Brer Rabbit, Uncle Remus, and the "Cornfield Journalist": The Tale of Joel Chandler Harris (review)

Walter M. Brasch's carefully researched and engagingly written biography of Joel Chandler Harris attempts to clarify the intentions of this enigmatic and private man, who is often maligned as racist by twentieth-century scholars. He represents Harris as a successful journalist who supplemented his income by recording and sharing the stories and language of the plantation workers, and as one who loved and respected African Americans and the stories they told. Harris remained in the racist South throughout his life, yet attempted to write beyond local prejudice and sensibilities. Even so, his name became firmly attached to racism through others' commercial exploitation of his work long after his death.

Brasch masterfully weaves strands of Harris's family history with Southern culture, plantation language, professional journalism, creative literature, and American history. Harris's personal intentions, challenges, and inevitable battles are explained through the examination of extensive personal and professional correspondence, reviewers' critiques, and discussions of the cultural contexts of his work. Brasch argues that Harris's stories of Brer (Brother) Rabbit, Brer Fox, and Brer Bear were powerful allegories of the human condition. The Tar-Baby story, for example, "set the pattern of the weak using cunning intelligence and deception to manipulate the strong" (p. 72).

Harris was influenced by articles by researchers W. S. Scarborough, William Owens, and William Orrie Toggle on the folklore and language of African Americans and Creek Indians. He "acknowledged that although he 'had absorbed the stories, songs, and myths' that he had first heard on Turnwold [a local plantation], until he read Owens's article he 'had no idea of their literary value'" (p. 51). His first plantation fable, "The Story of Mr. Rabbit and Mr. Fox as Told by Uncle Remus" was published in a series beginning 20 July 1879 in Atlanta's Weekly Constitution (p. 52).

Naively, perhaps, Harris apparently intended for his representations of the folklore and language of the plantation African Americans to entertain and bring happiness to readers of all ages. His purpose is recorded in his own words on his tombstone, an illustration of which is included in the book: "I seem to see before me the smiling faces of thousands of children some young and fresh, and some wearing the friendly marks of age, but all children at heart—and not an unfriendly face among them. And while I am trying hard to speak the right word, I seem to hear a voice lifted above the rest saying: You have made some of us happy. And so I feel my heart fluttering and my lips trembling, and I have to bow silently and turn away, and hurry back into the obscurity that fits me best" (p. 263). Brasch makes no comment on this quote, but he includes in the same chapter brief excerpts from the thousands of consolatory messages that the family received when Harris died, along with quotations from well-known friends and writers such as James Whitcomb Riley who admired and respected Harris's work.

Long after his death, Harris's characters and stories were revived as "racist stereotypes [which] proliferated . . . in the American media during the two decades following World War I" (p. 270). The film Song of the South combined human action with lively studio animation, using Harris's folktales from the plantation as a theme. When the film was released to a white-only audience in Atlanta on 12 November 1946, it was received as the greatest film Disney had produced, and for a time it was one of the nation's most popular films. Eventually, however, American consciousness awakened and the stereotypes of African Americans were recognized as abhorrent and antagonistic. According to Brasch, "The depiction of American Blacks made the film one of the most criticized in history" (p. 278...