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Uncle Remus is the title character and central storytelling device of several widely popular collections of African American folklore. The character is the creation of Joel Chandler Harris—a journalist and author of local color fiction of the mid to late nineteenth century. Shortly after the Civil War and during the period of Reconstruction, Harris began writing for various newspapers throughout the South, including the Atlanta Constitution, where Uncle Remus made his first appearance. Uncle Remus is a composite of elderly slaves Harris once encountered when he was thirteen years old and working for Joseph Addison Turner as an apprentice on his Turnwold plantation. Here, Harris heard the stories often shared within the slave community that eventually became the basis for his Uncle Remus stories, gracing the pages of the Atlanta Constitution until 1881 when Harris compiled a collection of the stories in Uncle Remus: His Songs and His Sayings, shortly followed by Nights with Uncle Remus in 1883. The overall popularity of the Uncle Remus tales and the subsequent controversies over their perceived racist depiction of blacks have both contributed to the significance of Uncle Remus and his creator in the American conversation of race and African American culture.
Harris’s early stories were politically charged and laden with the harsh social and cultural criticisms of former slaves that were commonplace for the time. Influenced heavily by the politics of Henry Woodfin Grady, whose concept of an industrialized New South served as the heart of the Constitution’s cultural critique, Harris also expressed sentiments that proved popular in the South following the Civil War. This included a startling disapproval of the somewhat rapid and unfamiliar social change that occurred when blacks began to seek education, the right to vote, and political power. In this regard, the early stories of Uncle Remus reflected the mounting racial tension of the time and were not dissimilar from the fears of blacks’ inability to fit the predominantly white standards of American life that were at the heart of Thomas Dixon’s The Clansman: An Historical Romance of the Ku Klux Klan (later adapted into the controversial silent film Birth of a Nation). This characterization, however, did eventually shift, presenting Uncle Remus instead as the kindly old man (and former slave) who shared stories each night with a little white boy. These stories about the humorous escapades of defenseless creatures like Brer Rabbit, in their dealings with stronger and more powerful beasts like Brer Fox and Brer Wolf, became classic American texts in homes across the United States.
“The Wonderful Tar-Baby Story” from his 1881 collection, for instance, describes the humorous interaction between the elusive Brer Rabbit and Brer Fox’s sticky contraption, what he names a Tar-Baby. Filled with the same types of humor common to the Uncle Remus tales and for which Chandler, as a humorist, was renowned, the story eventually became one of Chandler’s most popular and best-selling stories, heavily anthologized and widely shared. In the tale, Brer Rabbit finds himself in a tight bind, trapped by sticky tar and easy prey for his much stronger foe, Brer Fox. In a later tale from the same collection, however, Brer Rabbit uses his cunning (and a little well-planned reverse psychology) to escape, leaving Brer Fox dumbfounded and hungry by an empty briar patch. Stories like these filled the pages of Chandler’s collections and, for many, simply represented the innocent spirit of its characters, not an allegory depicting the ongoing and longstanding conflicts between blacks and whites across the United States. For them, these tales were humorous stories of their childhood pasts, quite similar to later tales such as the Roadrunner cartoons or the Looney Tunes tales of Bugs Bunny and Elmer Fudd.
To others, even those tales were steeped in the plantation tradition heavily popularized by writers such as Thomas Nelson Page. This plantation tradition was set in the antebellum South and largely built upon stereotypes of the African American community, particularly the contented slave or servile black figure (such as the Uncle or the Mammy) popular on the minstrel screen or stage. This critique interpreted Uncle Remus as having the same racialized characteristics as Uncle Tom from Harriet Beecher Stowe’s groundbreaking novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin—also a work that Harris himself acknowledges as a source of inspiration for what he considers a defense (as well as critique) of the slave owners who populated the South. A kind and loving servant who was beloved by the little white boy under his care, Uncle Remus reflected nostalgia for the loyal black servants (many of them slaves) from a not-so-distant past. As a result, the stories gained immediate success among an audience of equally nostalgic readers drawn to the idyllic portrait Harris created of the South—one where happy slaves lived in perfect peace with their benevolent masters and families.
This controversy extended into the twentieth century and even into the cultural conversations of the present day as scholars like Alice Walker critique the stories they consider a demeaning portrayal of blacks—the same types of criticism that eventually plagued Stowe’s renowned work. The primary source of contention was the positive attitude that Harris’s stories demonstrated on the surface, an endorsement of slavery closely aligned with what Alfred Kazin has termed the “Confederate romance.” Other readings criticize these works for appropriating cultural forms native to the black community such as High John the Conqueror, who was a folkloric character who many scholars contend is the true inspiration for Brer Rabbit, alongside the influence of the trickster figure and culture heroes of similar European and Native American tales. Though there is validity to these interpretations as well, the Uncle Remus stories still hold an invaluable place in American literature. Together with the tales of High John the Conqueror and others, these works showed another side of the slave experience—docile on the surface (in contrast to the brute Negro depicted on the minstrel screen) but also clever, using cunning to outwit the slave master day after day.
This latter perspective suggests that the stories of Brer Rabbit and the Tar-Baby, among many other popular tales, are significant examples of African American culture steeped in oral tradition that might never have received such widespread attention, except for Zora Neale Hurston’s article published decades later in the American Mercury. Following the format of the classic trickster tale, the stories of Uncle Remus were not too far removed from works such as Aesop’s Fables, often including a moral twist, particularly in the social education these tales offered to the young white boy in Uncle Remus’s care. In this sense, Uncle Remus brought renewed attention to African American culture and creative expression, even attempting to recreate the dialect of the people Harris encountered on the Turnwold plantation. For Harris, the form of dialect he developed in these tales was a stark contrast to the inaccurate and destructive dialect of Zip Coon and Sambo of the minstrel stage—overexaggerated dialect that served only as a source of laughter for the white audiences that attended these shows.
Because of the popularity of the Uncle Remus stories, Harris’s works have since been translated into dozens of different languages and even received renewed attention in the Disney classic film Song of the South. Despite the controversy ultimately surrounding his works, the many folklore collections that Harris compiled during his lifetime were vital to preserving African American tales that might otherwise have been lost if not for the important work of authors such as Joel Chandler Harris, Zora Neale Hurston, Arna Bontemps, and others. By retelling these stories, Harris placed his focus not on the hardships of the slaves—tales best explored in slave narratives and abolition fiction—but on the everyday life of the slaves outside of the fields and the sense of community slaves built in their cabins, on their porches, and around meals. Like most folklore and folktales passed down across generations and across time, though these tales are not Harris’s tales, they still serve a valuable historical function, preserving a part of the African American experience too often overshadowed by the political and social turmoil of the Reconstruction and post-Reconstruction years.
Christopher Allen Varlack
Song of the South (1946)
Considering the consistent cultural weight of the Disney film canon upon perceptions of world and American myth in the United States, it is noteworthy that Song of the South, a popular and award-winning post–World War II mélange of song, dance, live action, and animation, has never been released on DVD. Thought heartwarming family fare by some and blatantly and unrepentantly racist by others, Song of the South became the primary vehicle through which Uncle Remus became familiar to generations of Americans from the time of its release in 1946 through its cyclical re-release dates until the end of the 1980s. Although a film starring African Americans was undoubtedly ahead of its time during the Jim Crow era, Song of the South portrays an imaginary South in which the happiness of the protagonists seems overtly to embrace Uncle Tom stereotypes. Interestingly, the signature song, “Zip-A-Dee-Doo-Dah,” is widely known and sung, even by many who have never seen the film.
C. Fee
See also Brer Rabbit; Hurston, Zora Neale; John the Conqueror (High John the Conqueror); Minstrel Shows; Tar-Baby; Trickster Rabbit; Tricksters, Native American
Further Reading
Bickley, R. Bruce, Jr., ed. 1981. Critical Essays on Joel Chandler Harris. Boston: G. K. Hall.
Brasch, Walter M. 2000. Brer Rabbit, Uncle Remus, and the “Cornfield Journalist”: The Tale of Joel Chandler Harris. Macon, GA: Mercer University Press.
Chase, Richard, comp. 1983. The Complete Tales of Uncle Remus. Boston: Houghton Mifflin.
Hale, Grace Elizabeth. 1999. Making Whiteness: The Culture of Segregation in the South, 1890–1940. New York: Vintage.
Walker, Alice. 1988. “The Dummy in the Window: Joel Chandler Harris and the Invention of Uncle Remus.” Living by the Word: Selected Writings, 1973–1987. San Diego, CA: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich.