Constitution” and brings along his “deceitful jug,” a vessel that can look full even when it is empty.

  For the first story in Uncle Remus: His Songs and His Sayings
(1880), “Uncle Remus Initiates the Little Boy,” F. S. Church integrated image and text, adding musical notes into the background to enliven what will become the first encounter between clever Brer Rabbit and treacherous Brer Fox.

  Church’s illustration for “The Wonderful Tar-Baby Story” turns the figure of the title into the Africanized image of a woman and offers contrasting stances, with the Tar Baby welcoming the pugilistic rabbit.

  For “Mr. Fox Is Again Victimized,” the trio of Miss Meadows and the girls is painted in a Grecian style that contrasts sharply with the animal pair, the one dominating the other, who has been harnessed and subjugated.

  For “Miss Cow Falls a Victim to Mr. Rabbit,” Church shows Brer Rabbit’s wife and children grossly exploiting the trapped cow.

  Brer Fox is outfoxed once again, this time by Brer Tarrypin, who takes advantage of reverse psychology in “Mr. Fox Tackles Old Man Tarrypin.”

  Mr. Terrapin and Brer Rabbit entertain Miss Meadows and the girls. Although Brer Rabbit appears to be holding court in his chair, it is Mr. Terrapin who has the attention of the ladies.

  For “The Awful Fate of Mr. Wolf,” Church pictured the horrific demise of Mr. Wolf and, for the multitude of rabbits surrounding the death trap, he displays the survival of the one with the quickest wits.

  Terrapin outwits Brer Rabbit in a contest observed by Miss Meadows and the girls in this illustration for “Mr. Rabbit Finds His Match at Last.”

  “How Mr. Rabbit Saved His Meat” is illustrated with images of plenty and domestic contentment in Brer Rabbit’s house and with endless labor on the part of Brer Wolf. Some might see these images as racially encoded, reflecting the divide between masters and slaves, with the one carrying out the work and the other enjoying the fruits of labor.

  The buzzard, affiliated with death and destruction, is also, in the role of scavenger, associated with purification. Church’s illustration reveals Brer Rabbit’s deep vulnerability in the encounter found in “Mr. Rabbit Meets His Match Again.”

  Brer Rabbit peers at his two mortal enemies, whom he has succeeded in pitting against each other in “Mr. Rabbit and Mr. Bear.”

  Brer Bear is no match for Mr. Bull-Frog, who has taken a leaf from Brer Rabbit’s book in “Mr. Bear Catches Old Mr. Bull-Frog” and engineers an escape by insisting that Brer Bear put him anywhere but on a flat rock.

  Brer Rabbit ends up getting his choice of the ladies in a contest to see who can raise the most dust with a sledgehammer in “How Mr. Rabbit Succeeded in Raising a Dust.”

  This illustration for “How Mr. Rabbit Lost His Fine Bushy Tail” offers a contrast between Brer Rabbit’s foolishness, as he follows Brer Fox’s advice about fishing, and the wisdom of the owl perched above him.

  Owls and bats, creatures of the night, surround the image of Uncle Remus carrying the little boy back home.

  “The Corn-Shucking Song” was included in Harris’s volume of Uncle Remus tales as an example of how chores were carried out to the rhythms of music and song, with lyrics that often contained tales embedded in them.

  In this tableau, which accompanies “Plantation Play-Song,” evenings are presented as an idyllic time of dancing and singing, with not a trace of exhaustion from the day’s backbreaking work in the fields.

  Harris’s volume of Uncle Remus stories includes several genre portraits by James H. Moser.

  In “A Story of the War,” we learn that Uncle Remus “disremembered all ’bout freedom,” and shot a Union soldier on the “raw day” depicted in the illustration.

  The incongruous pairing of Brother Rabbit with a human Miss Meadows in conversation with each other creates a platform for considering the relationship between Uncle Remus and the little boy. Brother Rabbit, who has a way with words, is wooing Miss Meadows, while Uncle Remus—as we know from the title of the first story in Uncle Remus: His Songs and His Sayings, “Uncle Remus Initiates the Little Boy”—is introducing the boy into the ways of the world.

  Portrait of Arthur Burdett Frost in his New Jersey studio, published in The Independent in 1905. Arthur Burdett Frost (1851–1928) was an American painter, illustrator, and graphic artist. One of the pillars of the “Golden Age of American Illustration,” his work appeared in more than ninety books, among them hunting and gaming volumes as well as Joel Chandler Harris’s books. A distant cousin of Robert Frost, he received his first break as an artist when he was asked to illustrate Out of the Hurly Burly, a volume of American humor by Charles Heber Clarke. Frost’s illustrations for Joel Chandler Harris’s work first appeared in Century magazine in 1884 for the short story “Free Joe and the Rest of the World.” Frost subsequently went on to illustrate Uncle Remus and His Friends (1892), and Harris asked him to provide illustrations for a new and revised edition of Uncle Remus: His Songs and His Sayings. Harris was profoundly grateful to Frost for enlivening the volume with illustrations that he found beautifully suited to the tales of Uncle Remus. In a letter to Frost, he wrote, “Because you have taken it under your hand and made it yours. Because you have breathed the breath of life into these amiable brethren of wood and field. Because by a stroke here and a touch there, you have conveyed into their quaint antics the illumination of your inimitable humor, which is as true to our sun and soil as it is to the spirit and matter set forth. The book was mine, but now you have made it yours.”

  Joel Chandler Harris favored A. B. Frost’s illustrations for his stories, in part because they were far less edgy than the ones executed by Frederick Church. For the frontispiece and title page of the volume illustrated by Frost, Uncle Remus’s home and his possessions form a sharp contrast to the figure of the carefully coiffed boy, dressed like a little gentleman. Brer Rabbit’s confrontational gaze captures the spirit of the stories, even if the antagonists portrayed in the vignettes seem charming and benign.

  What follows are preliminary sketches and final images for the revised version of Uncle Remus: His Songs and Sayings.

  Page decorations by Frost appear throughout The Tar-Baby and Other Rhymes (1904).

  Harris decided to set some of the stories in verse, in an effort to capture a more authentic oral style and perhaps also to capitalize on strong sales of his anthologies. Frost’s decorative vignettes, delicate and whimsical, are included on each page of The Tar-Baby and Other Rhymes and made this volume particularly attractive as a collector’s item.

  In this 1921 cover illustration, Uncle Remus is surrounded by attentive figures from his tales as he gestures while telling stories to the little boy, transformed by his clothing into a twentieth-century figure.

  In this frontispiece illustration for Told by Uncle Remus: New Stories of the Old Plantation (1905), all the animals, even those who do not populate forests, listen attentively to Brother Rabbit’s description of his Laughing-Place, a site that he paints as filled with utopian pleasures.

  In the frontispiece of this child-friendly version of Nights with Uncle Remus, Uncle Remus and the little boy seem to be sitting before a fire that casts an interesting shadow of Uncle Remus’s hand. Note the broom and the hoe, signs of the daytime activities of the bespectacled old man, who is an animated teller of tales.

  In the frontispiece for Uncle Remus, or, Mr. Fox, Mr. Rabbit, and Mr. Terrapin (1883), Brer Rabbit succeeds in frustrating the appetites of the hounds baying at him, while on the title page we see domestic ecstasy as Brer Rabbit’s children await their next meal, more than likely a dish of Brer Wolf.

  A cruel story about Brer Rabbit’s theft of Miss Bob’s eggs is turned into a pourquoi story about the nighttime calls of partridges in this illustrated collection titled Uncle Remus and Brer Rabbit (1907).

  Editions of single stories were not uncommon, and Joel Chandler Harris’s tale about a witch wolf is told to the little boy by Uncle Remus. The illustration shows a young man seeking advice about romance from “Jedge Rabbit.” From The Witch Wolf: An Uncle Remus Story, illustrated by W. A. Dwiggins, 1921.

  Silhouette illustration from The Tree Named John by John
Sale (1929).

  BIBLIOGRAPHY

  Anthologies and Narrative Accounts

  Abrahams, Roger D., ed. African American Folktales: Stories from Black Traditions in the New World. New York: Pantheon, 1985.

  ———, ed. African Folktales: Traditional Stories of the Black World. New York: Pantheon, 1983.

  ———. Deep Down in the Jungle: Negro Narratives from the Streets of Philadelphia. Chicago: Aldine, 1970.

  ———. The Man-of-Words in the West Indies: Performance and the Emergence of Creole Culture. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1983.

  Adams, E. C. L., ed. Congaree Sketches, Scenes from Negro Life in the Swamps of the Congaree and Tales by Tad and Scip of Heaven and Hell with Other Miscellany. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1927.