As late as the 1930s Coca-Cola ads prominently featured the Uncle Remus image.

Harris’s self-deprecation deflected public attention away from the author and onto his stories; appropriately, since the only part of the stories really created by Harris is Uncle Remus himself. Afro-Americans had been telling the same Brer Rabbit tales to each other for 150 years, and the tar baby story had even been published by a folklore collector, Thaddeus Norris, eight years before it appeared as an Uncle Remus tale in the Constitution. Harris merely added a new context for tale telling in the figure of an “old time Negro” entertaining and teaching a young white boy. The fictional Uncle Remus, Harris’s literary contribution to Songs and Sayings, grew from both a personal and a historical necessity.

Harris apparently had a deep need to imagine himself as Uncle Remus. When the “other fellow” took over his writing in the voice of Uncle Remus, that fellow was a black man of Harris’s childhood, a plantation figure who told stories that Harris’s conscious mind had long forgotten. Harris told Walter Hines Page that he could “think in Negro dialect,” that if necessary he could speak whole passages of Emerson as a Negro would. The retiring Harris sometimes overcame his habitual fear of strangers with dialect jokes; he once took on the identity of Uncle Remus to entertain Andrew Carnegie. There is an element of the minstrel show in all this, though Harris’s dialect was fairly accurate, thereby distinguishing Remus from the “Honorable Pompey Smash” and other characters of the minstrel stage. The very authenticity of Harris’s dialect reveals his investment in the Uncle Remus role. Psychologically, there were benefits to blackface, particularly since there was never any danger of actually being mistaken for a Negro. In mimicking black speech, often calling himself Uncle Remus, signing his letters Uncle Remus, hearing himself referred to by the President of the United States as Uncle Remus, Joel Chandler Harris assumed an identity well suited to the “other fellow” dualism of his creative life. By donning the black mask of Uncle Remus, Harris liberated a part of himself.

After the publication of Songs and Sayings Harris confessed to a folklorist that “not one [tale] nor any part of one is an invention of mine.” He wanted to present his stories so that “it may be said that each legend comes fresh and direct from the Negroes.” This was admirable honesty, but also an act of creative identification. In each Uncle Remus story, Harris addresses a narrative introduction, in standard English, to what he assumes is a white audience; then the “other fellow” takes over, in Remus’s black dialect. Harris’s psychological investment in the Remus persona is startlingly revealed in the introduction to Nights with Uncle Remus. The painfully shy author who cannot find his tongue in the presence of strangers describes an evening of folklore collecting in Norcross, Georgia, in 1882. Waiting for his train, Harris observed black railroad workers at their ease at the end of a long day: “They seemed to be in great good humor, and cracked jokes at each other’s expense in the midst of boisterous shouts of laughter.” He was moved to sit down “next to one of the liveliest talkers in the party,” and after listening and laughing awhile, he told the tar baby story “by way of a feeler.” The story was “told in a low tone, as if to avoid attracting attention, but the comments of the negro . . . were loud and frequent. ‘Dar now!’ he would exclaim or ‘He’s a honey, mon!’ or ‘Gentermens! git out de way an’ gin ‘im room.’” Before the end of the story had been reached, the other men had gathered around and made themselves comfortable. Harris swiftly moved into two other stories, and for the next hour the group swapped tales. In a revealing aside, Harris admitted that a couple of the storytellers, “if their language and their gestures could have been taken down, would have put Uncle Remus to shame.”

There would be nothing remarkable about this event if someone other than Joel Chandler Harris had taken part in it. Harris apparently lost his shyness in the presence of black people; no one can be sure why, but clearly he was liberated by the storytelling identity he temporarily assumed with the workers. He wanted to think that he was one of them, their language shared, their stories mutually possessed.

Whatever the psychological imperatives leading to Harris’s creation, Uncle Remus must stand on his own and bear the scrutiny of a more radically self-conscious age. Under such gaze, Uncle Remus appears too often as less human being than Southern myth. He was meant to be, in Harris’s phrase from another context, “the old-fashioned, unadulterated negro who is still dear to the heart of the South.” Remus is as humble toward whites as Harris was toward the world. He gives to the white boy constantly, yet receives only tea cakes and an occasional piece of mince pie in return. He loves and caresses, strokes the child’s hair, props him on his knee, constantly says, “Bless yo soul, honey.” Merely outlined in Songs and Sayings, Remus’s character develops further in subsequent volumes until he comes to fulfill all the classic characteristics of the loyal family retainer.

Yet having said all of this, one must also admit that Uncle Remus goes beyond stereotype. Black critics have grudgingly admitted as much, Darwin Turner suggesting that he “transcends” his origins. Sterling Brown complained bitterly of the “first” Uncle Remus of the Atlanta sketches, calling him “a dialect-talking version of a Georgia politician,” but Brown also agreed that the Uncle Remus of the animal stories was “finely conceived,” and was in fact “one of the best characters in American literature.”

This power of Uncle Remus as a character explains much about Harris’s own popularity.