Uncle Remus

by Joel Chandler Harris

  Brer Rabbit’s status as folklore rather than literary creation explains much of Harris’s guilt as the “author” of Uncle Remus. Harris understood that his contribution to the Brer Rabbit tales was only a context for the rabbit to do his tricks. Harris’s newspaper editors had wanted an “antebellum darky,” and Harris, son of the South, with a good ear for dialect, could supply one. He hid his pathological shyness behind this comic mask, escaping into the blackness that had always beckoned, but carrying along all the prejudices and paternalism of a loyal Georgian. However, the “first” Uncle Remus, a Reconstruction mouthpiece for Harris and Southern whites, the Uncle Remus who appears in Songs and Sayings in the twenty-one “character sketches,” was nothing but a caricature. He primarily appealed to readers in need of a minstrel show.

  After the Lippincott’s article, Harris reached into the corners of his memory and discovered the significance of Afro-American folklore. Now Uncle Remus had something to say; his stories of Brer Rabbit granted Remus an authority he had never wielded before. Brer Rabbit, not Uncle Remus, commands the modern reader’s attention.

  The Brer Rabbit tales, shaped under slavery by black artists, function at three levels: they provide complicated insights into the slave’s world view; they demonstrate what Bernard Wolfe has called the “psychic drainage system” of folktales for a captive people; and they reveal an ultimate universality reached not by transcending the individual Afro-American experience, but by penetrating to its deepest psychic meaning.

  Certainly the stories can be enjoyed unconsciously. The average six-year-old who identifies with Cinderella or Brer Rabbit does not analyze his or her emotions. But folklore is a complicated system of expression, and to understand its universality one begins with its culturally specific characteristics. Folklorist Florence Baer has traced twenty-four of the thirty-two animal tales in Songs and Sayings to Africa. Her studies of all 220 of the tales concludes that well over half of them originally were African tales in some form.

  Naturally enough, the African tales were adapted to the Afro-American experience. Slaves told tales or the parts of tales that seemed most suited to the slave environment. Trickster tales, universal in all folklore, were especially popular because they often emphasized the triumph of the weak over the strong; they seemed ready made for a slave situation in which foot speed — escape — was a persistent hope and tricks rather than physical force were the primary recourse for survival. The point cannot be overemphasized: black people identified with Brer Rabbit. When Brer Rabbit triumphed over a physically superior foe, black people fantasized themselves in the identical situation. As one black storyteller told an early folklorist: “I allers use my sense for help me ‘long jes’ like Brer Rabbit.” Historian Lawrence Levine states: “The white master could believe that the rabbit stories his slaves told were mere figments of a childish imagination. . . . Blacks knew better. The trickster’s exploits, which overturned the neat hierarchy of the world in which he was forced to live, became their exploits; the justice he achieved, their justice; the strategies he employed, their strategies. From his adventures they obtained relief; from his triumphs they learned hope.” Even Harris himself understood this side of Brer Rabbit. In Nights with Uncle Remus, Uncle Remus tells the boy, “Well, I tell you dis, ef deze yer tales wuz des fun, fun, fun, en giggle, giggle, giggle, I let you know I’d a-done drapt um long ago.”

  Yet the allegorical identification between Brer Rabbit and black people is extremely complicated, much more complex than the simple victory of the weak (black) over the strong (white) that Harris noted in his introduction when he interpreted it as a victory not for virtue “but helplessness . . . not malice, but mischievousness.” To begin with, the prior existence of the rabbit as an African trickster proves that the tales originally were not racially coded for allegorical interpretation. Although it is true, as Bernard Wolfe has counted, that Brer Rabbit appears twenty-six times in Uncle Remus, encounters the fox twenty times, and soundly trounces him nineteen times, it is also true that Brer Rabbit often triumphs through malice and malevolence; he is seldom merely mischievous. Above all he is violent, savagely attacking not only his adversaries but also sometimes his friends. Assisted by his children, he cruelly assassinates the fox, imprisoning him in a chest, then pouring in scalding water little by little until he dies. If Brer Fox represents the white man, so be it: the slave’s rage was justified. But Brer Rabbit also contributes to the demise of his friend Brer Possum, who is entirely innocent, to escape punishment for stealing food. The allegory is not always precise.

  The allegorical interpretation tends to overlook the didactic function of the tales. The Brer Rabbit tales teach each generation anew the nature of the slave’s universe. Telling the tales was a means of acculturation, a technique of adaptation to the environment of bondage. Brer Rabbit can hardly be blamed for his violence, since the world he inhabits is one of unrelieved hostility. He must be constantly on guard, never trusting, always watching. Danger is everywhere; an assault lurks behind every bush. He never enjoys an open road, free of troubles. If Brer Rabbit forgets for one moment the true nature of his environment, if he once begins to think that he has cold-conked a tough world, a lesson in hubris lies just around the corner. The tar baby story, so famous for its reverse psychology that it has become a national metaphor for duplicity and slickness, also teaches the virtues of internal discipline. Brer Rabbit thinks for a moment that he can confront the world directly, loud-talk it into submission. He gets taken in by the tar baby; before he knows it he is trapped, as much by his own braggadocio as by the tar baby’s adhesiveness. He ends up with head and all four limbs stuck to the tar baby because, full of himself, he has tried to bully someone less powerful — and black. The racial ironies in the tar baby symbol — whites are intertwined with blacks, try as they may to untangle themselves — emphasize again how the tales go beyond allegory. Black people could identify with both the rabbit and the tar baby.

  In another tale, with a moral quite different from that of the comparable version in Aesop, Brer Tarrypin out-races the much speedier rabbit by positioning relatives along the route and himself at the finish line. Brer Rabbit thinks he has sped through the race, flashing his form, but in fact he has only chased himself and lost the contest. The trick works because Rabbit assumes all members of the Terrapin family look alike. But the tale also teaches the wisdom of knowing your opponent’s weakness and utilizing that knowledge. At the level of “psychic drainage,” the unconscious level at which stories bring satisfactions we scarcely realize, the story offers immense satisfactions to any people denied their individuality by a system which ignores that some people run, others walk. “I am what I am, shell and all,” says the tale, “and I can beat you with it.”

  At the most subtle levels of the narratives, Brer Rabbit teaches the world view necessary for survival. There is a constant emphasis on food as a symbol of status and power — a natural enough concern for slaves living on meager rations — and Brer Rabbit is particularly adept at stealing food. In one of the more complicated tales in Uncle Remus, Brer Rabbit steals Brer Wolf’s fish, then, when confronted with his crime, tells Brer Wolf that if he thinks he has been wronged, he can kill Brer Rabbit’s cow — which Wolf, seeking justice, proceeds to do. But Brer Rabbit, knowing Brer Wolf’s fear of “patter-rollers,” the white bands who enforce the slave codes, tricks him, stealing the meat back after falsely warning of a patter-roller attack. Allegorically, the tale may teach that one should not excessively fear the patter-rollers, but at another level it emphasizes the uncertainty of possession in a world where irrational violence can be invoked at any moment. There is no justice, only the search for it, and although Rabbit is on top at the end of the tale, Brer Wolf will be back with designs on the smokehouse.

  Whatever our interpretation of individual tales, one constant in all the Uncle Remus stories is the psychic satisfactions that come from Brer Rabbit’s acquisition of status. This characteristic of the tales can best be seen in
the famous tale of Brer Rabbit riding Brer Fox. A symbolic courting tale, the story revolves around Brer Rabbit’s attempt to impress “Miss Meadows en de gals” by telling them that Brer Fox used to be “my daddy’s riding horse.” Told of Brer Rabbit’s boast, Brer Fox vows to bring the rabbit to the ladies and make him eat his words. Brer Fox tries to trick Brer Rabbit into attending a party at Miss Meadows’s, but Brer Rabbit, feigning sickness, can only go if Brer Fox carries him part of the way. He tricks Brer Fox into putting on saddle and bridle, then breaks his promise and rides him right up to the front door, where “Miss Meadows en all de gals wuz settin’ on de peazzer.” Brer Rabbit saunters around smoking a cigar, a living reminder that the world can be overturned, the weak can ride the strong.

  The story demonstrates the ultimate triumph for the slave listeners. Brer Rabbit does not kill his enemy, but treats him as a beast of burden — the legal status of slaves — and humiliates him. He also implicitly steals his woman, although Harris probably did not understand this part of the story. “Miss Meadows en de gals” have caused a good deal of inquiry over the years. Harris admitted to his illustrator he had no idea why they were there, and neither does Uncle Remus: “Don’t ax me, honey. She wuz in de tale, Miss Meadows en de gals wuz, en de tale I give you like hi’t wer’ gun ter me.” But there should be no question about their function. The “gals” represent the order of the white world, which Brer Rabbit violates by trampling on the most sacred of white sexual taboos. In effect, Brer Rabbit takes Brer Fox’s place, turning the established order of the slave world on its head.

  The Brer Rabbit tales document one revolutionary turn of events after another. The world of superior force is undermined, but so is the notion that the meek shall inherit the earth; cunning often results in victory, but the trickster can also be tricked. Brer Rabbit exhibits the revolutionary consciousness necessary to survive in an oppressive system. He suggests that no order can be depended on for very long, that there are no certainties, that goodness may win this week but power the next. What is certain is the need to improvise, to hang loose, stay cool, avoid sticky situations, shun rigid interpretations of events. Brer Rabbit shows that anarchy undermines all systems which mask reality. His lessons inculcate a revolutionary consciousness because they teach that one never has to accept limitations on the self, that one can never be denied the radical possibilities of being human.

  The Uncle Remus tales showcase a revolutionary black figure, Brer Rabbit, who must be sanitized for acceptance by the predominantly white American reading public of the nineteenth century. For slaves listening to the Brer Rabbit tales, the rabbit provided an acceptable outlet for an overwhelming hostility, which could lead to self-destruction if openly expressed. Black Brer Rabbit could only be assimilated into the culture of a postslavery America through the mouth of a quasi-Negro whom white readers desperately needed to defuse the stories’ revolutionary hostility.

  Uncle Remus always loves, and Brer Rabbit sometimes hates, but Brer Rabbit does not hate life. He glories in its manifold possibilities, the chances for reversal. He embodies a revolutionary consciousness which says that one need not accept the world as it is, that any individual, working with the mother wit at hand, can change things.

  This revolutionary quality makes Brer Rabbit a universal figure. Brer Rabbit expresses archetypes of human emotion because one identifies with his liberating sense of anarchy — an imperative of liberation embedded deep in Afro-American history. The early tellers of Brer Rabbit tales, “black and unknown bards,” had no choice but to interpret the world as morally unstable. If slaves had not been able to believe in the possibility of revolution, of overturning the antihuman moral structure offered by slavery, they could have scarcely endured their physical pain. If their minds could not have identified with Brer Rabbit’s assaults, with his violence, they might have actually become the Sambo figures whites wanted them to be.

  One arrives at the universality of the Brer Rabbit tales by examining the ways in which we are all oppressed, the limits placed upon us, the need we all have for a psychic drainage system; for nineteenth-century whites the closest analogy was that of children surrounded by an adult world of unrelenting authority, thus the popularity of Uncle Remus among white children. Harris became, in Mark Twain’s words, “the oracle of the nation’s nurseries.” But for blacks, the oppression has been adult and immediate, even when, as in the case of Harris, the oppressor has had great sympathy with the race, has been guilty of paternalism rather than physical violence.

  Black folklore is not childish, yet it has survived in a society given to treating black people as children. Human survival systems, cultural paradigms for mental health, depend on the possibility of imagining a revolutionary change. It doesn’t have to be this way, Brer Rabbit says, and we listen because to believe is human.

  The curious history of Uncle Remus, Brer Rabbit, and Joel Chandler Harris charts an author retreating from an adult, public world of difficult decisions, establishing a life for himself that would change as little as possible, then trying to express what remained dammed within through a medium that he could mimic but never fully comprehend. Uncle Remus, the mimetic creation, had his moment, but his importance has diminished with the passage of time; Brer Rabbit, the collective discovery of a people seeking to express their humanity, has assumed universality. Uncle Remus became more than Harris during the author’s lifetime, and now Brer Rabbit has become more than both of them, because Harris could never openly embrace, or understand, a radically altered racial universe — one in which he no longer had to carry a terrible burden of guilt. It is a very American paradox.

  — Robert Hemenway

  Suggestions for

  Further Reading

  BIBLIOGRAPHICAL

  Bickley, R. Bruce, Jr. Joel Chandler Harris: A Reference Guide. Boston: G. K. Hall and Co., 1976.

  Ray, Charles. “Joel Chandler Harris.” In A Bibliographical Guide to the Study of Southern Literature, edited by Louis Rubin. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1969.

  Strickland, William Bradley. Joel Chandler Harris: A Bibliographical Study. Ph.D. dissertation, University of Georgia, 1976.

  BIOGRAPHICAL

  Bickley, R. Bruce, Jr. Joel Chandler Harris. Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1978.

  Cousins, Paul M. Joel Chandler Harris: A Biography. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1968.

  Griska, Joseph. “Selected Letters of Joel Chandler Harris, 1863-1885.” Ph.D. dissertation, Texas A and M University, 1976.

  Harris, Julia Collier. The Life and Letters of Joel Chandler Harris. Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1918.

  CRITICAL

  Baer, Florence. Sources and Analogues of the Uncle Remus Tales. Helsinki: Folklore Fellows Communications, 1981.

  Bickley, R. Bruce, Jr., ed. Critical Essays on Joel Chandler Harris. Boston: G. K. Hall and Co., 1981.

  Bone, Robert. Down Home: A History of Afro-American Short Fiction. New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1975.

  Brookes, Stella Brewer. Joel Chandler Harris — Folklorist. Athens, Ga.: University of Georgia Press, 1950.

  Brown, Sterling. The Negro in American Fiction. Washington, D.C.: Associates in Negro Folk Education, 1937.

  English, Thomas. “In Memory of Uncle Remus,” Southern Literary Messenger 2 (February 1940): 77-83.

  English, Thomas H., ed. Mark Twain to Uncle Remus: 1881-1885. Atlanta: Emory University Sources and Reprints, series VII, no. 3, 1953.

  Levine, Lawrence. Black Culture and Black Consciousness. New York: Oxford University Press, 1977.

  Turner, Darwin T. “Daddy Joel Harris and His Old Time Darkies,” Southern Literary Journal 1 (December 1968): 20-41.

  Wolfe, Bernard. “Uncle Remus and the Malevolent Rabbit,” Commentary 8 (July 1949): 31-41.

  Note on the Text

  This edition follows the text of the first edition, published by D. Appleton and Company in New York. The book was originally released in November 1880, although t
he title page bears the official publication date of 1881. There were three states, usually thought of as representing three separate printings, to this first edition, since Appleton had not anticipated the large demand for the book. All are usually considered first editions because they all carry the 1881 date, but the actual first edition can be identified by a few minor changes that took place in the second and third printings. In the first printing, the last line of page nine includes the word presumptive and page 233 contains an advertisement for Roberts Bartholow’s A Treatise on the Practice of Medicine. In the second printing, the word presumptive has been changed presumptuous and page 233 again advertises Bartholow’s Treatise. The third printing repeats presumptuous, but Bartholow has been replaced with reprints of favorable reviews of Songs and Sayings.

  The original edition was reprinted in 1883, 1884, 1886, 1889, 1890, and 1892. In 1895 Appleton brought out a new and revised edition, containing superior illustrations by A. B. Frost, a talented artist who would become a close friend of Harris’s as well as his favorite illustrator. The revised edition was reprinted virtually every year between 1895 and 1941; the printings of 1908 and 1920 show minor changes.

  It is interesting to note that a pirated English edition appeared almost immediately, published by George Routledge and Sons in 1881. The authorized English edition also appeared the same year but omitted both the songs and the twenty-one character sketches entitled “His Sayings.” The Woodruff Library at Emory University, where most of the Harris manuscripts and letters are deposited, owns a first edition of Uncle Remus that Harris himself began to revise, marking it in pencil to make the dialect more accurate. Anxious about the book’s reception, Harris apparently was concerned that linguists would find fault with his transcriptions. Few of his corrections, however, became a part of subsequent editions.