Uncle Remus was created by an author with a sentimental attachment to a plantation memory. Bald, bearded, bespectacled, Remus is a former slave who does odd jobs around the plantation after emancipation. He tells his stories night after night to a little white boy, son of the plantation owner, unfolding to him in grandfatherly fashion the “mysteries of plantation lore.” Remus has, Harris tells us, “nothing but pleasant memories of the discipline of slavery.” This fictional creation of a white Southerner was welcomed by an audience that wanted to believe Remus was a representative of his race; Uncle Remus is a cousin of those nineteenth-century minstrels who blackened their faces to entertain with jokes and songs. He is, in a way, white.

Brer Rabbit, on the other hand, was created by black storytellers long before Joel Chandler Harris heard animal tales being passed on from one slave generation to the next. Virtually every single Brer Rabbit tale written down by Harris, told by Remus, had been a staple of Afro-American folk expression prior to 1880, and the tales continue to be told, free of Harris’s influence, to the present day. Shaped by a long line of oral artists, Brer Rabbit is black from the tip of his ears to the fuzz of his tail, and he defeats his enemies with a superior intelligence growing from a total understanding of his hostile environment. He is the brier-patch representative of a people living by their wits to make a way out of no way.

These two images, Uncle Remus’s semiminstrelsy and Brer Rabbit’s cunning tricksterism, complicate the interchange between tale and teller in Harris’s famous book. Uncle Remus is literature, artifice, a Victorian relic whose plantation manners embarrass the modern reader. Brer Rabbit is folklore, a communally created universal outlaw whose revolutionary antics satisfy deep human needs. Joel Chandler Harris works between the two of them, investing a part of himself in Uncle Remus, struggling to understand Brer Rabbit’s appeal.

Joel Chandler Harris was pathologically shy, so self-effacing he often found himself unable to speak in the presence of strangers. He habitually stuttered in an unfamiliar environment, struggling to achieve speech. As a young printer, he couldn’t repeat the initiation oath of his typesetter’s union. Honored at a New York banquet, he suffered through the formal proceedings, then sprinted to his hotel room in a panic, leaving town and canceling all further engagements. Totally at ease only around a few friends and his family, Harris admitted that he lacked “the polishment, so to speak, that enables a fellow to get on with other fellows.” About to celebrate his closest friend’s silver wedding anniversary, he fled at the front gate, leaving his wife to make his excuses. Harris himself said it best: “I am morbidly sensitive. . . . It is an affliction — a disease. . . . It is worse than death itself. It is horrible.” Over the years he grew more and more eccentric, wearing unfashionable clothes and refusing to remove his hat even indoors, perhaps to hide his conspicuous red hair.

Harris told his publisher it was his “keenest regret” that he had ever allowed his name to appear on his books. He refused to read from Uncle Remus despite lucrative offers, and he avoided telling Brer Rabbit tales, even to his own children. His correspondence expresses a staggering humility. He felt his literary reputation unmerited, since his role in the Uncle Remus tales was that of a mere “compiler.” “I am perfectly well aware that my book has no basis of literary art to stand upon,” he told Mark Twain; “I know it is the matter and not the manner that has attracted public attention.” He called himself only a “cornfield journalist,” admitting, “Nobody knows better than I do how far below the level of permanence my writings fall.”

One might explain away the self-deprecation as an admirable modesty, or a coy authorial game, similar to Faulkner’s claim that he was a mere farmer. In Harris’s case, the disparagement was so consistent, and extended over such a long period of time, that clearly it was obsessive behavior. A vague, deep-seated guilt lay somewhere beneath Harris’s shyness. In 1886, an author already so famous that a national magazine begged him for a biographical essay, Harris called his fame “accidental” and disclaimed: “I .