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The Daddy Jack stories are a series of African American folktales featured in Nights with Uncle Remus (1883) collected by the American folklorist Joel Chandler Harris (1848–1908). This collection revisits the characters and settings, including the titular Uncle Remus and the little white boy to whom he tells tales, from Harris’s first collection, Uncle Remus: His Songs and His Sayings (1880). In Nights with Uncle Remus Uncle Remus remains the primary narrator, but Harris introduces several new storytellers, including Daddy Jack. Daddy Jack, a Gullah African American from the Sea Islands, serves as narrator or actor in fifteen stories, many of which feature or include supernatural elements.
Daddy Jack, who is also known as African Jack, is described as “a genuine African” whose “weazened, dwarfish appearance” helps to confirm his reputation as a “wizard, a conjurer, and a snake-charmer” (Harris 1883, 133). Daddy Jack, who was taken from West Africa to the Sea Islands of Georgia when he was twenty years old, speaks in Gullah, or Geechee, a creole language spoken by the Gullah people of the Sea Islands (also known as Sea Island Creole). Daddy Jack’s Gullah, which is based on English and African languages, is markedly different from Uncle Remus’s Middle-Georgia Black English. Harris acknowledges the dialect’s obscurity and provides a glossary in his introduction to Nights with Uncle Remus; however, within the narrative the characters (including the little boy) are able to understand Daddy Jack and he them, giving the impression that the dialects are mutually intelligible. The addition of Daddy Jack’s narration, as well as that of ’Tildy and Aunt Tempy (the housemaid and cook who feature prominently in Nights with Uncle Remus) allows Harris to exhibit the variety of folk traditions within African American society and to impress upon his readers his belief in the importance of dialect in the preservation of the folktales.
Harris considered dialect and language to be a vital element of the narrative of the folktales, and while his idyllic and picturesque perception of African American life in the pre– and post–Civil War South has drawn criticism, his portrayal of African American dialects is often considered both accurate and authentic (Brasch 1981, 88). Likewise, Harris made an effort to record and preserve the most common versions of the stories told to him, though he acknowledged that other variations existed within the traditions. In Nights with Uncle Remus the character of Daddy Jack is one way in which Harris is able to include some of the alternative stories. Uncle Remus acts as the primary narrator throughout the collection, but after Daddy Jack is introduced, he frequently jumps in either at the end or beginning of Uncle Remus’s storytelling to inform his friend that “me yent bin-a yerry da tale so” (I’ve never heard the story like that) (Harris 1883, 185). And, since Daddy Jack is Uncle Remus’s friend, guest, and elder, Uncle Remus’s typical reply is to ask Daddy Jack to tell (or retell) the story as he knows it.
The alternative versions offered by Daddy Jack also illustrate the ways in which Gullah traditions and culture combine European and African influences. Brer Rabbit, the trickster character in Uncle Remus’s stories, remains a constant throughout Daddy Jack’s versions, but the Gullah tales often feature animals, characters, or elements that are likely African in origin. In “Brother Rabbit’s Love Charm” the “Affiky man” (a witch-doctor or conjurer character) requires Brer Rabbit to bring him an “el’phan tush” as one of the items necessary to make the titular love charm (Harris 1883, 200). Similarly, in “Cutta Cord-La!” which is Daddy Jack’s version of Uncle Remus’s “Brother Rabbit Gets Provisions,” Brer Rabbit hides his grandmother from Brer Wolf in a coconut tree, a detail that causes the little boy some skepticism. “Cutta Cord-La!” is also interesting in relation to European influences. In the story, Brer Wolf attempts to trick Brer Rabbit’s grandmother into hauling him up the coconut tree in her basket by changing his voice to sound more like Brer Rabbit, a plot device found in similar European fairy tales like “The Three Little Pigs,” “Rapunzel,” and “The Wolf and the Seven Young Kids.”
Daddy Jack’s telling of “The Cunning Snake” further illustrates the relationship between African and European tales in the Gullah tradition. The story, which relates the tale of an African woman who angers a snake by taking its eggs, has clear parallels with the German fairy tale “The Wolf and the Seven Young Kids” collected by Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm in Kinder und hausmärchen: gesammelt durch die Brüder Grimm (1857). In Daddy Jack’s version, the African woman teaches her child a song, the refrain of which the mother will sing to tell the child that it is safe to open the door. The cunning snake learns the song and tricks the child, swallowing her whole. But, like the wolf in the German version, the snake is found sleeping, is killed, and the child is cut, still alive, out of its belly. Interestingly, the child in the Daddy Jack story is called Noncy, which suggests that the story may also be related to the West African Anansi stories.
Including Daddy Jack as a narrator in Nights with Uncle Remus was also a means of introducing a supernatural element to the story collection. The Gullah culture of the Sea Islands incorporates a strong sense of the spirit world and a rich heritage of folklore and religion, much of which has direct links to the Gullah people’s African roots. Some of the stories told by Daddy Jack are typical animal or didactic (morality) stories like those of Uncle Remus, but others feature magic and mysticism or ghosts and spirits. Daddy Jack is introduced in the story as “African Jack” and prior to his arrival in the narrative, the stories told by Uncle Remus to the little boy are mainly of the type featured in Harris’s first Uncle Remus collection. While stories about Brer Rabbit, Brer Wolf, and the other animal characters still dominate the last two-thirds of Nights with Uncle Remus, these fables are interspersed with stories of the supernatural. Daddy Jack’s reputation as a conjurer gives him authority both to tell such stories and to instruct the other narrators (and the little boy) as to dealings with the supernatural.
The second story after Daddy Jack’s introduction in “African Jack” is titled “Spirits, Seen and Unseen” and demonstrates Daddy Jack’s experience with the supernatural. The story is prefaced by Aunt Tempy’s concern over something she overheard while looking after another servant’s child. Aunt Tempy found the child sitting alone in a room, apparently “laffin’ un talkin’ un makin’ motions like she see somebody in de corner” (Harris 1883, 155). Daddy Jack confirms that the child was likely speaking with a ghost or spirit and declares that he “is bin-a see plenty ghos’” and is ‘no ’fraid dem; [he] is bin-a punch dem way wit’ [his] cane” (Harris 1883, 155). The remainder of the tale consists of Daddy Jack retelling his experiences with the supernatural, including “Jack-me-lantun” (a swamp spirit that can be dispatched by wearing one’s coat inside out) and witches, which Daddy Jack claims can be discovered by riding a heifer when the moon is low and hollering “Double, double, double, up!” (Harris 1883, 158–159). These stories frighten the little boy, but Daddy Jack assures him that “Lilly b’y no fred dem witch; e no bodder lilly b’y” (Harris 1883, 159).
Daddy Jack’s authority with the supernatural extends to his reputation as a conjurer, or wizard, and several of his tales center around the use of spells to influence events within the story. The magical elements of Daddy Jack’s story also serve to highlight the underlying plot of Daddy Jack’s courtship of the housemaid ’Tildy. When Daddy Jack is first introduced, he admits to Uncle Remus that he likes ’Tildy, but that she has spurned his advances. Uncle Remus tells Daddy Jack that if “[a man] want gal, he des got ter grab ’er,” and Daddy Jack’s attempts to “grab” ’Tildy are woven into the rest of the stories (Harris 1883, 137). In “Brother Rabbit’s Love Charm,” Daddy Jack tells the story of Brer Rabbit’s attempts to win the love of a young lady (though she is, by Daddy Jack’s assertion, definitely not Miss Meadow, one of the human characters in Uncle Remus’s tales). When Brer Rabbit’s attempts to attract the lady fail, he turns to the Affriky man for help. The Affriky man tells Brer Rabbit to bring him the tusk of an elephant, the tooth of an alligator, and a rice-bud to make a charm, and when Brer Rabbit succeeds in the three tasks, the Affriky man makes a conjurer-bag, or charm, and hangs it round Brer Rabbit’s neck, which results in Brer Rabbit’s marriage to the lady in question. The narration of the story ends with ’Tildy declaring that if she “lay ef dey’s any ole nigger man totin’ a cunjer-bag in dis neighborhood, he’ll git mighty tired un it fo’ it do ’im any good” (Harris 1883, 202). Of course, like the trickster Brer Rabbit, Daddy Jack wins over ’Tildy in the end, and the concluding story of Nights with Uncle Remus, entitled “The Night Before Christmas,” finds Daddy Jack with “his bright little eyes [glistening] triumphantly” as he walks ’Tildy down the aisle.
Elizabeth A. Koprowski
See also Anansi/Anansy; Brer Rabbit; Tar-Baby; Trickster Rabbit; Uncle Remus
Further Reading
Brasch, Walter M. 1981. Black English and the Mass Media. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press.
Brooks, Stella Brewer. 2009. Joel Chandler Harris, Folklorist. Athens: University of Georgia Press.
Cartwright, Keith. 2002. Reading Africa into American Literature: Epics, Fables, and Gothic Tales. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky.
Cross, Wilbur. 2000. Gullah Culture in America. Winston-Salem, NC: John F. Blair.
Harris, Joel Chandler. 1883. Nights with Uncle Remus: Myths and Legends of the Old Plantation. Boston: Houghton Mifflin.