Unce Remus, an “old time Negro,” reminds Southerners of what was “good” about slavery, becoming a wish-fulfillment fantasy for a populace forced to deal each day with black people considerably less docile than the plantation darky.

Remus’s dialect especially supports this fantasy. The standard English used by the author to frame the tales contrasts with the vivid dialect in the stories themselves, suggesting that black language is colorful but ignorant, that black people are picturesque but intellectually limited. Remus’s language helped whites forget that one of Georgia’s Reconstruction congressmen was a black man who spoke nothing like a plantation darky; that Frederick Douglass, writing in commanding, imperial prose, published the final version of his autobiography in the same year that Songs and Sayings appeared.

Uncle Remus, a black man who knows his place, who never threatens, helped heal the sectional scars. Teddy Roosevelt praised Harris as an author whose work was always a force for the “blotting out of sectional antagonism.” This “blotting out” occurs particularly in the Uncle Remus sketch that begins the last part of Songs and Sayings, “A Story of the War.” It tells of a Federal soldier, wounded in battle, recuperating on Remus’s plantation, where he falls in love with his nurse, the one hundred percent Southern belle. After the war they marry and produce the male heir Remus watches over. Harris claimed this story was almost “literally true,” but if so, what of the Constitution version three years earlier, which ended with the soldier’s being shot and killed by none other than Uncle Remus himself? Harris revised the story, as he created the character, to support the political cause of reunification.

While advocating sectional brotherhood, Harris also defended the South, one reason the long-dormant Brer Rabbit stories came back into his waking consciousness. In December 1877, Lippincott’s Magazine printed some animal tales in an article entitled “Folklore of the Southern Negroes.” Harris read the essay and realized that “the curious myths and animal stories” he had “absorbed” at Turnwold held “literary value”; moreover, he knew this material better than most white people, including the article’s author, William Owens. Harris mentioned the article in the Constitution, complaining about the transcription “Buh” for “Brer” and about omissions by Owens. He admitted later, “The article gave me my cue, and the legends told by Uncle Remus are the result.”

Because Harris recreated oral tales on the written page, readers think of him as a literary artist rather than a folklorist. Because Harris was white, many see the tales as tainted by a white perspective, the proof of which is Uncle Remus himself. Some black people resent Harris and Uncle Remus, and some school libraries have gone so far as to ban the Uncle Remus volumes as offensive. Although Uncle Remus has a place in the gallery of racist stereotypes that includes Aunt Jemima and Uncle Ben — and Harris held a full complement of the racist views of his age — there is also the danger of throwing out the tar baby with the bandana.

Not one of the stories, Harris assured readers, was “cooked,” and he spent much time and effort verifying the authenticity of the tales he used. Folklore research has largely proved his claim: Harris did not in any significant way tamper with the stories themselves. If he had merely published them in the Journal of American Folklore, without the Remus context, he would be thought one of the founding fathers of Afro-American folklore studies. Harris’s literary ambitions cannot be ignored, and his white perspective does affect the tales in racist ways, yet there is relatively little reason to doubt Harris when he says that his first book “is composed of stories originally told to me by Negroes.” At one point he titled his book Uncle Remus’s Folk-Lore.

Brer Rabbit’s status as folklore rather than literary creation explains much of Harris’s guilt as the “author” of Uncle Remus. Harris understood that his contribution to the Brer Rabbit tales was only a context for the rabbit to do his tricks. Harris’s newspaper editors had wanted an “antebellum darky,” and Harris, son of the South, with a good ear for dialect, could supply one. He hid his pathological shyness behind this comic mask, escaping into the blackness that had always beckoned, but carrying along all the prejudices and paternalism of a loyal Georgian. However, the “first” Uncle Remus, a Reconstruction mouthpiece for Harris and Southern whites, the Uncle Remus who appears in Songs and Sayings in the twenty-one “character sketches,” was nothing but a caricature. He primarily appealed to readers in need of a minstrel show.

After the Lippincott’s article, Harris reached into the corners of his memory and discovered the significance of Afro-American folklore. Now Uncle Remus had something to say; his stories of Brer Rabbit granted Remus an authority he had never wielded before. Brer Rabbit, not Uncle Remus, commands the modern reader’s attention.

The Brer Rabbit tales, shaped under slavery by black artists, function at three levels: they provide complicated insights into the slave’s world view; they demonstrate what Bernard Wolfe has called the “psychic drainage system” of folktales for a captive people; and they reveal an ultimate universality reached not by transcending the individual Afro-American experience, but by penetrating to its deepest psychic meaning.

Certainly the stories can be enjoyed unconsciously. The average six-year-old who identifies with Cinderella or Brer Rabbit does not analyze his or her emotions. But folklore is a complicated system of expression, and to understand its universality one begins with its culturally specific characteristics. Folklorist Florence Baer has traced twenty-four of the thirty-two animal tales in Songs and Sayings to Africa. Her studies of all 220 of the tales concludes that well over half of them originally were African tales in some form.

Naturally enough, the African tales were adapted to the Afro-American experience. Slaves told tales or the parts of tales that seemed most suited to the slave environment. Trickster tales, universal in all folklore, were especially popular because they often emphasized the triumph of the weak over the strong; they seemed ready made for a slave situation in which foot speed — escape — was a persistent hope and tricks rather than physical force were the primary recourse for survival. The point cannot be overemphasized: black people identified with Brer Rabbit. When Brer Rabbit triumphed over a physically superior foe, black people fantasized themselves in the identical situation.