So maybe Remus should go ahead and get his “remoovance papers” from Miss Sally, hang his bundle on his walking-cane, and “see w’at kinder dirt dey is at de fur een’ er de big road.” But protestations or apologies from the boy invariably bring Remus back to tell another story. He also makes sure, however, to keep reminding his adoring listener to act respectfully around his seniors—and, as he had advised in the first book, not to play with the white-trash Favers children, who are nearly as disreputable as Faulkner’s den of rodent-like Snopses. After all, Remus explains in story IV, “Ole Cajy Favers, he went ter de po’house, en ez ter dat Jim Favers, I boun’ you he know de inside er all de jails in dish yer State er Jawjy.”

The great majority of the seventy-one tales in Nights are Brer Rabbit trickster stories or trickster tales featuring other resourceful creatures, along with a handful of etiological legends about the origins of human and animal traits and a few ghost stories. To help unify this lengthy cycle of tales and describe their actual performance setting, Harris regularly adds atmospheric imagery and mood coloration. For example, this scene frames Remus’s first story:

It had been raining all day so that Uncle Remus found it impossible to go out. The storm had begun, the old man declared, just as the chickens were crowing for day, and it had continued almost without intermission. The dark gray clouds had blotted out the sun, and the leafless limbs of the tall oaks surrendered themselves drearily to the fantastic gusts that drove the drizzle fitfully before them.

 

In due course, Remus relieves the gloom by telling the little boy how Brer Rabbit helped Miss Goose escape the trap Brer Fox had set for her. Or examine the frame for story XI. Harris first points out that the rainy pre-winter season had indeed settled in, and the little boy felt surrounded by its dreariness. But Remus had put a tin pan under a persistent leak in his roof, which added “a not unmusical accompaniment to the storm.” Harris next describes how Remus’s shadow alternately swoops up to fill the cabin and then fades out among the cobwebs when the old man bends over to add lightwood to his flickering hearth. Then Harris borrows a technique from Edgar Allan Poe and uses synaesthesia to merge visual and auditory imagery:

 

The rain, and wind, and darkness held sway without, while within, the unsteady lightwood blaze seemed to rhyme with the drip-drip-drip in the pan.

Harris also adds an overarching temporal frame and a plot line to provide transitions and link the stories together. Remus and his three fellow slaves tell their stories from the late fall until Christmas eve, and the storytellers in his cabin often narrate subsets of two to five interlocking tales. Also, from chapter XXV on, Daddy Jack and ’Tildy carry on a lively courtship culminating in their wedding, which takes place during the concluding Christmas chapter, number LXXI. The closing chapter also recreates some Old South plantation Christmas festivities, merging into an epiphanic celebration of renewal and rebirth, in aesthetic contrast to the gloominess that Harris evokes to begin his folklore cycle.

The collective result of Harris’s enhancements to this second collection of tales is a much more vital, interactive, and engaging performance environment, for Remus’s circle and for today’s readers, than we experienced in his first book. In addition to the folklore research he cites in his extensive introduction to Nights, Harris occasionally inserts footnotes in his text to explain a source, interpret a dialectal or metaphoric expression, or describe the body language or voicing performance of a certain segment of a story. Carried out well before the advent of portable recording equipment, Harris’s achievement in this volume is all the more remarkable for its thoroughness and systematic attention to anthropological and linguistic detail. Harris even supplies a short explanatory essay on the Gullah dialect, a 39-word glossary of Gullah expressions, and a note explaining that Gullah speakers frequently add postvocalic vowels to words—and how these sounds are elided, so that “heard-a,” becomes “yeard-a,” becomes “yeddy.”

Furthermore, Harris distinguishes phonetically among Remus’s, Tempy’s, ’Tildy’s, and, especially, Daddy Jack’s speech performance patterns, rhythms, sound effects, and enunciations—and visually, among their respective physical poses, gestures, grimaces, and other interpretive and dramatic movements. Frequently, too, Harris describes how the individual audience members interrupt a narration with their spontaneous approval of story events or delivery style—“Enty!” (ain’t he?) affirms Jack; “Dar you is!” interjects ’Tildy; or Aunt Tempy suddenly exclaims, “What I done tell you!” The slave storytellers and the little boy also regularly question story details, because an event seems incredulous or contradicts an earlier plot development, or because a listener had heard a different version of that tale in the past. Additionally, Harris shows his field-collection expertise by pointing out the strong proprietary ownership the storytellers exercise over their material. For example, in narrative XXXV Remus won’t get involved when the little boy asks him to clarify a detail in one of Daddy Jack’s stories; Remus simply says, “ ’Taint none er my tale.” Remus, furthermore, knows from repeated experiences that Jack will always claim his Gullah version of a story to be the more authentic one.

But Remus also regularly deflects inquiries about his own stories. In tale XXXVI, for instance, Mammy-Bammy Big-Money had drowned Brer Wolf; yet the wolf is alive and well in the next story. When the little boy challenges this miraculous resurrection, Remus responds defensively, “Now, den, is I’m de tale, er is de tale me? . . . Dat w’at de tale say.” And then he resumes his narrative: “Dead er no dead, Brer Wolf was living in the swamp, found a lady-friend, and. . . . ” Similarly, when the boy queries Remus about his use of “jiblets” to refer to a cow’s liver, lungs, and heart in story XXXXVII, the old narrator responds “Tooby sho, honey.” He then briefly explains that some people call them jiblets and some people call them hasletts. “You do de namin’,” he concludes, “en I’ll do de eatin’.”

Although Remus and Aunt Tempy are occasionally jealous of the other’s status on the Abercrombie plantation, they essentially understand and sympathize with each other and enjoy telling folk stories from the old days; they also acknowledge that the “ole times” are about all they have left.