Joel Chandler Harris: Literary Legacy and Cultural Impact

Here come Brer Rabbit pacin’ down de road—lippity-clippity, clippity-lippity—dez ez sassy ez a jay-bird. (Uncle Remus)

The Encounter at George Washington Cable's Home. In 1882 at the home of George Washington Cable, a southern writer famous for his New Orleans dialect, a group of children gathered with hushed excitement, waiting for their promise to be fulfilled—namely, that Joel Chandler Harris, known to America as the lovable plantation storyteller Uncle Remus, was going to read the famous Tar-Baby story. How fascinating it must have been for the children in the moments before Harris’s entry to conjure up visions of this dignified slave with a knack for entertaining through witty tales who was about to recount for them the stories of Brer Rabbit and Brer Fox from his own lips while they pretended to be the nameless little white boy whom Uncle Remus instructed in Harris’s tales. However, the children were not prepared to discover the true extent that the fictional narrator of a story may differ from its actual author. As Harris entered, he was greeted with cries of dismay and the unrestrained bluntness of children: “Why, he’s white!” Their astonishment registered the fact that for the children of Harris’s day the fictional slave narrator Uncle Remus was as tangible as their own parents.

The children’s disappointment serves as a testament to the artistry and accomplishments of Harris, who, from his boyhood days, developed a keen ear for dialect and an ability to reproduce aptly the poetic cadences of African-American vernacular speech. His achievement extends beyond being a pioneer in writing dialect: He also anticipated the discipline of folklore through his tales, captured a passing moment in U.S. history with his depiction of the old plantation South, and, most important, drew an authentic portrait of an enduring character who firmly holds his place in the minds of children. Despite the controversy surrounding Harris’s own racist views, in 187 Uncle Remus tales, he succeeded in placing an African American at the forefront of American literature. Today, Harris stands as a force within the literary world and as quintessential a southern writer as any. In his own day his fame was second only to that of Mark Twain (Samuel Langhorne Clemens).

Personality Disparities and Shy Demeanor. Harris, however, would never possess the same flair and social aplomb that Twain did. In fact, on the day he visited Cable’s home to read to the children, Harris declined to recite any tales. Even with children as the only audience, Harris felt nothing but awkward and embarrassed. Just a few months prior Harris had rejected an offer from Twain to partner with him on a lecture tour across the country. An unparalleled opportunity to most, the tour represented unbearable exposure to a pathologically shy man from the middle Georgia region. Harris’s feelings of insecurity, shame, and vulnerability were deeply rooted in his illegitimate birth. Born in 1848 to the unwed Mary Harris in the immensely conservative area of Eatonton, Georgia, Joel Chandler Harris never knew his father, who was probably an Irish day laborer who absconded soon after Harris’s birth.

Harris’s stars never seemed to shine very favorably on him in his youth. With his mother working as a seamstress, he grew up in utter poverty; physically, he was short, clumsy, and marked with his father’s flaming Irish red hair. He spoke with a slight speech impediment, which, when provoked by public situations of embarrassment, could turn into a stammer.

Early Influences and Literary Beginnings. The love of his mother helped stabilize the imbalances of a chaotic childhood; she taught Harris to rely on his talents, one of which was fostered by her reading to him Oliver Goldsmith’s The Vicar of Wakefield. Harris later recalls that his desire to write stemmed from his mother’s reading this book to him as a child. Mary Harris also sent her son to the local grammar school, where Harris became the stereotypic prankster as a way to deflect attention from his red hair and freckles. Often truant at school and never an exceptional student when he did attend, Harris was celebrated for his mischievous deeds. One market day he loosed scads of pigs onto Main Street and terrified them so much that their squealing spooked the horses, creating general chaos. Oftentimes, Harris would be smitten with the neighbor’s crops and organize a gang of friends to steal melons and peaches from the local fields. Whatever the pranks, Harris would consistently use them as a shield for his self-consciousness.

As Harris’s grammar school education approached an end in his early teens and Mary Harris was in desperate need of financial support, Harris, who frequented the post office to read discarded newspapers and magazines to feed his active mind, stumbled upon an ad that would propel him into a career of writing and mold immutable shapes into his later fiction: “Wanted: An active, intelligent white boy, 14 or 15 years of age, is wanted at this office, to learn the printing business.”

Formative Years at Turnwold Plantation. Incontrovertibly, the experience at Turnwold Plantation, a relatively benevolent plantation where he began work in the “printing business” became the birthplace for the Uncle Remus tales. Between printing jobs on Turnwold, young Harris had plenty of leisure time to indulge his gifts and ambitions on the 1,000-acre plantation—hunting rabbits and foxes among the wooded areas, visiting the one-room slave cabins, listening to animal stories told by the slaves, and engaging his capacious wit in a plantation library full of classics. There, he became a voracious reader of Geoffrey Chaucer, Charles Dickens, William Shakespeare, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Edgar Allan Poe; there, he could freely observe life in the South, and perhaps discover that his own self-consciousness and feelings of isolation provided a common bond with the slaves. No doubt Harris projected himself into the slave fables that told of an oppressed underdog figure who triumphed at the end of the day through tricks and pranks. That his experience as a young white boy raptly listening to the stories of the older slaves left an indelible imprint on Harris is made stunningly clear when he invented the Uncle Remus tales 10 years later.

At Turnwold a fatherless Harris sought father figures in the plantation’s owner, Joseph Turner, who provided young Harris with years of support and instruction in writing, and in one of Turner’s slaves, known on the plantation as “Uncle” George Terrell. Harris would later comment that Uncle Remus was a composite of several slaves on Turnwold Plantation. Harris soon began publishing short pieces of humor and poems in the style of Poe in the Turnwold newspaper, The Countryman, but his humorous pieces garnered him most attention and approbation of Joseph Turner, which fueled his desire to be a writer. In short, at Turnwold he had everything at his disposal, and the seeds were planted that would later ripen into the Uncle Remus tales.

The Impact of the Civil War. While no single event shaped Harris as a writer more than the experience at Turnwold, Harris was forced to move into other endeavors after five years there, when the emancipation of slaves following the Civil War caused the downfall of plantation life. After The Countryman, Harris continued work in the newspaper business and accepted an offer at the Macon Telegraph, where, after only a few months, he was troubled by his coworkers’ compulsion to jeer at his red hair. Perhaps to avoid ridicule, perhaps to search for more lucrative opportunities, Harris moved to New Orleans in 1868, but the shy Georgia boy found big city life and the cultural melting pot overwhelming and perturbing at times. He moved back to middle Georgia after less than a year away.

Editorial Career in Savannah and Atlanta. After taking menial jobs at various dwarf-sized newspapers, Harris landed a giant-sized job for the times—to be paid $40 a week—as an associate editor for the Savannah Morning News in south Georgia. Harris would settle in Savannah for almost seven years, marrying Esther LaRose there on April 20, 1873, and gaining a statewide reputation for his editorial accomplishments, particularly his paragraph commentaries. Harris’s work in Savannah and later in Atlanta was characterized by his penchant for racial joking. Pandering to a predominantly racist audience, Harris’s newspaper paragraphs were more subtle than slurring: “The colored people of Macon celebrated the birthday of Lincoln again on Wednesday. This is the third time since last October” (Bickley, Joel Chandler Harris 27). To modern sensibilities Harris’s attitude is more than a little discourteous toward African Americans, but placing him in the time of Reconstruction in the Old South, we find his beliefs to be prejudiced but progressive for his day. As for his Savannah life, disaster struck in 1876 when an epidemic of yellow fever spread through the city and forced Harris and his family (by then he had two children) to uproot, but Harris would never again live outside Georgia.

The Genesis and Rise of Uncle Remus. Harris’s next move positioned him in Atlanta, a place where he found permanent employment until his retirement in 1900. Working for one of the New South’s best known newspapers, Atlanta’s Constitution, Harris happened across an article entitled “Folklore of the Southern Negroes,” published in a leading magazine. This essay by William Owens included an animal fable called “Buh Rabbit and the Tar Baby.” This fortuitous discovery prompted a wealth of Harris’s latent memories to rise to consciousness. Never before had Harris considered his own experiences with Southern slaves worthy of publication. Owens’s article taught him differently, and within a year’s time Harris was publishing stories under the title “Negro Folklore” in the Constitution.

While Uncle Remus first appears in the Constitution in 1876, it was not until 1879 that Uncle Remus tales made use of the narrative frame that presents Uncle Remus as an elderly plantation slave telling stories to an inquisitive young white boy sitting on his knee. The Uncle Remus sketches instantly established Harris as a major regional writer. Shortly after he was approached by D. Appleton and Company, Harris’s first collection of Uncle Remus tales, and what would turn out to be his most famous, was published in 1881 as Uncle Remus: His Songs and His Sayings, which included not only the tales but also aphoristic phrases and songs of Uncle Remus.

Social Insecurities and Public Perception. While Harris blossomed as a leading writer in the South, writing Uncle Remus sketches for the paper year after year, the teasing he had experienced throughout his life and his omnipresent insecurity returned in full force. Staff members of the Constitution would occasionally compose epic poems in Harris’s name and leave them lying around the office for everyone’s entertainment. One notable example parodied Harris’s red hair and cited the difficulty the fire brigade had in quenching the burning flames that Harris used to illuminate his desk at night so that he could continue reading. Appropriately written in red ink, the poem further compared Harris’s hair to a lighthouse beacon that guides ships through stormy nights. Quick to smother his coworkers’ mockery, Harris took to wearing a hat indoors and was rarely seen without one at the Constitution.

Harris’s physical camouflaging was matched by his own humble remarks about his work. Harris consistently undercut the value of his writing, citing himself as a mere recorder of tales and believing his tales had little historical value. Perhaps his lifelong involvement with journalism—in which yesterday’s news is quickly forgotten—fostered his erroneous sense of the ephemeral importance of language in general and his Remus stories in particular, but one must wonder whether by the time of his death Harris had finally realized his own achievement and place in American literature.

Later Literary Contributions and National Recognition. By the end of his career Harris had published numerous other collections of Uncle Remus tales, including:

• Nights with Uncle Remus
• Uncle Remus and His Friends
• The Tar-Baby and Other Rhymes of Uncle Remus
• Told by Uncle Remus: New Stories of the Old Plantation

He had also broadened his writing repertoire and written novels—The Romance of Rockville, A Little Union Scout, and an autobiographical novel titled On the Plantation—not to mention a score of other significant sketches.

In 1902 he received an honorary doctorate in literature from Emory College; a few years later he was the only southern writer to be elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters, which included writers such as William Dean Howells and Twain. President Theodore Roosevelt hosted a banquet for Harris and proclaimed him a “genius” who never “wrote anything which did not make a man or woman reading it feel a little better” (Julia Harris 42). Harris died at his home in 1908 of acute nephritis and cirrhosis of the liver; he will stand as one of the most influential local color writers, whose works have now been translated into more than 40 languages.

Allegory and Ambiguity in Harris's "The Wonderful Tar-Baby Story"

Narrative Prelude and Racial Allegory. As a prelude to the Tar-Baby story, Harris begins with a suggestive tale called “Uncle Remus Initiates the Little Boy.” In it Brer Fox orchestrates a scheme whereby Brer Rabbit is invited to dinner—not to eat but to be eaten. However, the shrewd rabbit, under the pretense of finding some calamus root, escapes, yet this ending disappoints the white boy listening to Uncle Remus's fable, who wishes the fox to consume the rabbit. When Harris refers to Uncle Remus as “the old darkie, chuckling slyly,” he hints at Uncle Remus's agenda in telling the boy these fables as methods of instruction for living in a racially divided society (Uncle Remus 16). In the Tar-Baby story, as with most of the animal fables, Harris sublimates his own views as an author in order to comment allegorically on race relations in the American South.

The animal fables, then, represent a social system divided between whites (the fox) and blacks (the rabbit) and explain how conflicting values and emerging classes can be conjoined in a New South. A subordinate figure to the other creatures’ brute strength, Brer Rabbit roams unfettered and uses his wits and tricks to survive in a hostile world where he would otherwise be devoured. The oppressed rabbit no doubt echoes in the consciousness of slaves who had little means of rebelling against a monolithic plantation system except through subversion and cleverness. The lessons Brer Rabbit teaches reflect a universal truth all too well known to slaves who were governed by their masters’ whips: Being sly and shifty is better than being honest. Contrastingly, the little white boy views the fables from his own privileged perspective and identifies with the fox, an assertive, self-sustaining predator.

The Trickster and Social Hierarchy. At the opening of the Tar-Baby story the boy reveals how much initiation he must undergo with Uncle Remus when he asks, “Didn't the fox never catch the rabbit, Uncle Remus?” Wishing the predator would devour the prey, the boy seeks to maintain a social order that dominates a weaker race and eradicates threats to the system. As the educator and proprietor, however, Uncle Remus uses his own wits to spin stories that mask his subversive social aims through the rhetorical device of the children's tale. In effect, Uncle Remus encourages social change by teaching the boy to empathize with Brer Rabbit's plight and appreciate his resourcefulness in surviving. Through the Tar-Baby, Uncle Remus advocates realignment of the dominant social structure to include the upstart rabbit, Brer Rabbit, that is, to integrate a supposedly weaker race into mainstream white society.

Uncle Remus's critique of society suggests that, with a large free-roaming presence of recently emancipated slaves, society cannot remain rapacious as a fox does. However, any precipitous attempt to achieve harmony in a society characterized by such aggressive values and attitudes would lead to dissension and chaos. Consequently, Uncle Remus addresses the downfalls of slaves who become too prideful. When the Tar-Baby says nothing despite Brer Rabbit's repeated promptings, Brer Rabbit becomes enraged and positions himself on top of a hierarchy: “I'm gwinter larn you howter talk ter 'spectubble folks” (9). Brer Rabbit becomes figuratively and then literally “stuck up” when he disregards all manners and swings at the Tar-Baby.

Advocating for Social Realignment and the Middle Ground. With this scene Uncle Remus exposes racial pride, emotional eruptions, and demands for immediate respect as flawed methods for achieving slave acceptance in Southern society; these approaches would only entangle the newly freed slaves in a self-created shackle of tar. Uncle Remus implies that racial mobility won after the Civil War may be in jeopardy if racial equality is sought too soon. With Brer Rabbit's assault on the 'Tar-Baby, Uncle Remus shows that pushing too hard to upset social boundaries may backfire. On the other hand, the excessively passive Tar-Baby is also a searing allegorical attack leveled at those slaves who remain unobtrusive and obsequious even after the collapse of plantation life.

These slaves are immobile, silenced, oppressed, unassertive, uneducated, and victimized, so they would never denounce the injustice of roles to which they have become so inured. The Tar-Baby serves as the antithesis of Brer Rabbit's fiery arrogant attitude, suggesting that newly emancipated slaves should adopt a middle ground between the extremes represented by these two opposing figures.

Ethnographic Origins and the Trickster Archetype. To represent the old plantation life accurately Harris scrupulously verified all of the details for his fables, using stories he learned from Southern slaves when he was at Turnwold and interviewing freed slaves while working as a journalist. Much scholarship surrounds the mysterious and debatable origins of the Tar-Baby and Brer Rabbit. On the surface the tales originated in African folklore, as Harris himself suggests, deriving from the rich cultural heritage of animal fables that slaves carried across the Atlantic to the Americas, but the closeness of these fables to similar fables from other cultures complicates this simple observation. For example, the African fables hinge on Brer Rabbit as a trickster figure, a guileful and mentally agile character who, though oppressed, survives through his wits.

The trickster character embedded in African folklore appears as an anthropomorphized animal and is not an invention by Harris; however, the trickster crosses all cultures and time frames. Typical tricksters for North American Indians include the coyote and the raven; for Brazil, the tortoise serves the same function; and fables from India tell of a double-dealing jackal. Perhaps these similar tales arose independently of each other, implying that the trickster figure can be explained as an archetype, or perhaps through the course of history cross-cultural exchanges among Africans, Indians, and South Americans spread these stories, preserving them for generations in each culture's oral tradition. Whatever the case, Africans’ introducing stories, like that of the Tar-Baby, to the United States would unavoidably lead to the modification and reinvention of portions of the tales to reflect current conditions better. These unaccounted-for, unknowable amendments are now immortalized in Harris’s published versions of the fables.

For Discussion or Writing. The following prompts facilitate critical engagement with the text.
1. Why does Harris write the Tar-Baby story in dialect? Does it show a poetic imagination, or is it a mocking exploitation of black language? Why does he feel a need to tell the story as authentically as possible? Explain.

2. Select a person who speaks with a noticeable dialect and record a short conversation with him or her. Try to transcribe the tape in a way that best captures the distinct dialect. What observation can you make on this process, and how does this enlighten your understanding of Harris's work? Explain your response.