Bear

XXIX.  Mr. Fox gets into Serious Business
XXX.  How Mr. Rabbit succeeded in raising a Dust
XXXI.  A Plantation Witch
XXXII.  “Jacky-my-Lantern”
XXXIII.  Why the Negro is Black
XXXIV.  The Sad Fate of Mr. Fox

PLANTATION PROVERBS

HIS SONGS.

I.  Revival Hymn
II.  Camp-Meeting Song
III.  Corn-Shucking Song
IV.  The Plough-hands’ Song
V.  Christmas Play-Song
VI.  Plantation Play-Song
VII.  Transcriptions:
1. A Plantation Chant
2. A Plantation Serenade
VIII.  De Big Bethel Church

IX.  

Time goes by Turns

A STORY OF THE WAR.

HIS SAYINGS.

I.  Jeems Rober’son’s Last Illness
II.  Uncle Remus’s Church Experience
III.  Uncle Remus and the Savannah Darkey
IV.  Turnip Salad as a Text
V.  A Confession
VI.  Uncle Remus with the Toothache
VII.  The Phonograph
VIII.  Race Improvement
IX.  In the Rôle of a Tartar
X.  A Case of Measles
XI.  The Emigrants
XII.  As a Murderer
XIII.  His Practical View of Things
XIV.  That Deceitful Jug
XV.  The Florida Watermelon
XVI.  Uncle Remus preaches to a Convert
XVII.  As to Education
XVIII.  A Temperance Reformer
XIX.  As a Weather Prophet
XX.  The Old Man’s Troubles
XXI.  The Fourth of July

PENGUIN CLASSICS

UNCLE REMUS:
HIS SONGS AND HIS SAYINGS

Joel Chandler Harris was born on December 9, 1848, near Eatonton, Georgia. Little is known about his family, except that they were poor and his mother was a seamstress.

In 1862, Harris began a four-year apprenticeship as a printer at the Turnwald plantation in Putnam County, Georgia, where the journal The Countryman was published. Through this position he was able to publish his first writing compositions. In 1866 he began his career as a journalist, working for a number of newspapers around the South, including the Macon, Georgia Telegraph, the New Orleans Picayune and Crescent, and the Savannah Morning News. In 1876 he began his work at the Atlanta Constitution, where he eventually became an editor. During this time he also married Esther LaRose. Together they had five children: Mary Esther, Lillian, Linton, Mildred, and Joel Chandler, Jr.

Harris was also an avid student of black folklore and wrote several collections of stories based on his studies, known as the Uncle Remus Tales. The first volume, Nights with Uncle Remus: Myths and Legends of the Old Plantation was published in 1883. Other works include Daddy Jake, the Runaway, and Short Stories Told After Dark (1889), Little Mr. Thimblefinger and His Queer Country (1894), and The Chronicles of Aunt Minervy Ann (1899). In 1900 Harris resigned from the Constitution so he could concentrate on his fiction. He founded Uncle Remus’s Magazine in 1906.

Harris died in Atlanta in 1908 after a long liver illness.

Robert Hemenway is Professor of English at the University of Kentucky. He is the author of Zora Neale Hurston: A Literary Biography and the editor of Hurston’s Mules and Men, Taylor Gordon’s Born to Be, and Paul Allen’s The Late Charles Brockden Brown. Mr. Hemenway’s essays on F. Scott Fitzgerald, William Faulkner, Charles W. Chesnutt, and others have appeared in such journals as American Literature, American Studies, The Black Scholar, and Modern Fiction Studies.

Uncle Remus

HIS SONGS AND

HIS SAYINGS

by

Joel Chandler Harris

Edited with an Introduction by
ROBERT HEMENWAY


BookishMall.com

Introduction:
Author, Teller, and Hero

“I read your stories to the little folks nearly every night of my life,” said Edith Roosevelt to Joel Chandler Harris, “and they never tire of their beloved ‘Uncle Remus.’” Edith’s husband thought Uncle Remus “one of the undying characters of story”; he invited Harris to a private White House dinner. “Presidents may come and presidents may go,” Teddy said, “but Uncle Remus stays put.”

Uncle Remus: His Songs and His Sayings, a collection of thirty-four black folktales, four pages of proverbs, ten songs, and twenty-one character sketches, sold 7,500 copies in the first month after being released for the Christmas book trade in November 1880. It has been constantly before the American reading public ever since, in more than sixty reprints of the original edition. There have been ten Uncle Remus volumes in all, published over a seventy-year span, containing 220 tales. The stories have been translated into dozens of languages, including the African tribal dialects in which some of the folktales originated.

Few characters in American literature have held the popular imagination like Harris’s venerable black storyteller. The Ralston-Purina Company, in return for a box top from Ralston Wheat Cereal, once mailed out thousands of “Draw-Your-Own Uncle Remus Comic Strips.” A steel company manufactured Tar Baby nails, “Guaranteed to hold-on-tite.” Always with a nose for the box office, Walt Disney starred Uncle Remus in a feature-length movie in 1946, Song of the South, an Oscar-winning combination of actors and animation that grossed millions and played neighborhood theaters for the next twenty years. Withheld from circulation in the late sixties because of criticism that it portrayed blacks in stereotypical roles, the movie has apparently transcended American race relations. The centennial of Uncle Remus’s first appearance, fall 1980, found black and white parents, kids in tow, waiting in long lines to view the reissued movie once again, to hear Oscar winner James Baskett sing, “Zip-a-dee-do-dah, zip-a-dee-ay, My oh my what a wonderful day.”

Any character who has persisted so long and become so fixed in the American imagination deserves thinking about, and Uncle Remus deserves more thought than most; no one questions his historical and cultural significance, but there is considerable confusion about just what he means.

One can make sense of the collision of ideas and images surrounding Uncle Remus by distinguishing among Joel Chandler Harris, Uncle Remus, and Brer Rabbit. A fictional character.