Dey er mighty wom times, mon, dem ar dog days is.” Generations of black storytellers, whom Harris helps to recreate and honor in Daddy Jack, Uncle Remus, ’Tildy, and Aunt Tempy, constantly wove into their tales coded references to the dog days of full-blown chattel slavery in America. Furthermore, before blacks met slavery in the Americas, many of their ancestors had also known, or known about, slavery in their native lands, as Olaudah Equiano and other former African slaves have documented.

Yet even in the face of the violent motifs and themes in the Uncle Remus tales, we also see how Harris’s stories have worked their iconographies into popular culture. The Disneyfication of Harris has helped to make Brer Rabbit, Brer Fox, and Brer Bear household images. “Zip-a-Dee-Doo-Dah,” the hit song from The Song of the South, won an Academy Award for best song in 1946, but James Baskett could only receive his Oscar for portraying Uncle Remus in a private ceremony. Disney re-released the movie four times and also reincarnated dense-brained Brer Bear as Cousin Albert, the lead singer in the “The Country Bear Jamboree” animatronics band at Orlando’s Walt Disney World. Cousin Albert loves singing “I’ve got blooood on the saddle / I’ve got blooood on the ground.” “I’m gonna knock your head clean off,” Brer Bear keeps saying to Brer Rabbit, in a litany of threatened violence that children, and adults, will catch themselves repeating after seeing the animation sequences from Song of the South that still run on the Disney Channel’s “Vault Disney.” On your way to the water-ride at Orlando Disney’s Splash Mountain, you first walk past Uncle Remus’s empty cabin living room, wired with speakers from which you hear—but don’t see—a non-dialectal Remus-voice narrating a Brer Rabbit tale. Then you ride your fiberglass raft through Brer Rabbit’s Laughing Place and The Briar Patch of disconcertingly phallic 18-inch vinyl thorns on the way to the waterfall, where Brer Fox or Brer Rabbit grins at you from the bow as you plummet five stories down a 45-degree slope at forty miles an hour.

A hardware manufacturing company used to sell Tar Baby Nails, guaranteed to clinch tight, while Atlanta silversmiths regularly ran ads for genuine Uncle Remus spoons, their handles decorated with his smiling visage. At your local supermarket today you can buy a 12-ounce bottle of Brer Rabbit Molasses, distributed by Del Monte in San Francisco. Bugs Bunny and Yosemite Sam, the Road Runner and the Coyote, Tweetie and Sylvester, and the rest of the Saturday morning cartoon herd reinvent Brer Rabbit’s tricksterisms. Both Melville’s White Whale and Harris’s Tar Baby have become literary and popular culture icons, and they each derive from a world of violent assaults and revenge-taking to appease personal insults. Jeff MacNelly captures the image of Saddam Hussein as America’s exasperating “Iraqi Tar-Baby” in his 1991 Gulf War political cartoon showing a long-eared Uncle Sam stuck hand-and-foot to Saddam’s oil-rich but dangerously adhesive self.

Protesting that you don’t want to be thrown in the briar patch, when you really do want to go there, has found its metaphoric way into the language of western culture in dozens of incarnations, from British House of Commons debates to corporate deregulation policy decisions. And a computer worm-virus is still another manifestation of the double-bind trap that almost killed Brer Rabbit—“the more you fight it, the worse it gets.” In 2001 D. Patrick Miller of fearlessbooks.com posted on the web “Senator Helms Meets Uncle Remus,” a wry take on what some people never learn from their cultural tar babies. Yes, Uncle Remus can make us both giggle and grieve.

The sheer energy of Harris’s stories makes them work well for us, too—both the vigorousness of his animal characters’ gestures, body language, and outrageous struggles, pratfalls, and contortions, and the wonderfully anthropomorphized, fast-talking, street-wise language of the dialogue between and among the critters, who talk “de same ez folks.” One of Harris’s several legacies, in fact, was his almost single-handed revolutionizing of children’s literature. As John Goldthwaite points out, the highly believable give-and-take dialogues of Harris’s animal figures, along with their easily visualized gestures and motions, brought animal stories beyond Aesop and the Brothers Grimm into modern settings and parlance. Winnie the Pooh and Tigger, Kipling’s jungle creatures, Uncle Wiggly, Charlotte and her barnyard friends, Peter Rabbit, Little Black Sambo (who is actually a resourceful trickster, not a “Sambo figure”), Peter Pan, and Pogo all crossed over into “an advanced state of anthropomorphism,” thanks to Harris’s reinvention of the street-smart, or loveable but sometimes not-so-smart, animal hero.

Harris left us five legacies. He was an innovative and influential children’s author. Harris was also a major New South journalist, urging national reconciliation and racial understanding after the Civil War. He was a popular literary comedian, too, even though he could never take to the stage as Twain did. Additionally, Harris was a sensitive portrayer of the plight of the poor white and of the black man and woman during Reconstruction; “Free Joe and the Rest of the World,” “Mingo,” “At Teague Poteet’s,” and, among other works, the wonderfully vital Chronicles of Aunt Minervy Ann are superb local-color writings. Finally, Harris recreated and helped preserve an entire, and still influential, African American trickster folk-tale tradition. Reviewing his conscientious reconstruction and transmission of black oral-presentation styles and narrative craft, Keith Cartwright asserts that “Harris might arguably be called the greatest single authorial force behind the literary development of African American folk matter and manner.” Like nothing else in his canon, Nights with Uncle Remus shows Harris’s cultural sensitivity and his masterful rendering of folk-tale performance skills—including physical gestures, audience- storyteller dynamics, and aural discrimination. Only a modern folklorist armed with a camcorder could have done a better job.

Furthermore, Harris not only taught Mark Twain and other white local colonists, including Flannery O’Connor and William Faulkner, several important lessons about black dialect, black portraiture, and the poor white. He also influenced and helped make viable the later contributions to African American oral and written folklore legacies of Charles Chesnutt, Zora Neale Hurston, Ralph Ellison, and Toni Morrison—who uses tar-baby characters in at least three of her novels. Fellow Eatonton-born writer Alice Walker vilifies Harris, however, for having stolen and then appropriated for the white man’s publishing industry her native black folklore legacy. The Harlem Renaissance and many black scholars and writers in the 1960s had also written off Harris as a racially clichéd, if not downright racist, purveyor of Uncle Tom images and themes.

But it is fair to say that Harris and his complex legacies are back now, under full and more appreciative study. As Robert Hemenway argues, we don’t want to overreact to Harris’s use of some white nineteenth-century Southern stereotypes by “throwing out the tar baby with the bandana.” Robert Bone, in what remains the best one-liner in Harris scholarship, observes of Brer Rabbit: “Having been raised in a brier patch, he is one tough bunny.” Raised in his own Middle Georgia briar patch, Harris was tough, too. His journalism, short stories, novels, and folk tales paint a complex picture of race, slavery, class, cultural difference, and the shifting of power in the Old South becoming New. Joel Chandler Harris also teaches us eternal truths about the agility and resourcefulness of the human mind and the resiliency of the human spirit, beyond racial lines and beyond cultural expectations and assumptions.

 

JOHN T. BICKLEY
R.