Nights with Uncle Remus by Joel Chandler Harris

First published: 1883; illustrated

Subjects: Animals, family, friendship, race and ethnicity, and social issues

Type of work: Novel

Type of plot: Folktale and moral tale

Time of work: Before the American Civil War

Recommended Ages: 15-18

Locale: A plantation in Putnam County, Georgia

Principal Characters:

• Uncle Remus, an eighty-year-old black slave, originally from Virginia, who is an authority figure on the Home Place plantation
• Master John, the white owner of the Home Place and Georgia coastal plantations
• Miss Sally, Master John’s wife
• The little boy, Master John and Miss Sally’s young son
• ’Tildy, a young black slave, the ladies’ maid to Miss Sally and the sometime attendant of the little boy
• Daddy Jack, also called African Jack, the eighty-year-old black Gullah-speaking overseer of the coastal plantation
• Aunt Tempy, a black female slave who is an authority figure for the other female slaves
• Brer Rabbit, the usually successful trickster figure and hero of the animal tales told by the various narrators
• Brer Terrapin, another successful trickster figure in the tales
• Brer Fox, ,
• Brer Wolf, and
• Brer Bear, the usually unsuccessful adversaries of Brer Rabbit and Brer Terrapin

Form and Content

Nights with Uncle Remus is a thematic novel of seventy-one chapters, sixty-one of which contain animal stories and one of which contains a witch tale. The final chapter provides a climactic celebration of Christmas Eve festivities led by Uncle Remus, including the marriage of Daddy Jack and ’Tildy, a dance, and a communal song session. The white plantation owners and their guests are appreciative onlookers.

In most of these chapters, Uncle Remus tells stories in a rural black dialect to the young son of the plantation owner. The device of stories within a frame was introduced in Joel Chandler Harris’ first book, Uncle Remus: His Songs and His Sayings (1880). In Nights with Uncle Remus, however, the time has shifted to before the Civil War to allow for more variety in black narrators and black dialects and for differences in storytelling techniques. A lively competition between narrators ensues in the sessions.

Reconciliation, a major theme of the book, is established in the frame of the novel when these narrators come to appreciate their differences as individuals and as storytellers. At first, they argue over the authenticity and details of tales, but eventually they become a mutually appreciative and cooperative group. Their tales provide contrast to this harmony by focusing on the negative and destructive aspects of the animal community. Brer Rabbit, along with Benjamin Ram and Brer Terrapin, must constantly be on guard to avoid being captured and eaten by Brer Fox, Brer Wolf, and Brer Bear. When the animals do undertake a communal project—such as building a house, digging a well, or planting a garden—Brer Rabbit manages through trickery to take it away from the others. Several of the stories show Brer Rabbit tricking his enemies into selling their kin for food. Other conflicts over courtship and property arise in this self-destructive animal community.

Nights with Uncle Remus begins on a dull rainy night in late fall when the little boy and ’Tildy bring an evening meal to Uncle Remus, who is unable to get about. As a reward, Remus tries to amuse and interest the little boy in his stories of Brer Rabbit tales, but he has to tell five stories before the boy shows much enthusiasm. This nightly pattern of exchanging meals for stories continues until chapter twenty-four, when Daddy Jack, an overseer on the coastal plantation, visits the Home Place plantation.

Soon, Jack objects to Uncle Remus’ storytelling and offers more authentic African versions. Smitten with affection for ’Tildy, he also begins a serious flirtation, which she rejects. When Jack’s physical advances become known, Aunt Tempy is sent as a chaperon to the young boy at the nightly storytelling sessions. Aunt Tempy and ’Tildy become regular and occasionally quarrelsome members of the group. The competitive storytelling continues along with the aged but vigorous Daddy Jack’s courtship of the young, pert ’Tildy.

All in all, Daddy Jack tells ten tales; Aunt Tempy, five; and ’Tildy, three. Uncle Remus tells the remainder. The storytelling sessions contribute to the development of characters and plot. For example, ’Tildy’s ghost story (chapter 29), based on “The Golden Arm” story suggested to Harris by Mark Twain, allows her to make physical contact with Daddy Jack when she shouts, “‘You got my money!’ ” and grabs him. In turn, Daddy Jack shows respect by complimenting her telling of a second story (chapter 61). Criticized by Uncle Remus for her telling of a third tale (chapter 65), ’Tildy shows modesty, courtesy, and respect for his authority and age by listening to his corrected version of the story. Similar interactions between Uncle Remus and both Daddy Jack and Aunt Tempy show the characters overcoming their argumentative natures and jealousy of one another’s place and authority. These developments lead to the joyous, harmonious final chapter of the book, with its Christmas Eve festivities.

Critical Context

Collections of Negro folklore were just beginning in the late nineteenth century. Some folklorists praised the stories in Joel Chandler Harris’ Uncle Remus miscellany as a contribution to this new science. Nights with Uncle Remus resulted from Harris’ ambition to combine a work of fiction, a thematic novel, with an academic collection and anthology. After this book, many more collections of black folklore appeared, either for the amusement and entertainment of a general audience, such as those of Charles C. Jones, Jr., and Mrs. A. M. H. Christensen, or for folklorists, by such scholars as Elsie Parsons, Alan Dundes, and Richard Dorson.

Harris soon realized that Nights with Uncle Remus was a failure both as an academic contribution and as a commercial venture even though the reviews were good. Sales were not as large as those for his first book, and academics took no notice of it. In one inscribed copy of Nights with Uncle Remus, he wrote humorously and deprecatingly concerning the subject of “comparative folklore” that the author “knows no more on the subject than a blind horse knows about Sunday.” In Uncle Remus and His Friends (1892), his third Uncle Remus book, which follows the much simpler miscellany structure of his successful 1880 Uncle Remus, Harris announced the end to his Uncle Remus books, apologizing for the stories as authentic folktales. Later, he satirized folklore as a science in the essay “The Late Mr. Watkins of Georgia: His Relation to Oriental Folk-Lore” (1898) and through the academic narrator of a children’s book in Wally Wanderoon (1903). His last three Uncle Remus books (1904, 1905, 1907), which were mainly lavishly illustrated picture books, made no pretense to being authentic folktale collections.

Nights with Uncle Remus regularly appeared on lists for children from 1912 to 1941 and occasionally afterward. The book deserves rediscovery, however, because it gives a thorough, detailed description of oral storytelling techniques. The stories have an authentically oral structure in interspersing prose with verse. Florence Baer’s Sources and Analogues of the Uncle Remus Tales (1980) has proved that most of the sixty-nine animal stories in Nights with Uncle Remus have African or African American sources. Only five stories have European sources, five are American, four are American Indian, and one is unknown. Both storytellers and academics have come to a greater respect for Harris’s amateur collection. Stripped of Harris’ frame, the stories have been restored to a general audience of children’s literature through retellings such as Julius Lester’s four volumes of Uncle Remus tales (1987, 1988, 1990, and 1990) and by Van Dyke Parks’s three Jump books (1986, 1987, and 1989). Nights with Uncle Remus deserves more consideration as a complex but unified novel.