Uncle Remus Stories Read online

  Contents.

  Introduction: Author Teller, and Hero

  by Robert Hemenway

  Suggestions for Further Reading

  A Note on the Text

  UNCLE REMUS:

  HIS SONGS AND HIS SAYINGS

  LEGENDS OF THE OLD PLANTATION.

  I. Uncle Remus initiates the Little Boy

  II. The Wonderful Tar-Baby Story

  III. Why Mr. Possum loves Peace

  IV. How Mr. Rabbit was too sharp for Mr. Fox

  V. The Story of the Deluge, and how it came about

  VI. Mr. Rabbit grossly deceives Mr. Fox

  VII. Mr. Fox is again victimized

  VIII. Mr. Fox is “outdone” by Mr. Buzzard

  IX. Miss Cow falls a Victim to Mr. Rabbit

  X. Mr. Terrapin appears upon the Scene

  XI. Mr. Wolf makes a Failure

  XII. Mr. Fox tackles Old Man Tarrypin

  XIII. The Awful Fate of Mr. Wolf

  XIV. Mr. Fox and the Deceitful Frogs

  XV. Mr. Fox goes a-hunting, but Mr. Rabbit bags the Game

  XVI. Old Mr. Rabbit, he’s a Good Fisherman

  XVII. Mr. Rabbit nibbles up the Butter

  XVIII. Mr. Rabbit finds his Match at last

  XIX. The Fate of Mr. Jack Sparrow

  XX. How Mr. Rabbit saved his Meat

  XXI. Mr. Rabbit meets his Match again

  XXII. A Story about the Little Rabbits

  XXIII. Mr. Rabbit and Mr. Bear

  XXIV. Mr. Bear catches Old Mr. Bull-Frog

  XXV. How Mr. Rabbit lost his Fine Bushy Tail

  XXVI. Mr. Terrapin shows his Strength

  XXVII. Why Mr. Possum has no Hair on his Tail

  XXVIII. The End of Mr. Bear

  XXIX. Mr. Fox gets into Serious Business

  XXX. How Mr. Rabbit succeeded in raising a Dust

  XXXI. A Plantation Witch

  XXXII. “Jacky-my-Lantern”

  XXXIII. Why the Negro is Black

  XXXIV. The Sad Fate of Mr. Fox

  PLANTATION PROVERBS

  HIS SONGS.

  I. Revival Hymn

  II. Camp-Meeting Song

  III. Corn-Shucking Song

  IV. The Plough-hands’ Song

  V. Christmas Play-Song

  VI. Plantation Play-Song

  VII. Transcriptions:

  1. A Plantation Chant

  2. A Plantation Serenade

  VIII. De Big Bethel Church

  IX.

  Time goes by Turns

  A STORY OF THE WAR.

  HIS SAYINGS.

  I. Jeems Rober’son’s Last Illness

  II. Uncle Remus’s Church Experience

  III. Uncle Remus and the Savannah Darkey

  IV. Turnip Salad as a Text

  V. A Confession

  VI. Uncle Remus with the Toothache

  VII. The Phonograph

  VIII. Race Improvement

  IX. In the Rôle of a Tartar

  X. A Case of Measles

  XI. The Emigrants

  XII. As a Murderer

  XIII. His Practical View of Things

  XIV. That Deceitful Jug

  XV. The Florida Watermelon

  XVI. Uncle Remus preaches to a Convert

  XVII. As to Education

  XVIII. A Temperance Reformer

  XIX. As a Weather Prophet

  XX. The Old Man’s Troubles

  XXI. The Fourth of July

  PENGUIN CLASSICS

  UNCLE REMUS:

  HIS SONGS AND HIS SAYINGS

  Joel Chandler Harris was born on December 9, 1848, near Eatonton, Georgia. Little is known about his family, except that they were poor and his mother was a seamstress.

  In 1862, Harris began a four-year apprenticeship as a printer at the Turnwald plantation in Putnam County, Georgia, where the journal The Countryman was published. Through this position he was able to publish his first writing compositions. In 1866 he began his career as a journalist, working for a number of newspapers around the South, including the Macon, Georgia Telegraph, the New Orleans Picayune and Crescent, and the Savannah Morning News. In 1876 he began his work at the Atlanta Constitution, where he eventually became an editor. During this time he also married Esther LaRose. Together they had five children: Mary Esther, Lillian, Linton, Mildred, and Joel Chandler, Jr.

  Harris was also an avid student of black folklore and wrote several collections of stories based on his studies, known as the Uncle Remus Tales. The first volume, Nights with Uncle Remus: Myths and Legends of the Old Plantation was published in 1883. Other works include Daddy Jake, the Runaway, and Short Stories Told After Dark (1889), Little Mr. Thimblefinger and His Queer Country (1894), and The Chronicles of Aunt Minervy Ann (1899). In 1900 Harris resigned from the Constitution so he could concentrate on his fiction. He founded Uncle Remus’s Magazine in 1906.

  Harris died in Atlanta in 1908 after a long liver illness.

  Robert Hemenway is Professor of English at the University of Kentucky. He is the author of Zora Neale Hurston: A Literary Biography and the editor of Hurston’s Mules and Men, Taylor Gordon’s Born to Be, and Paul Allen’s The Late Charles Brockden Brown. Mr. Hemenway’s essays on F. Scott Fitzgerald, William Faulkner, Charles W. Chesnutt, and others have appeared in such journals as American Literature, American Studies, The Black Scholar, and Modern Fiction Studies.

  Uncle Remus

  HIS SONGS AND

  HIS SAYINGS

  by

  Joel Chandler Harris

  Edited with an Introduction by

  ROBERT HEMENWAY

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  Introduction:

  Author, Teller, and Hero

  “I read your stories to the little folks nearly every night of my life,” said Edith Roosevelt to Joel Chandler Harris, “and they never tire of their beloved ‘Uncle Remus.’” Edith’s husband thought Uncle Remus “one of the undying characters of story”; he invited Harris to a private White House dinner. “Presidents may come and presidents may go,” Teddy said, “but Uncle Remus stays put.”

  Uncle Remus: His Songs and His Sayings, a collection of thirty-four black folktales, four pages of proverbs, ten songs, and twenty-one character sketches, sold 7,500 copies in the first month after being released for the Christmas book trade in November 1880. It has been constantly before the American reading public ever since, in more than sixty reprints of the original edition. There have been ten Uncle Remus volumes in all, published over a seventy-year span, containing 220 tales. The stories have been translated into dozens of languages, including the African tribal dialects in which some of the folktales originated.

  Few characters in American literature have held the popular imagination like Harris’s venerable black storyteller. The Ralston-Purina Company, in return for a box top from Ralston Wheat Cereal, once mailed out thousands of “Draw-Your-Own Uncle Remus Comic Strips.” A steel company manufactured Tar Baby nails, “Guaranteed to hold-on-tite.” Always with a nose for the box office, Walt Disney starred Uncle Remus in a feature-length movie in 1946, Song of the South, an Oscar-winning combination of actors and animation that grossed millions and played neighborhood theaters for the next twenty years. Withheld from circulation in the late sixties because of criticism that it portrayed blacks in stereotypical roles, the movie has apparently transcended American race relations. The centennial of Uncle Remus’s first appearance, fall 1980, found black and white parents, kids in tow, waiting in long lines to view the reissued movie once again, to hear Oscar winner James Baskett sing, “Zip-a-dee-do-dah, zip-a-dee-ay, My oh my what a wonderful day.”

  Any character who has persisted so long and become so fixed in the American imagination deserves thinking abo
ut, and Uncle Remus deserves more thought than most; no one questions his historical and cultural significance, but there is considerable confusion about just what he means.

  One can make sense of the collision of ideas and images surrounding Uncle Remus by distinguishing among Joel Chandler Harris, Uncle Remus, and Brer Rabbit. A fictional character. Uncle Remus was created by an author with a sentimental attachment to a plantation memory. Bald, bearded, bespectacled, Remus is a former slave who does odd jobs around the plantation after emancipation. He tells his stories night after night to a little white boy, son of the plantation owner, unfolding to him in grandfatherly fashion the “mysteries of plantation lore.” Remus has, Harris tells us, “nothing but pleasant memories of the discipline of slavery.” This fictional creation of a white Southerner was welcomed by an audience that wanted to believe Remus was a representative of his race; Uncle Remus is a cousin of those nineteenth-century minstrels who blackened their faces to entertain with jokes and songs. He is, in a way, white.

  Brer Rabbit, on the other hand, was created by black storytellers long before Joel Chandler Harris heard animal tales being passed on from one slave generation to the next. Virtually every single Brer Rabbit tale written down by Harris, told by Remus, had been a staple of Afro-American folk expression prior to 1880, and the tales continue to be told, free of Harris’s influence, to the present day. Shaped by a long line of oral artists, Brer Rabbit is black from the tip of his ears to the fuzz of his tail, and he defeats his enemies with a superior intelligence growing from a total understanding of his hostile environment. He is the brier-patch representative of a people living by their wits to make a way out of no way.

  These two images, Uncle Remus’s semiminstrelsy and Brer Rabbit’s cunning tricksterism, complicate the interchange between tale and teller in Harris’s famous book. Uncle Remus is literature, artifice, a Victorian relic whose plantation manners embarrass the modern reader. Brer Rabbit is folklore, a communally created universal outlaw whose revolutionary antics satisfy deep human needs. Joel Chandler Harris works between the two of them, investing a part of himself in Uncle Remus, struggling to understand Brer Rabbit’s appeal.

  Joel Chandler Harris was pathologically shy, so self-effacing he often found himself unable to speak in the presence of strangers. He habitually stuttered in an unfamiliar environment, struggling to achieve speech. As a young printer, he couldn’t repeat the initiation oath of his typesetter’s union. Honored at a New York banquet, he suffered through the formal proceedings, then sprinted to his hotel room in a panic, leaving town and canceling all further engagements. Totally at ease only around a few friends and his family, Harris admitted that he lacked “the polishment, so to speak, that enables a fellow to get on with other fellows.” About to celebrate his closest friend’s silver wedding anniversary, he fled at the front gate, leaving his wife to make his excuses. Harris himself said it best: “I am morbidly sensitive. . . . It is an affliction — a disease. . . . It is worse than death itself. It is horrible.” Over the years he grew more and more eccentric, wearing unfashionable clothes and refusing to remove his hat even indoors, perhaps to hide his conspicuous red hair.

  Harris told his publisher it was his “keenest regret” that he had ever allowed his name to appear on his books. He refused to read from Uncle Remus despite lucrative offers, and he avoided telling Brer Rabbit tales, even to his own children. His correspondence expresses a staggering humility. He felt his literary reputation unmerited, since his role in the Uncle Remus tales was that of a mere “compiler.” “I am perfectly well aware that my book has no basis of literary art to stand upon,” he told Mark Twain; “I know it is the matter and not the manner that has attracted public attention.” He called himself only a “cornfield journalist,” admitting, “Nobody knows better than I do how far below the level of permanence my writings fall.”

  One might explain away the self-deprecation as an admirable modesty, or a coy authorial game, similar to Faulkner’s claim that he was a mere farmer. In Harris’s case, the disparagement was so consistent, and extended over such a long period of time, that clearly it was obsessive behavior. A vague, deep-seated guilt lay somewhere beneath Harris’s shyness. In 1886, an author already so famous that a national magazine begged him for a biographical essay, Harris called his fame “accidental” and disclaimed: “I . . . know nothing at all of what is termed literary art. I have had no opportunity to nourish any serious literary ambition.” He was “embarrassed” by his success: “People persist in calling me a literary man, when I am a journalist and nothing else.”

  Harris was obviously of two minds about his fame — on the one hand he sought it by continuing to write, on the other he felt unworthy of it — and those two minds were seldom very far from the surface. In an extraordinary letter to his daughter, well after he was a national figure, Harris personified the two sides of his personality:

  As for myself — though you could hardly call me a real, sure enough author — I never have anything but the vaguest ideas of what I am going to write; but when I take my pen in my hand, the rust clears away and the “other fellow” takes charge. You know all of us have two entities, or personalities. That is the reason you see and hear persons “talking to themselves.” They are talking to the “other fellow.” I have often asked my “other fellow” where he gets all his information, and how he can remember, in the nick of time, things that I have forgotten long ago; but he never satisfies my curiosity. He is simply a spectator of my folly until I seize a pen, and then he comes forward and takes charge.

  Sometimes I laugh heartily at what he writes . . . is not my writing at all; it is my “other fellow” doing the work and I am getting all the credit for it. Now, I’ll admit that I write the editorials for the paper. The “other fellow” has nothing to do with them, and, so far as I am able to get his views on the subject, he regards them with scorn and contempt . . . He is a creature hard to understand, but, so far as I can understand him, he’s a very sour, surly fellow until I give him an opportunity to guide my pen in subjects congenial to him; whereas, I am, as you know, jolly, good-natured, and entirely harmless.

  Now, my “other fellow,” I am convinced, would do some damage if I didn’t give him an opportunity to work off his energy in the way he delights.

  Harris’s psychological complexity was masked by an uneventful biography. Born in 1848, he grew up illegitimate in a small rural village, Eatonton, Georgia. Harris’s biographers have long suggested that his birth out of wedlock explains his anxieties. Perhaps so, but the fact also remains that Harris was a kind and loving father and husband, nowhere exhibiting in his domestic life the kinds of inadequacies he apparently felt in the larger world. He also was a competent, conscientious, and professional journalist all of his adult life; his journalism displays authority and wit; there is no hint of the shyness of the man himself, perhaps because, as he once wrote, “You know, of course, that I do most of my talking with the pen.” Walter Hines Page, visiting Harris shortly after the initial success of Uncle Remus, could only remark, “It was impossible to believe the man realized what he had done. . . . Joe Harris [the journalist] does not appreciate Joel Chandler Harris.”

  Reared by a strong-willed mother who refused to act as a community outcast, who stimulated her son’s literary ambitions by reading to him nightly from The Vicar of Wakefield, Harris left home at the age of thirteen to learn the printer’s trade on the only newspaper ever published on a plantation, Joseph Turner’s The Countryman, printed at “Turnwold,” nine miles from Eatonton in Putnam County.

  Turner was an unusual man, “good” to his slaves, literate, cultivated, and eccentric, and he shaped Harris in many ways, serving as a kind of literary father. He placed his large library at Harris’s disposal and both encouraged and demanded the discipline necessary for a young writer. Harris began publishing juvenile pieces in The Countryman, displaying considerable wit for a printer’s devil.

  Harris’s semiautobiographical account of his
years at Turnwold, On the Plantation, reports that he befriended a runaway slave shortly after arriving, an act of kindness that caused Turnwold’s black citizens to treat him with special respect: “There was nothing they were not ready to do for him at any time of day or night.” Two slaves in particular took him under their wing. Masters of the tale teller’s art, “Uncle” George Terrell and “Old” Harbert shared with him their repertoire of folktales. Terrell owned a Dutch oven in which he made ginger cakes each Saturday, then sold them to the children of planters. At twilight, by the light of the oven’s fire, he told stories to the Turner children and Joe Harris.

  Harris left Turnwold in 1866 after The Countryman stopped publishing and spent the next decade building a newspaper career, including among his stops Forsyth, Georgia (1867-70), where the town gardener was named Remus. In the fall of 1876, a yellow fever epidemic forced him to leave a paper he had edited in Savannah and bring his family to Atlanta. Well known for his humorous paragraphs widely reprinted across Georgia, Harris was quickly hired as a columnist and editorial writer by Atlanta’s major newspaper, the Atlanta Constitution.

  The Constitution had for some time been using “an antebellum darky” named Old Si for comic comment on its editorial page. Written in dialect, the Old Si sketches had been a great hit, but their creator was leaving the paper. The new staff member was given the assignment; he told his employers, “I know the old time Middle Georgia Negro pretty well.”

  A character named Remus appeared briefly in the October 31, 1876, issue, followed by Uncle Remus himself on November 28; for the next three years Harris periodically published sketches about this first Uncle Remus, an elderly ex-slave who occasionally dropped by the Constitution offices to beg from the staff and talk his darky talk. This Uncle Remus, little more than a delegate for white Atlanta’s views of Reconstruction blacks (“W’en freedom come out de niggers sorter got dere humps up, an’ dey staid dat way, twel bimeby dey begun fer ter git hongry, an’ den dey begun fer ter drap inter line right smartually”), eventually gave way to a second Uncle Remus, the “old time Negro” of the Brer Rabbit tales, whom Harris remembered as “a human syndicate . . . of three or four old darkies whom I had known. I just walloped them together into one person and called him Uncle Remus.”