The Complete Tales of Uncle Remus by Joel Chandler Harris

First published: 1880-1948; anthologized in 1955

Type of work: Short fiction

The Work:

Without the efforts of Joel Chandler Harris, it is doubtful that many of the African American folktales he preserved would have survived, or that anyone other than folklorists would have any idea of who Brer Rabbit or any of his associates are. Bugs Bunny might not even exist.

Between 1880 and his death in August, 1908, Harris produced many Uncle Remus books, containing a total of 168 African American folktales: Uncle Remus: His Songs and His Sayings (1880) contains thirty-four tales; Nights with Uncle Remus: Myths and Legends of the Old Plantation (1883), sixty-nine; Daddy Jake the Runaway: And Short Stories Told After Dark (1889), thirteen; Uncle Remus and His Friends: Old Plantation Stories, Songs, and Ballads with Sketches of Negro Character (1892), twenty-four; Told by Uncle Remus: New Stories of the Old Plantation (1905), sixteen; Uncle Remus and Brer Rabbit (1907), six; and Uncle Remus and the Little Boy (1910), six.

After his death, two more volumes were published: Uncle Remus Returns (1918), with six tales, edited by his biographer daughter-in-law, Julia Collier Harris; and Seven Tales of Uncle Remus (1948), edited by Thomas H. English.

The Complete Tales of Uncle Remus, edited by Richard Chase, contains all 181 of these folktales, together with the narrative frames in which they were originally presented, unbowdlerized and absent any attempt to modernize the mid-Georgia black dialect of the stories’ primary raconteur, Uncle Remus, or the Gullah dialect of his friend Daddy Jack, who tells ten tales in Nights with Uncle Remus.

The most famous of the Uncle Remus stories is the story of Brer Rabbit and the tar-baby, told in two chapters from Uncle Remus: His Songs and His Sayings. In “The Wonderful Tar-Baby Story,” Brer Fox fashions a small tar figure and leaves it by the side of the big road down which Brer Rabbit soon comes pacing, “lippity-clippity, clippity-lippity—dez ez sassy ez a jay-bird.” When Brer Rabbit smacks the tar baby for not responding to his greeting, his paw sticks to it. Demanding to be let loose, the rabbit hits the figure three more times, getting another paw stuck each time. Then he butts it with his head, and now he is stuck in five places. Brer Fox emerges and, when he can finally stop laughing, captures the helpless Brer Rabbit.

When the story resumes, in “How Mr. Rabbit Was Too Sharp for Mr. Fox,” Brer Fox first threatens to “bobbycue” Brer Rabbit, then to hang him, then to drown him. Each time, Brer Rabbit says fine, do anything you want, but please do not throw me in the briar patch. After Brer Rabbit says he would even prefer having his eye gouged out, his ears torn, and his legs cut off than to be thrown into the briar patch, the stupid fox, who “wanter hurt Brer Rabbit ez bad ez he kin,” flings Brer Rabbit into the briar patch. A few minutes later, Brer Fox hears someone calling him. Looking up to the top of a hill, he sees Brer Rabbit seated on a log and combing the tar out of his fur. Brer Fox realizes he has been had, and Brer Rabbit cannot help but taunt him, hollering out, “’Bred en bawn in a brier-patch, Brer Fox—bred en bawn in a brier-patch!’ en wid dat he skip out des ez lively ez a cricket in de embers.”

This story is not only the most famous of the Uncle Remus stories, it is also one of the most typical. First, it is what could be termed an animal tale: The characters are sentient animals who act like human beings. There are only sixteen Uncle Remus tales in which this is not the case: from Uncle Remus: His Songs and His Stories, “A Plantation Witch,” “Jacky-My-Lantern,” and “Why the Negro Is Black”; from Nights with Uncle Remus, “Spirits, Seen and Unseen” and “A Ghost Story”; from Daddy Jake, the Runaway, “How a Witch Was Caught,” “The Little Boy and His Dogs,” “The Foolish Woman,” and “The Adventures of Simon and Susanna”; from Uncle Remus and His Friends, “Death and the Negro Man,” “According to How the Drop Falls,” “A Fool for Luck,” “The Man and His Boots,” and “How the King Recruited His Army”; from Told by Uncle Remus, “The Hard-Headed Woman”; and from Uncle Remus Returns, “Impty-Umpty and the Blacksmith.”

Second, the tar-baby story belongs to the largest of the three primary groups of tales into which all Uncle Remus stories can be divided, without regard to the presence or absence of animals as main characters. It is a trickster tale, a tale in which one or more of the main characters seeks to dupe one or more others. There are more than 120 such Uncle Remus tales, of which all but four are animal tales, and all but twenty-nine have Brer Rabbit as their protagonist.

Sometimes, the consequences of the trickery are horrific, as in the following three examples. “The Awful Fate of Mr. Wolf,” from Uncle Remus: His Songs and His Stories, is a variation on the story of “The Three Little Pigs.” Brer Rabbit revenges himself on Brer Wolf by tricking him into getting into a large chest, then scalding him to death. In another story, from Nights with Uncle Remus, a bear cub uses trickery to get away with eating all of the alligator’s children, while ostensibly taking care of them. In “Brother Bear Learns to Comb His Head,” from Seven Tales of Uncle Remus, Brer Rabbit tricks Brer Bear into getting Miss Bear to cut off Brer Bear’s head so she can comb it well.

At other times, the injury is less harsh. In “Brother Rabbit’s Laughing-Place,” from Told by Uncle Remus, Brer Rabbit sends Brer Fox into what Brer Rabbit says is his laughing place, and Brer Fox walks straight into a hornets’ nest. As he struggles to escape the insects, Brer Fox protests that he does not see anything funny about the place, whereupon Brer Rabbit replies, “I said ’twas my laughin’-place, an’ I’ll say it ag’in. What you reckon I been doin’ all dis time? Ain’t you hear me laughin’?”

Sometimes, the injury is only to the dupe’s pride. For example, in “The Moon in the Mill Pond,” from Nights with Uncle Remus, Brer Rabbit and Terrapin trick Brer Bear, Fox, and Wolf into trying to seine for the moon in a mill pond, with the result that the latter three end up getting soaked and made to look foolish in front of Miss Meadows and her “gals.”

The other two major kinds of stories in these collections are the myth and the supernatural tale. The myth seeks to explain the origin of something; it is sometimes called an etiological tale. There are twenty-three of these. Four tales representative of the myth are “Why the Negro Is Black,” from Uncle Remus: His Songs and His Sayings; “Why the Alligator’s Back Is Rough,” from Nights with Uncle Remus; “Where the Harrycane Comes From,” from Uncle Remus and His Friends; and “When Brother Rabbit Was King,” from Told by Uncle Remus, which tells why dogs are always sniffing around.

In a supernatural tale, one of the main characters is a witch, a ghost, the devil, or some similar creature, or a magical object is used to significant effect. The sixteen supernatural tales in the Uncle Remus stories include two bargain-with-the-devil stories, “Jacky-My-Lantern” (from Uncle Remus: His Songs and His Sayings) and “Impty-Umpty and the Blacksmith” (from Uncle Remus Returns); a gruesome shape-shifter story, “How a Witch Was Caught” (from Daddy Jake, the Runaway); two golden-arm stories, “A Ghost Story” (from Nights with Uncle Remus) and “Taily-po” (from Uncle Remus Returns); and a chilling story about a demoniac changeling, “The Baby and the Punkins” (from Seven Tales of Uncle Remus).

One reason the Uncle Remus tales are important is that they represent the first time anyone seriously attempted to record the folktales of African Americans in the exact form, language, and style in which they existed. They not only inspired future folklorists to interest themselves in African American folklore but also encouraged them to record such material as precisely as they could.

A second reason for their significance is that these tales, together with the narrative frameworks in which they are embedded, provide an insight into the psyche of blacks in the antebellum South. It should not be surprising, Harris always maintained, that a trickster rabbit is the hero of the majority of these tales. The rabbit is among the most physically helpless wild animals in the South, lacking not only fangs and claws but also hooves and horns. Likewise, the slave was the most physically helpless person in the antebellum South, exploited almost as much by his owner as the rabbit is by the predators who rule forest and swamp. In the triumph of the prey animal over the predator, the slave could enjoy, if only vicariously, a triumph over his owner and the other predatory whites by whom he was surrounded.

This is not to say, as some have, that there is validity to the idea that Uncle Remus tells these stories in order to give a little white boy nightmares, to be Brer Rabbit to the little boy’s Brer Fox. Uncle Remus says, explicitly and often, that there is a difference between the world of the “creeturs” and the world of people: Human beings have preachers and the Bible to tell them how they should behave, whereas the creatures have no idea of the difference between right and wrong. Brer Rabbit is not an allegorical embodiment of Nat Turner. Many of the stories are told, in fact, to point out to the boy that one should not try to imitate the animals in one’s behavior.

The Uncle Remus stories do not present a picture of a world that Uncle Remus, or the average reader, would want to see come into being. Instead, they present readers with a world that is already far too like their own, one that human beings should work to keep from becoming realized.

Bibliography

Baer, Florence E. Sources and Analogues of the Uncle Remus Tales. Helsinki: Suomalainen Tiedeakatemia, 1980. Essential for cross-cultural comparison of an Uncle Remus tale with other folktales of the same type. Finds close African analogs for almost 70 percent of the Uncle Remus tales.

Bickley, R. Bruce, Jr. Joel Chandler Harris. Boston: Twayne, 1978. Chapters 3, 4, and 7 focus on the major critical approaches to these tales. Includes useful notes, index, and selected bibliography.

‗‗‗‗‗‗‗. “John, Brer Rabbit, and Babo: The Trickster and Cultural Power in Melville and Joel Chandler Harris.” In Trickster Lives: Culture and Myth in American Fiction, edited by Jeanne Campbell Reesman. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2001. Analyzes the character of the black trickster, comparing Brer Rabbit to characters created by Herman Melville.

‗‗‗‗‗‗‗, ed. Critical Essays on Joel Chandler Harris. Boston: G. K. Hall, 1981. A casebook for all of Harris’s work. Eight of its eighteen scholarly articles address the Uncle Remus stories.

Brasch, Walter M. Brer Rabbit, Uncle Remus, and the “Cornfield Journalist”: The Tale of Joel Chandler Harris. Macon, Ga.: Mercer University Press, 2000. A balanced examination of Harris and his stories—part biography, part analysis—aimed at an audience from whom, as children, the Uncle Remus tales had been withheld in deference to the sensitive racial issues encumbering the stories.

Brookes, Stella Brewer. Joel Chandler Harris—Folklorist. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1950. Chapters 3 through 7 and the appendix are especially valuable in a study of Uncle Remus tales.

Cartwright, Keith. “Creole Self-Fashioning: Joel Chandler Harris’s Other Fellow.’” In Reading Africa into American Literature: Epics, Fables, and Gothic Tales. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2002. Cartwright defines Harris as a “self-fashioned Afro-Creole fabulist” and demonstrates the elements of African folklore in Harris’s work.

Mixon, Wayne. “The Ultimate Irrelevance of Race: Joel Chandler Harris and Uncle Remus in Their Time.” Journal of Southern History 56, no. 3 (August, 1990): 457-480. By far the most reasoned discussion of the question of whether these stories are racist.

Wyatt-Brown, Bertram. “Trickster Motif and Disillusion: Uncle Remus and Mark Twain.” In Hearts of Darkness: Wellsprings of a Southern Literary Tradition. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2003. This comparison of the two authors is part of Wyatt-Brown’s examination of the role of melancholy and alienation in nineteenth century southern literature.