Uncle Remus
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This second Uncle Remus tells animal tales, the first of which appeared in the Constitution on July 20, 1879. Five months later he reappeared with the tar baby story, and from then until May 1880 he became a regular feature of the Constitution’s Sunday edition. The stories received such a favorable response and were reprinted so widely in other newspapers that in early 1880 the New York publisher D. Appleton contacted Harris about bringing out a book-length collection. Harris had already received over a thousand inquiries about the Uncle Remus tales, and the publisher was impressed. Appleton’s J. C. Derby stopped in Atlanta, contract in hand, on his way home from Alabama, where he had just collected Jefferson Davis’s memoirs, The Rise and Fall of the Confederate Government.
Released in November 1880, although officially published in 1881 as part of Appleton’s catalogue of humorous publications, Uncle Remus: His Songs and His Sayings found instant praise, partly because white reviewers wanted to believe the book granted a glimpse of life behind the veil. The New York Times called it “the first real book of American folklore.” Northern readers unfamiliar with the South were urged to buy the book; one of Harrises New York correspondents wrote him that the stories “are, to people here, the first graphic pictures of genuine Negro life in the South.” The Dial followed this lead, praising the book for giving the “sentiments and habits of the negroes themselves.” The New York Evening Post proclaimed Uncle Remus the most significant contribution to the “literature of Negro life” that had ever been made, while Scribner’s Monthly felt Harris “had recorded in a style so true to character and tradition” that “it is safe to say that no one will ever undertake to improve his work.” Shrewd book men saw immediately that white interest in the supposed “sentiments and habits of the negroes” would sell books, especially if the presentation did not threaten. Charles A. Dana told Appleton, “Uncle Remus is a great book. It will not only have a large, but a permanent, an enduring, sale.”
Perennially shy, Harris continued to write Uncle Remus stories for the remaining twenty-eight years of his life, but avoided public acclaim. He also published nineteen other books, including a number of collections of local-color stories about Georgia, and a Reconstruction novel, Gabriel Tolliver, which expressed his moderate views on race and politics. All of this fiction was well received, but the judgment of time has relegated most of it to minor status. Only a few of Harris’s short stories, such as “Mingo” or “Free Joe,” have survived to be anthologized. Uncle Remus made Harris’s reputation, and without it he would be a relatively insignificant figure in American literary history.
Harris published a second Uncle Remus collection, Nights with Uncle Remus, in 1883; six more Uncle Remus volumes appeared during his lifetime, an additional two after he died. For the last two years of his life he edited and owned a family monthly, Uncle Remus’s Magazine, which at one point had a circulation of 200, 000. He kept his job as editorial writer at the newspaper until 1900 but after 1890 went to the office in the morning, collected his assignments, and returned home to compose his copy. Harris usually did his “own writing” at night, often surrounded by his children and, later, his grandchildren. A small man who grew increasingly heavy in his later years, apparently from lack of exercise, Harris suffered from ill health for the last decade of his life. He died in 1908 at the age of fifty-nine.
Harris’s life story is less important than the story of his creation, Uncle Remus, yet it becomes difficult to separate them. Mark Twain wrote of a group of children who waited eagerly to meet Harris, then turned away in disappointment after discovering he was white. The grinning illustration of Uncle Remus that appeared on the frontispiece of the first edition of Songs and Sayings was much better known during Harris’s lifetime than his own photograph, even though it bore little resemblance to any black human being, living or dead. As late as the 1930s Coca-Cola ads prominently featured the Uncle Remus image.
Harris’s self-deprecation deflected public attention away from the author and onto his stories; appropriately, since the only part of the stories really created by Harris is Uncle Remus himself. Afro-Americans had been telling the same Brer Rabbit tales to each other for 150 years, and the tar baby story had even been published by a folklore collector, Thaddeus Norris, eight years before it appeared as an Uncle Remus tale in the Constitution. Harris merely added a new context for tale telling in the figure of an “old time Negro” entertaining and teaching a young white boy. The fictional Uncle Remus, Harris’s literary contribution to Songs and Sayings, grew from both a personal and a historical necessity.
Harris apparently had a deep need to imagine himself as Uncle Remus. When the “other fellow” took over his writing in the voice of Uncle Remus, that fellow was a black man of Harris’s childhood, a plantation figure who told stories that Harris’s conscious mind had long forgotten. Harris told Walter Hines Page that he could “think in Negro dialect,” that if necessary he could speak whole passages of Emerson as a Negro would. The retiring Harris sometimes overcame his habitual fear of strangers with dialect jokes; he once took on the identity of Uncle Remus to entertain Andrew Carnegie. There is an element of the minstrel show in all this, though Harris’s dialect was fairly accurate, thereby distinguishing Remus from the “Honorable Pompey Smash” and other characters of the minstrel stage. The very authenticity of Harris’s dialect reveals his investment in the Uncle Remus role. Psychologically, there were benefits to blackface, particularly since there was never any danger of actually being mistaken for a Negro. In mimicking black speech, often calling himself Uncle Remus, signing his letters Uncle Remus, hearing himself referred to by the President of the United States as Uncle Remus, Joel Chandler Harris assumed an identity well suited to the “other fellow” dualism of his creative life. By donning the black mask of Uncle Remus, Harris liberated a part of himself.
After the publication of Songs and Sayings Harris confessed to a folklorist that “not one [tale] nor any part of one is an invention of mine.” He wanted to present his stories so that “it may be said that each legend comes fresh and direct from the Negroes.” This was admirable honesty, but also an act of creative identification. In each Uncle Remus story, Harris addresses a narrative introduction, in standard English, to what he assumes is a white audience; then the “other fellow” takes over, in Remus’s black dialect. Harris’s psychological investment in the Remus persona is startlingly revealed in the introduction to Nights with Uncle Remus. The painfully shy author who cannot find his tongue in the presence of strangers describes an evening of folklore collecting in Norcross, Georgia, in 1882. Waiting for his train, Harris observed black railroad workers at their ease at the end of a long day: “They seemed to be in great good humor, and cracked jokes at each other’s expense in the midst of boisterous shouts of laughter.” He was moved to sit down “next to one of the liveliest talkers in the party,” and after listening and laughing awhile, he told the tar baby story “by way of a feeler.” The story was “told in a low tone, as if to avoid attracting attention, but the comments of the negro . . . were loud and frequent. ‘Dar now!’ he would exclaim or ‘He’s a honey, mon!’ or ‘Gentermens! git out de way an’ gin ‘im room.’” Before the end of the story had been reached, the other men had gathered around and made themselves comfortable. Harris swiftly moved into two other stories, and for the next hour the group swapped tales. In a revealing aside, Harris admitted that a couple of the storytellers, “if their language and their gestures could have been taken down, would have put Uncle Remus to shame.”
There would be nothing remarkable about this event if someone other than Joel Chandler Harris had taken part in it. Harris apparently lost his shyness in the presence of black people; no one can be sure why, but clearly he was liberated by the storytelling identity he temporarily assumed with the workers. He wanted to think that he was one of them, their language shared, their stories mutually possessed.
Whatever the psychological imperatives leading to Harris’s creation, Uncle Remus must stand on hi
s own and bear the scrutiny of a more radically self-conscious age. Under such gaze, Uncle Remus appears too often as less human being than Southern myth. He was meant to be, in Harris’s phrase from another context, “the old-fashioned, unadulterated negro who is still dear to the heart of the South.” Remus is as humble toward whites as Harris was toward the world. He gives to the white boy constantly, yet receives only tea cakes and an occasional piece of mince pie in return. He loves and caresses, strokes the child’s hair, props him on his knee, constantly says, “Bless yo soul, honey.” Merely outlined in Songs and Sayings, Remus’s character develops further in subsequent volumes until he comes to fulfill all the classic characteristics of the loyal family retainer.
Yet having said all of this, one must also admit that Uncle Remus goes beyond stereotype. Black critics have grudgingly admitted as much, Darwin Turner suggesting that he “transcends” his origins. Sterling Brown complained bitterly of the “first” Uncle Remus of the Atlanta sketches, calling him “a dialect-talking version of a Georgia politician,” but Brown also agreed that the Uncle Remus of the animal stories was “finely conceived,” and was in fact “one of the best characters in American literature.”
This power of Uncle Remus as a character explains much about Harris’s own popularity. The Uncle Remus stories create a racial utopia in which black and white love one another and share a childhood, just as Harris thought he had done at Turnwold. Uncle Remus’s cabin constitutes one of the most secure and serene environments in American literature. In the half-light of evening, in the flickering shadows of the fire, black man and white boy enjoy an intense and loving bond. Time stands still while animals walk the earth like natural men. Parental authority has retired to the big house, and the confusing world of racial caste disappears at the slave cabin’s door. Two human beings share an atmosphere of mutual care and respect, a frozen moment of innocent childhood purity.
That only one of the participants is actually a child goes unnoticed; that it is an unnatural environment is beside the point; that it never really existed historically is forgotten; Uncle Remus’s antecedents in both the dialectology of the American minstrel show and the antebellum myth of the contented slave fall by the wayside. For a brief moment, history is suspended in the fire-lights flickering glow.
Yet only for a moment. Uncle Remus as a phenomenon of American cultural history quickly reappears, even before the child leaves for his bed in the big house. Harris is the captive of a plantation tradition that includes, in Brown’s words, the courtly planter, the one hundred percent Southern belle, the dueling cavalier, and the bighearted mammy. In a strange way, Uncle Remus in the quarters was intended to serve as a signpost on America’s “road to reunion,” a uniting symbol for South and North.
An editorial writer for the Atlanta Constitution, Harris joined the paper’s chief editor, Henry W. Grady, one of the region’s most dynamic leaders, to manipulate public sentiment toward the goal of reuniting the country — Northern capital joining Southern labor in a new industrialism. As Grady put it in his famous essay entitled “The New South”: “The Old South rested everything on slavery and agriculture. . . . The new South presents . . . a diversified industry that meets the complex needs of a complex age.” Grady’s ultimate purpose, as expressed by Harris, was “to draw the two sections together in closer bonds of union, fraternity, harmony and goodwill.”
Uncle Remus became a historical instrument promoting closer bonds of sectional harmony, representing an image of black people around which Northern and Southern whites could unite. Harris borrowed Uncle Tom’s faithfulness but did away with his harsh masters, took the minstrel’s grin but added a loving demeanor, affixed to them his hazy, romantic memories of life at Turnwold, and created a figure who could contribute to the country’s reunification. Uncle Remus reassured Southern whites about their darkest fears: free black people would love, not demand retribution. At the same time he assured Northern whites that abandoning black people was not a failure of moral responsibility. Uncle Remus, immensely popular, witnessed that black people would turn the other cheek, would continue to love, despite all the broken promises of American history.
Invented as Federal troops withdrew from the South, Uncle Remus was the perfect figure to allay Northern uneasiness about the abandonment of the Negro. Uncle Remus promised the North that Southerners could see the Negro’s virtues and could even celebrate them, which was proof that rehabilitation had occurred and that force was no longer necessary to ensure that black people would be treated with justice by their former masters. In an editorial written in the same year that Uncle Remus was published, Harris claimed that the South had made “a disastrous and demoralizing mistake” after the war by “refusing to take their old slaves into their care and confidence.” The solution, so obvious that it hurt, was, “We had only to hold out our hands to these poor, unfortunate people to renew the confidence and affection that had always existed between the white and colored races in the South.”
For moderate Southerners of Harris’s stripe, slavery now seemed a blot on the civilization that had produced Washington and Jefferson. There was a reluctant admission that slavery was wrong, even though the means of ending it had seemed an outrage. Harris himself believed that the South would have abolished slavery, in all deliberate speed, without the Civil War. By referring to the romantic tradition of the plantation, a warm, mythic memory that had existed in the South since the proslavery fiction of John Pendleton Kennedy in the 1830s, Harris reinforced a historical theory of slavery that began with the premise, widespread in his generation, that the human relationships of the peculiar institution had been close and mutually supporting. There is relatively little truth to this assertion, especially from black people’s point of view, but it was a premise that could be manipulated to enlist support for the cause of the New South. Since slavery had receded into the past, and Reconstruction had brought such violence, blacks and whites were losing sight of the virtues of those former days. Unce Remus, an “old time Negro,” reminds Southerners of what was “good” about slavery, becoming a wish-fulfillment fantasy for a populace forced to deal each day with black people considerably less docile than the plantation darky.
Remus’s dialect especially supports this fantasy. The standard English used by the author to frame the tales contrasts with the vivid dialect in the stories themselves, suggesting that black language is colorful but ignorant, that black people are picturesque but intellectually limited. Remus’s language helped whites forget that one of Georgia’s Reconstruction congressmen was a black man who spoke nothing like a plantation darky; that Frederick Douglass, writing in commanding, imperial prose, published the final version of his autobiography in the same year that Songs and Sayings appeared.
Uncle Remus, a black man who knows his place, who never threatens, helped heal the sectional scars. Teddy Roosevelt praised Harris as an author whose work was always a force for the “blotting out of sectional antagonism.” This “blotting out” occurs particularly in the Uncle Remus sketch that begins the last part of Songs and Sayings, “A Story of the War.” It tells of a Federal soldier, wounded in battle, recuperating on Remus’s plantation, where he falls in love with his nurse, the one hundred percent Southern belle. After the war they marry and produce the male heir Remus watches over. Harris claimed this story was almost “literally true,” but if so, what of the Constitution version three years earlier, which ended with the soldier’s being shot and killed by none other than Uncle Remus himself? Harris revised the story, as he created the character, to support the political cause of reunification.
While advocating sectional brotherhood, Harris also defended the South, one reason the long-dormant Brer Rabbit stories came back into his waking consciousness. In December 1877, Lippincott’s Magazine printed some animal tales in an article entitled “Folklore of the Southern Negroes.” Harris read the essay and realized that “the curious myths and animal stories” he had “absorbed” at Turnwold held “literary value”
; moreover, he knew this material better than most white people, including the article’s author, William Owens. Harris mentioned the article in the Constitution, complaining about the transcription “Buh” for “Brer” and about omissions by Owens. He admitted later, “The article gave me my cue, and the legends told by Uncle Remus are the result.”
Because Harris recreated oral tales on the written page, readers think of him as a literary artist rather than a folklorist. Because Harris was white, many see the tales as tainted by a white perspective, the proof of which is Uncle Remus himself. Some black people resent Harris and Uncle Remus, and some school libraries have gone so far as to ban the Uncle Remus volumes as offensive. Although Uncle Remus has a place in the gallery of racist stereotypes that includes Aunt Jemima and Uncle Ben — and Harris held a full complement of the racist views of his age — there is also the danger of throwing out the tar baby with the bandana.
Not one of the stories, Harris assured readers, was “cooked,” and he spent much time and effort verifying the authenticity of the tales he used. Folklore research has largely proved his claim: Harris did not in any significant way tamper with the stories themselves. If he had merely published them in the Journal of American Folklore, without the Remus context, he would be thought one of the founding fathers of Afro-American folklore studies. Harris’s literary ambitions cannot be ignored, and his white perspective does affect the tales in racist ways, yet there is relatively little reason to doubt Harris when he says that his first book “is composed of stories originally told to me by Negroes.” At one point he titled his book Uncle Remus’s Folk-Lore.