The Uncle Remus Travesty

It is a perpetual tug-of-war to decide who will "own" and interpret the art and artifacts of the Black American-determine the use to which historical and cultural materials will be put. This subtle war of wills ensues as a natural result of scholarly Black resistance to further intellectual colonization. The resisters confront the reluctance of white America to relinquish its illegitimate and unnatural proprietorship of valuable and persuasive materials. The nature of this ongoing struggle is encapsulated in the steadily increasing efforts to restore Joel Chandler Harris's Uncle Remus to the 'canon' of children's literature.

This misdirected energy in behalf of the Harris version of classic Black folktales has kept pace with the efforts of Black scholars and writers to offer more creditable versions and presentations of the same (as well as other) Black folk material. For instance, Uncle Remus reappears in Macmillan's textbook for children's literature courses, Classics of Children's Literature edited by John W. Griffith and Charles H. Frey (1981). In an article in the Children's Literature Association Quarterly, Nina Mikkelsen argues for Harris's version of the Black folktale because "it is invariably Harris's version that we remember" (5). And in a two-part article appearing in Signal, John Goldthwaite goes even further, crediting Harris with inspiring the major advances in imaginative children's literature over the seventy year period from 1880 to 1950.

It is not for absence of reputable alternative materials that Harris's Remus is being revived. There are texts that offer the Black folktale in a balanced presentation, emphasizing the weight and substance of the story (as contrasted with Harris's depiction of Remus as the prototype of the national 'darky' character). The reasons for the Remus revival probably have less to do with the merits of alternative materials than with Mikkelsen's observation: that Harris's Remus-creation is the image already seared in the mature American psyche. The larger-than-life, shuffling, sho-nuffing, grinning image is the sugartit appeasement from which America has refused to be weaned. The contradictions and interpretive difficulties presented by the Remus figure as mouthpiece for the Black folktale are anxiously overlooked, or dismissed with a sympathetic nod in the manner of Goldthwaite, who says: "Talking in dialect and the image of a slave as a man contented with his lot (more or less) did an injury, Blacks knew, to their children, and whites, with the rise of the civil rights movement of the 1960s, quickly abandoned the work as an embarrassment" (91). Goldthwaite then goes on to assert that "An Uncle Remus may have been the right, the necessary, choice of character for the telling of these tales, but he was, everyone agreed, the wrong one for the preserving of them." Finally, however, Goldthwaite devalues these (and presumably all other) objections to the work as "extraliterary."

But the variety of objections leveled against Harris's vision of the folktales turns on the conviction that Remus is not, and never was, the right presenter of the tales (that is, if importance is to be given to preserving their context, complexity, and texture). Such objections are decidely textual-raising substantive questions of authenticity and intent-and cannot be brushed aside as nervous-Nelly liberalism, or the over-sensitive nail-biting of a finicky modern Black aesthetic.

Challenges to the authenticity of Harris's work take issue with the "packaging" of the tales more often than with the tales themselves, allowing for the numerous variations and omissions that are possible in an orally preserved story. The charges leveled against Harris are that he, rather than the tales, is "inauthentic"; that Remus is a mouthpiece crafted out of stereotype to camouflage, efface, misdirect, or mute the pungency and irreverence of the tales; and that the appropriation of the tales is a bald misuse of the material. Attempts to determine whether it is use or misuse must begin with Harris himself-a man seemingly as contradictory and problematic as his stumbling creation.

In explaining their use of the Harris texts, Griffith and Frey maintain that Harris "grew up on intimate terms...