Nights with Uncle Remus (4 page)

Protesting that you don't want to be thrown in the briar patch, when you really do want to go there, has found its metaphoric way into the language of western culture in dozens of incarnations, from British House of Commons debates to corporate deregulation policy decisions. And a computer worm-virus is still another manifestation of the double-bind trap that almost killed Brer Rabbit—“the more you fight it, the worse it gets.” In 2001 D. Patrick Miller of
fearlessbooks.com
posted on the web “Senator Helms Meets Uncle Remus,” a wry take on what some people never learn from their cultural tar babies. Yes, Uncle Remus can make us both giggle and grieve.

The sheer energy of Harris's stories makes them work well for us, too—both the vigorousness of his animal characters' gestures, body language, and outrageous struggles, pratfalls, and contortions, and the wonderfully anthropomorphized, fast-talking, street-wise language of the dialogue between and among the critters, who talk “de same ez folks.” One of Harris's several legacies, in fact, was his almost single-handed revolutionizing of children's literature. As John Goldthwaite points out, the highly believable give-and-take dialogues of Harris's animal figures, along with their easily visualized gestures and motions, brought animal stories beyond Aesop and the Brothers Grimm into modern settings and parlance. Winnie the Pooh and Tigger, Kipling's jungle creatures, Uncle Wiggly, Charlotte and her barnyard friends, Peter Rabbit, Little Black Sambo (who is actually a resourceful trickster, not a “Sambo figure”), Peter Pan, and Pogo all crossed over into “an advanced state of anthropomorphism,” thanks to Harris's reinvention of the street-smart, or loveable but sometimes not-so-smart, animal hero.

Harris left us five legacies. He was an innovative and influential children's author. Harris was also a major New South journalist, urging national reconciliation and racial understanding after the Civil War. He was a popular literary comedian, too, even though he could never take to the stage as Twain did. Additionally, Harris was a sensitive portrayer of the plight of the poor white and of the black man and woman during Reconstruction; “Free Joe and the Rest of the World,” “Mingo,” “At Teague Poteet's,” and, among other works, the wonderfully vital
Chronicles of Aunt Minervy Ann
are superb local-color writings. Finally, Harris recreated and helped preserve an entire, and still influential, African American trickster folk-tale tradition. Reviewing his conscientious reconstruction and transmission of black oral-presentation styles and narrative craft, Keith Cartwright asserts that “Harris might arguably be called the greatest single authorial force behind the literary development of African American folk matter and manner.” Like nothing else in his canon,
Nights with Uncle Remus
shows Harris's cultural sensitivity and his masterful rendering of folk-tale performance skills—including physical gestures, audience- storyteller dynamics, and aural discrimination. Only a modern folklorist armed with a camcorder could have done a better job.

Furthermore, Harris not only taught Mark Twain and other white local colonists, including Flannery O'Connor and William Faulkner, several important lessons about black dialect, black portraiture, and the poor white. He also influenced and helped make viable the later contributions to African American oral and written folklore legacies of Charles Chesnutt, Zora Neale Hurston, Ralph Ellison, and Toni Morrison—who uses tar-baby characters in at least three of her novels. Fellow Eatonton-born writer Alice Walker vilifies Harris, however, for having stolen and then appropriated for the white man's publishing industry her native black folklore legacy. The Harlem Renaissance and many black scholars and writers in the 1960s had also written off Harris as a racially clichéd, if not downright racist, purveyor of Uncle Tom images and themes.

But it is fair to say that Harris and his complex legacies are back now, under full and more appreciative study. As Robert Hemenway argues, we don't want to overreact to Harris's use of some white nineteenth-century Southern stereotypes by “throwing out the tar baby with the bandana.” Robert Bone, in what remains the best one-liner in Harris scholarship, observes of Brer Rabbit: “Having been raised in a brier patch, he is one tough bunny.” Raised in his own Middle Georgia briar patch, Harris was tough, too. His journalism, short stories, novels, and folk tales paint a complex picture of race, slavery, class, cultural difference, and the shifting of power in the Old South becoming New. Joel Chandler Harris also teaches us eternal truths about the agility and resourcefulness of the human mind and the resiliency of the human spirit, beyond racial lines and beyond cultural expectations and assumptions.

 

JOHN T. BICKLEY
R. BRUCE BICKLEY, JR.
FLORIDA STATE UNIVERSITY

Suggestions for Further Reading

Bickley, R. Bruce, Jr., and Hugh T. Keenan.
Joel Chandler Harris: An Annotated Bibliography of Criticism, 1977-1996; with Supplement, 1892-1976.
Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1997.

Bickley, R. Bruce, Jr., in collaboration with Karen L. Bickley and Thomas H. English.
Joel Chandler Harris: A Reference Guide.
Boston: G. K. Hall, 1978. An annotated bibliography from 1862-1976.

Bickley, R. Bruce, Jr.
Joel Chandler Harris: A Biographical and Critical Study.
Lincoln, NE: Authors Guild Backinprint, 2000.

Brasch, Walter M.
Brer Rabbit, Uncle Remus, and the ‘Cornfield Journalist': The Tale of Joel Chandler Harris.
Macon, GA: Mercer University Press, 2000.

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

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

Keenan, Hugh T.
Dearest Chums and Partners: Joel Chandler Harris's Letters to His Children. A Domestic Biography.
Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1993.

Baer, Florence E.
Sources and Analogues of the Uncle Remus Tales.
Helsinki: Folklore Fellows Communications, 1980.

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

Bickley, R. Bruce, Jr.
Joel Chandler Harris: A Biography and Critical Study.
Lincoln, NE: Authors Guild Backinprint, 2000.

Bone, Robert.
Down Home: A History of Afro-American Short Fiction from Its Beginnings to the End of the Harlem Renaissance.
New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1975.

Brookes, Stella Brewer.
Joel Chandler Harris—Folklorist.
Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1950, 1972.

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

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, 2001.

Goldthwaite, John. “The Black Rabbit: A Fable Of, By, and For the People” and “Sis Beatrix: The Fable in the Nursery.” In
The Natural History of Make-Believe: A Guide to the Principal Works of Britain, Europe, and America.
New York: Oxford University Press, 1996.

Hemenway, Robert. “Author, Teller, and Hero.” Introduction to
Uncle Remus: His Songs and His Sayings.
New York: Penguin Classics, 1982.

Humphries, Jefferson. “Remus Redux, or French Classicism on the Old Plantation: La Fontaine and J. C. Harris.” In
Southern Literature and Literary Theory.
Edited by Jefferson Humphries. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1990.

Keenan, Hugh T. “Rediscovering the Uncle Remus Tales.”
Teaching and Learning Literature
5 (March/April 1996): 30-36.

Levine, Lawrence W.
Black Culture and Black Consciousness: Afro-American Folk Thought from Slavery to Freedom.
New York: Oxford University Press, 1977.

Light, Kathleen. “Uncle Remus and the Folklorists.”
Southern Literary Journal
7 (Spring 1975): 88-104. Reprinted in Bickley, ed.,
Critical Essays on Joel Chandler Harris
(see above).

MacKethan, Lucinda. “Joel Chandler Harris: Speculating on the Past.” In
The Dream of Arcady: Place and Time in Southern Literature.
Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1980.

Okepewho, Isidore. “The Cousins of Uncle Remus.”
The Black Columbiad: Defining Moments in African American Literature and Culture. Harvard English Studies 19.
Edited by Werner Sollors and Maria Diedrich. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1994.

Pederson, Lee. “Language in the Uncle Remus Tales.”
Modern Philology
82 (February 1985): 292-298.

Price, Michael E. “Back in Tall Cotton: The New South or the Same Old South?” In
Stories with a Moral: Literature and Society in Nineteenth-Century Georgia.
Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2000.

Roberts, John W. “Br'er Rabbit and John: Trickster Heroes in Slavery.” In
From Trickster to Badman: The Black Folk Hero in Slavery and Freedom.
Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1989.

Russo, Peggy A. “Uncle Walt's Uncle Remus: Disney's Distortion of Harris's Hero.”
Southern Literary Journal
25.1 (Fall 1992): 19-32.

Stafford, John. “Patterns of Meaning in
Nights with Uncle Remus.
”
American Literature
18 (May 1946): 89-108.

Sundquist, Eric. “Uncle Remus, Uncle Julius, and the New Negro” and “ ‘De Ole Times,' Slave Culture, and Africa,” In
To Wake the Nations: Race in the Making of American Literature.
Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993.

Turner, Darwin T. “Daddy Joel Harris and His Old-Time Darkies.”
Southern Literary Journal
1 (December 1968): 2o-41. Reprinted in Bickley, ed.,
Critical Essays on Joel Chandler Harris
(see above).

Walker, Alice. “Uncle Remus: No Friend of Mine.”
Southern Exposure
9.2 (Summer 1981): 29-31.

Werner, Craig Hansen. “The Brier Patch as (Post)modernist Myth: Morrison, Barthes, and
Tar-Baby
As-Is.” In
Playing the Changes: From Afro-Modernism to the Jazz Impulse.
Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1994.

Wolfe, Bernard. “Uncle Remus and the Malevolent Rabbit.”
Commentary
8 (July 1949): 31-41. Reprinted in Bickley, ed.,
Critical Essays on Joel Chandler Harris
(see above).

A Note on the Text, Harris Editions, and Major Harris Collections

This edition of
Nights with Uncle Remus
reproduces the text of the first edition, published by James R. Osgood and Company, Boston, in November 1883. As was the case with his first book,
Uncle Remus: His Songs and His Sayings
(1880),
Nights
carried a list price of $1.50. The George Routledge and Sons, London, English edition shows an 1884 date, although Routledge probably released its printing simultaneously with Osgood's. Routledge published multiple runs of
Nights
until at least 1905. Houghton Mifflin, Boston, became the primary American publisher of
Nights
from the 1880s until 1971, when this publisher ran its final printing under the Singing Tree Press imprint—the last known edition of the book until our Penguin Classics edition. Ticknor (Boston), Chatto and Windus (London), and McKinlay, Stone & MacKenzie (New York), among other houses, also published reprinted editions over the decades.

In 1895, Harris released a handsome new and revised edition of
Uncle Remus: His Songs and His Sayings
, illustrated by the noted artist Arthur Burdette Frost. Harris published only one authorized edition of
Nights
, however, illustrated by Frederick Stuart Church (along with James H. Moser, one of the two illustrators for the 1880
Uncle Remus
) and William Holbrook Beard. During his lifetime, Harris published seven volumes of Uncle Remus tales; three smaller collections would appear posthumously. In 1955, Richard Chase conveniently gathered all 185 of Harris's folktales in
The Complete Tales of Uncle Remus
, also published by Houghton Mifflin.

Among scores of modern retellings and adaptations of Harris's animal tales, the most widely discussed is Julius Lester's
Tales of Uncle Remus
, four volumes of contemporary black-dialect stories richly illustrated with pencil drawings, charcoals, and watercolors by Jerry Pinkney (1987, 1988, 1990, and 1994). Van Dyke Parks and Malcolm Jones wrote three charming volumes of adaptations in their
Jump!
series, featuring Barry Moser's playfully anachronistic drawings and watercolors of Brer Rabbit and the other creatures dressed in early-twentieth-century attire (1986, 1987, and 1989).

The primary repository of Harris's books, correspondence, and manuscripts is Emory University's Joel Chandler Harris Collection, Atlanta. The Paxton H. Briley Joel Chandler Harris Collection at Florida State University, Tallahassee, is the second largest public collection of Harris books, magazine publications, biographies, and critical studies. Harris's home, The Wren's Nest, in West End Atlanta, is a fully restored Queen Anne Victorian House Museum, open to the public.

NIGHTS WITH UNCLE REMUS

MYTHS AND LEGENDS

OF

 

 

THE OLD PLANTATION

 

 

 

BY

 

 

JOEL CHANDLER HARRIS

 

 

With Illustrations.