Joel Chandler Harris

American writer

• Born: December 9, 1848
• Birthplace: Eatonton, Georgia
• Died: July 3, 1908
• Place of death: Atlanta, Georgia

Harris was famous in his day for his retellings of folktales by Uncle Remus in black dialect. In the mid-twentieth century, his reputation suffered when his tales became regarded as negative stereotypes; however, later studies of folklore established Harris’s importance as a folklorist who collected authentic black folktales.

Early Life

Joel Chandler Harris was the illegitimate son of an Irish laborer who deserted his family shortly after Harris was born; however, Harris spent a rather ordinary boyhood in rural Georgia. He was not very interested in school and seems to have preferred playing pranks to studying. At the age of fourteen, Harris was given a job as a printer’s devil by Addison Turner, an eccentric planter who published a rural weekly newspaper, The Countryman, on his nearby plantation. It is impossible to overestimate Turner’s influence on young Harris, for in addition to allowing him to contribute pieces to the paper, Turner also encouraged him to read extensively in his private library and to roam around his thousand-acre plantation. It was here that Harris first heard the black folk narratives that were later to become the heart of the Uncle Remus stories. After working for Turner for four years, Harris held brief jobs at several newspapers around the South. In 1873 he married Esther LaRose and soon settled in Atlanta, where he lived until his death in 1908.

In 1876, Harris was hired to do editorial paragraphing for the Atlanta Constitution. Soon after his arrival, he was asked to take over a black-dialect column from a retiring writer, and, on October 26, 1876, his first sketch appeared, featuring the witty observations of an older black man. A month later the older black man was officially called “Uncle Remus,” and a major new voice in American humor was born. Uncle Remus began as a rather thin, almost vaudevillian caricature of a black man who supposedly dropped by the Atlanta Constitution office to offer practical comments, and some of Harris’s own opinions, on corrupt politicians and lazy African Americans. The character grew, however, when Harris transferred the locale of the sketches to a plantation and incorporated tales he had heard in the slave quarters during his early days with Turner. In late 1880, Harris collected twenty-one “urban” and thirty-four “plantation” Uncle Remus sketches along with black songs, maxims, and proverbs in Uncle Remus: His Songs and His Sayings . The collection was an immediate success, and, much to Harris’s astonishment and embarrassment, he was famous.

Life’s Work

Uncle Remus: His Songs and His Sayings proved so popular that Harris went on to publish a half-dozen more Uncle Remus volumes in his lifetime. In 1881, Harris, who now had a steady and comfortable income, moved his family to a large farmhouse in Atlanta’s West End, where he did most of his writing at night after returning home from work. His second collection, Nights with Uncle Remus (1883), is the most important and the one that most fully shows the fruits of his labor. In it, Uncle Remus is rounded out much more to become a complete character in his own right, and other characters on the plantation are introduced as storytellers, principally Daddy Jack, a character who speaks in a Sea Island dialect called “Gullah,” and who Harris used to tell stories he perceived to be of a different cultural origin than the stories that Uncle Remus tells.

As popular as these Uncle Remus collections were, Harris never considered that their merit was inherently literary. He always insisted that in them he was the “compiler” of a folklore and dialect that were fast disappearing in the South at the end of the nineteenth century. He was careful to include only the Uncle Remus tales that could be verified as authentic black oral narratives, and, with his usual diffidence, he minimized his own role in elevating them to artistic short fiction.

In Mingo and Other Sketches in Black and White (1884), Harris surprised his readers by temporarily moving away from the Uncle Remus formula. The collection was favorably reviewed, and Harris showed that his literary talents could be stretched to include what he considered to be more serious forms. The title story, “Mingo: A Sketch of Life in Middle Georgia,” is an admirable local-color portrayal of class conflicts. The central conflict is between two white families, the aristocratic Wornums and the poor-white Bivinses. Before the Civil War, the Wornums’ daughter, Cordelia, had married the Bivinses’ son, Henry Clay, much to the displeasure of the Wornum family, who promptly disinherited her. Henry Clay was killed in the war, and Cordelia died shortly thereafter, leaving a daughter in the care of Mrs. Feratia Bivins, Henry’s mother. Mrs. Wornum is overcome with grief after the death of the children and realizes that she has made a mistake in snubbing the Bivinses, but fiercely proud Feratia cannot forgive her.

In a comic yet pathos-filled scene, Mrs. Wornum asks Feratia Bivins to let her see her granddaughter, whom she has never seen. Feratia coolly replies, “if I had as much politeness, ma’am, as I had cheers, I’d ast you to set down,” and adamantly refuses to let Mrs. Wornum see the baby. The final wise commentary, however, comes from Mingo, a former Wornum slave who is loyal to his old master and acts as the surrogate father for the surviving child. It is the black man’s strength of character and endurance that promises reconciliation and social progress. Harris, a poor white by birth himself, is clearly antiaristocratic and sides with the underdog in times of changing social values, yet by applauding the virtues of loyalty and duty in the black, he comes close to advocating a servile and passive acceptance, as some of his critics have charged.

Harris’s Free Joe and Other Georgian Sketches (1887) and the frequently anthologized title story, “Free Joe and the Rest of the World,” further illustrate his ambivalence on the “Negro question.” In 1840, a slave-speculator named Major Frampton lost all his property except one slave, his body-servant Joe, to Judge Alfred Wellington in a famous card game. Frampton adjourned the game, went to the courthouse and gave Joe his freedom, and then blew his brains out. Joe, although freed, remains in town because his wife Lucinda is now the property of the judge.

All goes well for Joe until the judge dies and his estate is transferred to the stern Spite Calderwood. Calderwood refuses to let Joe visit Lucinda. Joe’s easy life comes to an end: The other slaves will have nothing to do with him, and he is an outcast from the white community, sleeping outside under a poplar tree. When Calderwood learns that in spite of his orders Lucinda has been sneaking out to meet Joe, he takes her to Macon and sells her; he even has his hounds kill Joe’s dog. Joe, however, even when told the truth about Lucinda, seems incapable of understanding. Night after night he waits for his wife and his dog to return together in the moonlight, until one night he dies alone under the poplar tree, a smile on his face and humble to the last.

In “Free Joe and the Rest of the World,” Harris achieves a balance between sentimentality and realistic portrayal in dramatizing the plight of the freeman in the antebellum South. Even though Joe is the humble, unassuming victim of white cruelty, his freedom also represents the vague, Gothic threat of social dissolution to the white community, which comes to view him as “forever lurking on the outskirts of slavery, ready to sound a shrill and ghostly signal” of insurrection. Unlike Brer Rabbit, Joe is no ingenious trickster, and Harris obliquely hints that, all things considered, Joe may have been better off a slave because his freedom leaves him “shiftless” and incapable of fending for himself.

Of the six stories collected in Balaam and His Master and Other Sketches and Stories (1891), three are portraits of loyal black people and three treat the fate of a white man in a crumbling society. In this collection Harris again illustrates his favorite themes: the changing social values between black and white people, and the need for reconciliation through patience and understanding. “Balaam and His Master” is the story of the fiercely loyal manservant of young Berrien Cozart—the sensual, cruel, impetuous, and implacable son of a respected plantation family. As in many of Harris’s aristocratic families, the older Cozart practices a benign paternalism toward his slaves, but his young son Berrien is nothing but a spoiled and dissolute gambler who abuses the privileges of his race.

Despite his master’s excesses, Balaam remains a constant and loyal valet, even to the point of participating in a scam to sell himself to a new master and then returning to Berrien. Berrien is finally arrested for murder, and Balaam breaks into the jail to be with him; but it is too late—Berrien is already dead. The story ends with Balaam loyally crouching over his dead master, who died with a smile as sweet as a “little child that nestles on his mother’s breast.” Even though Balaam is morally superior to his white master, the message of the story is that loyalty and service are superior to social revolution.

In “Where’s Duncan?”—another story in Balaam and His Master and Other Sketches and Stories—Harris gives a more apocalyptic version of the changing social values between black and white people. The story is narrated by old Isaiah Winchell, who meets a dark stranger named Willis Featherstone as he is hauling his cotton to market. As they camp for the evening, old Isaiah learns that Willis Featherstone is the mulatto son of a plantation owner who had educated him, grown to hate him, and then sold him. The next evening the group camps near the old Featherstone plantation, and a vampirelike mulatto woman comes to invite them to dinner at the “big house.” Willis Featherstone, who seems to know the woman, enigmatically asks her, “Where’s Duncan?” and she hysterically replies that old Featherstone has “sold my onliest boy.” Later that evening, the camp is awakened by a commotion at the big house. Old Isaiah rushes up to see the house on fire, and through the window he glimpses the mulatto woman stabbing Old Featherstone and screaming, “Where’s Duncan?” Willis Featherstone, say some of the observers, was inside enjoying the spectacle.

The story ends with a Gothic scene of fiery retribution as the old plantation house burns and collapses, and old Isaiah still dreams of the smell of burning flesh. Violent confrontation is possible, Harris suggests, if white society continues to abuse the black.

In 1900, Harris quit his job at the newspaper so he could concentrate on writing full time at his farmhouse. During his lifetime, he gained much attention from his book. He was admired by Mark Twain, and the two embarked upon a joint lecture tour. Harris was also invited to the White House in 1902 by President Theodore Roosevelt, who declared that Harris’s books had been instrumental in repairing the rifts caused by the Civil War. In 1905, he and his son Julian began publishing a southern literary magazine called Uncle Remus’s Magazine, which achieved a circulation of 200,000 and became another huge success for the writer. Harris, however, was beginning to face recurrent illness in his old age, and the pressures of publishing a magazine did little to restore his health. He died at his home in 1908 after being diagnosed with cirrhosis of the liver.

Significance

As an editorialist, essayist, and humorist, Joel Chandler Harris was instrumental in trying to reconcile the tensions between North and South, black and white, left by the Civil War. Although he shared some of the racial prejudices of his time—one detects a paternalism for the black in much of the short fiction—he was a progressive conservative who, as one critic has said, “affirmed the integrity of all individuals, whether black or white; and he could not countenance unjust or inhumane actions by any member of the human race.”

During the 1870’s and 1880’s, his editorials in the Atlanta Constitution consistently argue against sectionalism, both literary and political, and in favor of a united country. Any literature, wrote Harris in 1879, takes its materials and flavor from “localism,” yet “in literature, art, and society, whatever is truely Southern is likewise truely American; and the same may be said of what is truely Northern.”

Bibliography

Baer, Florence E. Sources and Analogues of the Uncle Remus Tales. Helsinki, Finland: Academia Scientiarium Fennica, 1980. Essential to anyone trying to study the Brer Rabbit stories. For each tale, Baer gives a summary, the tale type number from The Types of the Folk-tale (1928), motif numbers from Stith Thompson’s Motif-Index of Folk Literature (1955-1958), and a discussion of possible sources. She also includes an excellent essay discussing Harris’s legitimacy as a collector of folktales.

Bickley, R. Bruce, ed. Critical Essays on Joel Chandler Harris. Boston: G. K. Hall, 1981. Traces the critical heritage about Harris, including contemporary reviews. Of particular importance is an article by Bernard Wolfe, which was printed in Commentary in 1949.

‗‗‗‗‗‗‗, ed. Joel Chandler Harris. Boston: Twayne, 1978. A full-length study, including chapters on the major as well as the later Uncle Remus tales, and Harris’s other short fiction. Includes a brief, useful annotated bibliography.

Brasch, Walter M. Brer Rabbit, Uncle Remus and the “Cornfield Journalist”: The Tale of Joel Chandler Harris. Mercer, Ga.: Mercer University Press, 2000. Biography detailing Harris’s newspaper and literary career and the debate over the racist character of his stories. Brasch argues that Harris’s tales accurately depicted American Black English and Reconstruction Georgia.

Cousins, Paul. Joel Chandler Harris: A Biography. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1968. A biography that the author worked on intermittently for more than thirty years and that includes material from interviews with friends of Harris. Not a reliable source for critical evaluations of Harris’s work.

Harris, Joel Chandler. Dearest Chums and Partners: Joel Chandler Harris’s Letters to His Children: A Domestic Biography, edited by Hugh T. Keenan. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1993. Reprints 280 letters that Harris wrote to his four sons and two daughters between 1890 and his death. The letters reveal Harris’s interest in Roman Catholicism; some of the letters, written in Uncle Remus’s dialect and containing patronizing remarks about “negroes,” reveal Harris’s attitudes about race.

Hemenway, Robert. Introduction to Uncle Remus: His Songs and Sayings, edited by Robert Hemenway. New York: Penguin Books, 1982. Hemenway’s introduction is clear and informative, one of the better all-around essays on the Brer Rabbit stories. Contains a brief bibliography.

Keenan, Hugh T. “Twisted Tales: Propaganda in the Tar-Baby Stories.” The Southern Quarterly 22 (Winter, 1984): 54-69. This essay updates some arguments that Bernard Wolfe put forth in his Commentary article (included in R. Bruce Bickley’s entry). Better researched than Wolfe’s article and more even in tone.