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TWO Br'er Rabbit andJohn: Trickster Heroes in Slavery Trickster tale traditions, especially those in which clever animals acted as humans, were ubiquitous in the cultures from which Africans enslaved in the United States had come. Therefore, it is not surprising that tales of trickery built around the exploits of anthropomorphized animals occupied a central position in the oral narrative performances of Africans enslaved in America. Although the existence of animal trickster tales was seldom noted during slavery, folktale collectors in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century constantly expressed amazement over the sheer number and the wide distribution and coherence of the black trickster tale repertoire. For example , in 1892, Octave Thanet declared "All over the South the stories of Br' er Rabbit are told. Everywhere not only ideas and plots are repeated, but the very words often are the same; one gets a new vision of the power of oral tradition."! The trickster tales of enslaved Africans not only appeared to be remarkably similar to each other throughout the South, but they also exhibited a close kinship to trickster tales in African oral traditions. Shortly after the appearance in print of the first animal trickster tales found among African Americans , scholars began publishing parallel tales from African traditions demonstrating that, in some instances, trickster tales of African Americans were developed around the same plots and situations as those found in African tales." Early students of the African American animal trickster tale tradition accepted not only the African origins of the tales but also the idea that African Americans conceptualized the trickster as a folk hero. William Owens, one of the first to discuss the tales in print, raised the specter of African origins when he noted that animal trickster tales were "as purely African as their faces or their own plantation melodies.?" Joel Chandler Harris, one the earliest collectors of the 18/ Trickster Heroes in Slavery tales and the foremost popularizer of them in the late nineteenth century, was a strong advocate of both African origins and the trickster as hero. On the subject of the origins of animal trickster tales, he noted that "One thing is certain, they did not get them from the whites: they are probably of remote African origins.?" Harris' views on the African origins of the tales, however, were much stronger than this statement implies. In another context, he argued that "if ethnologists should discover that they did not originate with the African, the proof to that effect should be accompanied by a good deal of persuasive eloquence.:" As to the trickster's heroism, Harris was much more determined from the outset, and asserted that "It takes no scientific investigation to show why he [the African American] selects as his hero the weakest and most harmless of all animals, and brings him out victorious in contests with the bear, the wolf, and the fox. It is not virtue which triumphs but helplessness; it is not malice but mischievousness . "6 In the late nineteeth century, most folktale scholars would probably have agreed with Harris that the burden of proof was clearly on those who would claim other than African origins for the heroic animal trickster of black folktales. In early discussions of the tradition, the African origins of animal trickster tales and the trickster as hero became interrelated issues. That students of African American animal trickster tales in the late nineteenth century would merge these issues in discussing the tales was virtually inescapable. On one level, their view of the origins and functions of the tales was strongly influenced by the popular conception of folklore as a survival from the savage past of humankind which existed in the present as a kind of mental relic among those closest to this stage of cultural development." Even before the period of slavery, Europeans had begun to propagate the idea that African cultures were arrested in a savage state of development by the innate inferiority of African people. However, white Americans had during the period of slavery defended black subjugation by promulgating the idea that, though innately inferior to whites, black acculturation "under the discipline of slavery" had served to eradicate the more savage aspects of the African character, an effect reflected in their docile and childlike behavior as slaves." Therefore, when folktale scholars were confronted with the animal trickster tale tradition which portrayed a hero in the form of a small animal whose cunning and wit could explode into acts of brutality and violence, their approach...

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