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  • When The Animals Talked—A Hundred Years of Uncle Remus
  • Nina Mikkelsen (bio)

In 1880, and three years later in 1883, Joel Chandler Harris published his first two volumes of animal folk tales, Uncle Remus: His Songs and His Sayings and Nights With Uncle Remus: Myths and Legends of the Old Plantation. In them, he presented the "myth-stories" or legends told by a former slave, who supposedly had "nothing but pleasant memories of the discipline of slavery and the period he described."1 In the fictional framework of the stories, a plantation owner's son listened and intermittently questioned the old man about the animals, just as Harris, as a Middle Georgia youth, had also listened to the slaves telling stories.2

Harris's first volume contained, not just animal stories, but also plantation proverbs, songs, and sketches of Remus living a frustrating, poverty-stricken existence in Atlanta after the war. Harris reprinted these sketches, previously published in The Atlanta Constitution, in an effort to record the "shrewd observations, the curious retorts, the homely thrusts, the quaint comments and the humorous philosophy of the race of which Uncle Remus is the type" (xxvi). American authors of this time were generally concerned with national and regional types. James was contrasting the American with his opposite the European; Twain dealt with the Westerner, Howells, the New Englander, and Cable, the New Orleans Creole. Harris was no exception. "Where is the magician," he asked in 1879, who could "catch" and "store" up "the very spice and essence of all literature," the materials of "localism" that lay all around him "untouched, undeveloped, undisturbed, unique and original, as new as the world, as old as life, as beautiful as the dreams of genius."3

In Harris's case, storing up the very "flavor" of local materials meant recording the stories in the dialect in which he had heard them in order "to preserve the legends in their original simplicity" (xxi). With the publication of the second Remus volume in 1883 and the increased national popularity of dialect literature, black American culture suddenly became an important new area for formal research.4 By 1888, Joseph Jacobs had set forth his theory that the Jataka tales were the original source of the Remus stories, in contrast to Harris, who felt the connection was African; in 1889, Harris published his third book of Uncle Remus tales, Daddy Jake the Runaway and Short Stories Told After Dark. More Remus stories were to follow: Uncle Remus and His Friends in 1892; Told By Uncle Remus: New Stories of the Old Plantation, 1905; and in 1907, Uncle Remus and Brer Rabbit. Even after Harris's death in 1908, additional stories Harris had previously collected were to make their appearance: Uncle Remus and the Little Boy, in 1910; Uncle Remus Returns, in 1918; and Seven Tales of Uncle Remus, in 1948; 185 tales in all, of literary and historical importance for the moral and social viewpoints they directly and indirectly express, for the framing device of the old man's comments and the young boy's questions, for the humor and picturesque language, and above all, for the continuously intriguing question of whether or not Harris was able to deal with the literary matter of another race.

Thematically, the Uncle Remus tales set forth a rural, Southern, mythology, a code of behavior for the underdog, in which cunning and subterfuge replace open resistance, neither debate nor compromise being a possibility within the master-slave relationship. The underdog trickster who survives and triumphs in these stories is most often the rabbit, as is often the case in both Indian and African tales. "It needs no scientific investigation," said Harris, in his Introduction to the first book, "to show why he [the Negro] selects as his hero the weakest, the most harmless of all animals, and brings him out victorious in contests with the bear, the wolf, and the fox. It is not virtue that triumphs, but helplessness; it is not malice but mischievousness" (xxv). Neither


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Illustration by Palmer Cox in Cock Robin and Other Stories (Hubbard Publishing Co., 1897) from the private rare books collection...

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