He embodies a revolutionary consciousness which says that one need not accept the world as it is, that any individual, working with the mother wit at hand, can change things.

This revolutionary quality makes Brer Rabbit a universal figure. Brer Rabbit expresses archetypes of human emotion because one identifies with his liberating sense of anarchy — an imperative of liberation embedded deep in Afro-American history. The early tellers of Brer Rabbit tales, “black and unknown bards,” had no choice but to interpret the world as morally unstable. If slaves had not been able to believe in the possibility of revolution, of overturning the antihuman moral structure offered by slavery, they could have scarcely endured their physical pain. If their minds could not have identified with Brer Rabbit’s assaults, with his violence, they might have actually become the Sambo figures whites wanted them to be.

One arrives at the universality of the Brer Rabbit tales by examining the ways in which we are all oppressed, the limits placed upon us, the need we all have for a psychic drainage system; for nineteenth-century whites the closest analogy was that of children surrounded by an adult world of unrelenting authority, thus the popularity of Uncle Remus among white children. Harris became, in Mark Twain’s words, “the oracle of the nation’s nurseries.” But for blacks, the oppression has been adult and immediate, even when, as in the case of Harris, the oppressor has had great sympathy with the race, has been guilty of paternalism rather than physical violence.

Black folklore is not childish, yet it has survived in a society given to treating black people as children. Human survival systems, cultural paradigms for mental health, depend on the possibility of imagining a revolutionary change. It doesn’t have to be this way, Brer Rabbit says, and we listen because to believe is human.

The curious history of Uncle Remus, Brer Rabbit, and Joel Chandler Harris charts an author retreating from an adult, public world of difficult decisions, establishing a life for himself that would change as little as possible, then trying to express what remained dammed within through a medium that he could mimic but never fully comprehend. Uncle Remus, the mimetic creation, had his moment, but his importance has diminished with the passage of time; Brer Rabbit, the collective discovery of a people seeking to express their humanity, has assumed universality. Uncle Remus became more than Harris during the author’s lifetime, and now Brer Rabbit has become more than both of them, because Harris could never openly embrace, or understand, a radically altered racial universe — one in which he no longer had to carry a terrible burden of guilt. It is a very American paradox.

— Robert Hemenway

Suggestions for
Further Reading

BIBLIOGRAPHICAL

Bickley, R. Bruce, Jr. Joel Chandler Harris: A Reference Guide. Boston: G. K. Hall and Co., 1976.

Ray, Charles. “Joel Chandler Harris.” In A Bibliographical Guide to the Study of Southern Literature, edited by Louis Rubin. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1969.

Strickland, William Bradley. Joel Chandler Harris: A Bibliographical Study. Ph.D. dissertation, University of Georgia, 1976.

BIOGRAPHICAL

Bickley, R. Bruce, Jr. Joel Chandler Harris. Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1978.

Cousins, Paul M. Joel Chandler Harris: A Biography. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1968.

Griska, Joseph.