As one black storyteller told an early folklorist: “I allers use my sense for help me ‘long jes’ like Brer Rabbit.” Historian Lawrence Levine states: “The white master could believe that the rabbit stories his slaves told were mere figments of a childish imagination. . . . Blacks knew better. The trickster’s exploits, which overturned the neat hierarchy of the world in which he was forced to live, became their exploits; the justice he achieved, their justice; the strategies he employed, their strategies. From his adventures they obtained relief; from his triumphs they learned hope.” Even Harris himself understood this side of Brer Rabbit. In Nights with Uncle Remus, Uncle Remus tells the boy, “Well, I tell you dis, ef deze yer tales wuz des fun, fun, fun, en giggle, giggle, giggle, I let you know I’d a-done drapt um long ago.”

Yet the allegorical identification between Brer Rabbit and black people is extremely complicated, much more complex than the simple victory of the weak (black) over the strong (white) that Harris noted in his introduction when he interpreted it as a victory not for virtue “but helplessness . . . not malice, but mischievousness.” To begin with, the prior existence of the rabbit as an African trickster proves that the tales originally were not racially coded for allegorical interpretation. Although it is true, as Bernard Wolfe has counted, that Brer Rabbit appears twenty-six times in Uncle Remus, encounters the fox twenty times, and soundly trounces him nineteen times, it is also true that Brer Rabbit often triumphs through malice and malevolence; he is seldom merely mischievous. Above all he is violent, savagely attacking not only his adversaries but also sometimes his friends. Assisted by his children, he cruelly assassinates the fox, imprisoning him in a chest, then pouring in scalding water little by little until he dies. If Brer Fox represents the white man, so be it: the slave’s rage was justified. But Brer Rabbit also contributes to the demise of his friend Brer Possum, who is entirely innocent, to escape punishment for stealing food. The allegory is not always precise.

The allegorical interpretation tends to overlook the didactic function of the tales. The Brer Rabbit tales teach each generation anew the nature of the slave’s universe. Telling the tales was a means of acculturation, a technique of adaptation to the environment of bondage. Brer Rabbit can hardly be blamed for his violence, since the world he inhabits is one of unrelieved hostility. He must be constantly on guard, never trusting, always watching. Danger is everywhere; an assault lurks behind every bush. He never enjoys an open road, free of troubles. If Brer Rabbit forgets for one moment the true nature of his environment, if he once begins to think that he has cold-conked a tough world, a lesson in hubris lies just around the corner. The tar baby story, so famous for its reverse psychology that it has become a national metaphor for duplicity and slickness, also teaches the virtues of internal discipline. Brer Rabbit thinks for a moment that he can confront the world directly, loud-talk it into submission. He gets taken in by the tar baby; before he knows it he is trapped, as much by his own braggadocio as by the tar baby’s adhesiveness. He ends up with head and all four limbs stuck to the tar baby because, full of himself, he has tried to bully someone less powerful — and black. The racial ironies in the tar baby symbol — whites are intertwined with blacks, try as they may to untangle themselves — emphasize again how the tales go beyond allegory. Black people could identify with both the rabbit and the tar baby.

In another tale, with a moral quite different from that of the comparable version in Aesop, Brer Tarrypin out-races the much speedier rabbit by positioning relatives along the route and himself at the finish line.