Brer Rabbit first became popular in the United States through author Joel Chandler Harris’s newspaper column in the Atlanta Constitution, but these stories have deep roots in West African tradition. Trickster characters, especially hares, are common among traditional storytelling in West, Central, and Southern Africa. This character is often conflated with Anansi stories from the Akan people, especially in Jamaica.30 Included in the bibliography are examples of public domain stories from Harris’s books (Uncle Remus: His Songs and Sayings; Uncle Remus and His Friends: Old Plantation Stories, Songs, and Ballads with Sketches of Negro Character; and Nights with Uncle Remus) as well as a modern online children’s storybook (“Hare and Hyena”) and George M. Theal’s book on folklore in South Africa, Kaffir31 Folk-Lore: A Selection of Traditional Tales Current Among the People Living on the Eastern Border of the Cape Colony with Copious Explanatory Notes.
Joel Chandler Harris (1848-1908) was born in Georgia to an unwed Irish immigrant mother who worked as a seamstress to support herself and her son. Harris’s school tuition was paid for by a local doctor, and he excelled at reading and writing, but quit school at 14 due in part to his insecurity about his red hair, Irish ancestry, and illegitimacy. He became an apprentice to Joseph Addison Turner, owner of The Countryman Confederate newspaper, and worked for clothes, room, and board on the Turner plantation.32
In his free time, Harris spent time reading Turner’s extensive library and listening to stories from Uncle George Terrell, Old Harbert, and Aunt Crissy, enslaved elders of the plantation.33 These storytellers were both role models for Harris and the basis of his Uncle Remus character. Harris later worked at The Atlanta Constitution newspaper from 1876 to 1900. As an editor and journalist, he supported the New South, a vision of regional and racial reconciliation after Reconstruction.
In the introduction to Uncle Remus: His Songs and Sayings, Harris wrote that “A number of the plantation legends originally appeared in … The Atlanta Constitution- and in that shape they attracted the attention of various gentlemen who were kind enough to suggest that they would prove to be valuable contributions to myth-literature.”34 He acknowledged that “few Negroes … will acknowledge to a stranger that they know anything of these legends; and yet to relate one of the stories is the surest road to their confidence and esteem,”35 and that his familiarity with plantation life was what had allowed him to collect these stories.
Harris’s race has been a controversial issue surrounding his Uncle Remus stories almost since publication. According to Mark Twain, when Harris visited him, he “deeply disappointed a number of children who had flocked eagerly to … glimpse [the] illustrious sage and oracle of the nation’s nurseries. [When they saw him,] They said: ‘Why, he’s white!’ They were grieved about it.”36 The children had assumed that the author of the Uncle Remus stories was black. Similarly, in 1981, The Color Purple author Alice Walker claimed Harris “stole a good part of [her] heritage”37 by profiting from black folktales as a white man. Likewise, when Julius Lester rewrote the Brer Rabbit stories, he removed Uncle Remus, and therefore changed “the focus from fictional stereotyped storyteller to rebellious trickster hero, Brer Rabbit, and the tales themselves… Lester’s collection participates in the work of Black storytellers who resist retellings of Black folklore, predominantly written by White adaptors, that cater to White audiences.”38
Conversely, Robert Cochran argues in his article “Black Father: The Subversive Achievement of Joel Chandler Harris” that Harris’s book filled a gap, as it allowed everyone, including African Americans, to share these stories with their children, spreading “the wit and wisdom he heard at the knee of George Terrell and Harbet are passed onto a new generation by mothers reading to their children.”39 He further argues that Harris did not steal the stories- they were given to him as he sat and listened to the enslaved storytellers on the Turner plantation. He was a teenager, still a child in many ways, when “he sat at the feet of the black men who became his models for Uncle Remus… His evenings listening to George Terrell and Harbert were absolutely critical formative experiences; such scenes were what he knew of childhood. These wise men were in the deepest sense (emotionally, spiritually, culturally) his fathers… [He] was both nourished as a child and trained as an artist by black storytellers who were in turn both mentors and fathers to a boy”40 Harris cannot have stolen these stories if they were given to him oral, just as they have been passed down for generations.
Likewise, in his book Going to the Territory, Ralph Ellison described his childhood segregated school system’s annual May Day celebrations:
On May Day children from all the Negro schools were assembled… we competed in wrapping dozens of maypoles and engaged in the mass dancing of a variety of European folk dances… there were those who found the sight of young Negroes dancing European folk dances absurd, if not comic, but their prejudiced eyes missed the point of the exercise in democratic education. For in learning such dances, we were gaining an appreciation of the backgrounds and cultures of our fellow Americans whose backgrounds lay in Europe. And not only did it narrow the psychological distance between them and ourselves, but we saw learning their dances as an artistic challenge. And while there were those who thought that we were stepping out of the role assigned Negroes and were expressing a desire to become white, we ignored them. For we know that dancing such fences would no more alter our racial identity or social status than would our singing of Bach chorales… we were being introduced to one of the most precious of American freedoms, which is our freedom to broaden our personal culture by absorbing the cultures of others.41
Ellison believes that interacting with cultures other than our own is an American experience, and that in a country with so many cultures, people who learn from other backgrounds than their own benefit the most. Later in the same chapter, he aligns Uncle Remus with Aesop as literary teachers that “taught us that comedy is a disguised form of philosophical instruction; and especially when it allows us to glimpse the animal instincts lying beneath the surface of our civilized affectations.”42
In summation, the debate over Harris’s right to record and profit from the Brer Rabbit stories has raged since they were first published. Many writers and scholars, black and white, have been divided over the issue. Is it cultural appropriation or appreciation? Who has the right to tell which stories? In class debate and discussion of this topic should be deep and insightful, and lead students to more nuanced discussions in the future.
