Uncle Remus
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Uncle Remus is a fictional character, the title character and fictional narrator of a collection of African American folktales adapted and compiled by Joel Chandler Harris, published in book form from 1881. A journalist in post-Reconstruction Atlanta, Georgia, Harris produced seven Uncle Remus books.
Uncle Remus is a collection of animal stories, songs, and oral folklore, collected from Southern United States blacks. Many of the stories are didactic, much like those of Aesop's fables and the stories of Jean de La Fontaine. Uncle Remus is a kindly old slave who serves as a storytelling device, passing on the folktales to white children gathered around him.
The stories are told in Harris' version of a Deep South slave dialect. The genre of stories is the trickster tale. The term "uncle" was a patronizing, familiar and often racist title reserved by whites for elderly black men in the South, which is considered, by some, pejorative and offensive. At the time of Harris' publication, his work was praised for its ability to capture plantation negro dialect.[citation needed]
Brer Rabbit ("Brother Rabbit") is the main character of the stories, a likable trickster prone to getting into trouble who is often opposed by Brer Fox and Brer Bear. In one tale, Brer Fox and Brer Bear construct a lump of tar and put clothing on it. When Brer Rabbit comes along he addresses the "tar baby" amiably, but receives no response. Brer Rabbit becomes offended by what he perceives as Tar Baby's lack of manners, kicks it, and becomes stuck. Now that Brer Rabbit is stuck, Fox ponders how to dispose of him. The helpless, but cunning, Brer Rabbit pleads, "Please don't throw me in the briar patch," prompting Fox to do exactly that. As rabbits are at home in thickets, the resourceful Brer Rabbit escapes. Using the phrases "please don't throw me in the briar patch" and "tar baby" to refer to the idea of "a problem that gets worse the more one struggles against it" became part of the wider culture of the United States in the mid-20th century.
The animal stories are not racist and had considerable popular appeal, but by the Civil Rights era of the 1960s the dialect and the "old Uncle" stereotype of the narrator, long considered demeaning by many blacks, as well as Harris' racist and patronizing attitudes toward blacks and his defense of slavery in his foreword, made the book indefensible. Without much controversy the stories became less popular.[citation needed]
Harris himself said, in the introduction to Uncle Remus, that he hoped his book would be considered:
…a sympathetic supplement to Mrs. Stowe's [author of Uncle Tom's Cabin] wonderful defense of slavery as it existed in the South. Mrs. Stowe, let me hasten to say, attacked the possibilities of slavery with all the eloquence of genius; but the same genius painted the portrait of the Southern slave-owner, and defended him.
In Harris' day, among most southern whites, this would have been a moderate or even enlightened position to take. However, in other parts of American society in the 1880s and certainly in the modern United States, such views would be considered contemptibly racist.[citation needed]
Mark Twain read the Uncle Remus stories to his children, who were awed to meet Harris himself. In his Autobiography Twain describes him thus:
He was the bashfulest grown person I have ever met. When there were people about he stayed silent, and seemed to suffer until they were gone. But he was lovely, nevertheless; for the sweetness and benignity of the immortal Remus looked out from his eyes, and the graces and sincerities of his character shone in his face.
Twain wrote that "It may be that Jim Wolf was as bashful as Harris. It hardly seems possible...." Jim Wolf being a person from the first humorous story Twain ever told—the story recorded in "Jim Wolf and the Cats".
[edit] Film adaptations
The stories inspired at least three films. The first and most famous of which is Walt Disney's Song of the South, released in 1946. The film was a combination of live-action and animation. The film was extremely popular throughout the years, but has never been released on home video in the United States due to fear of controversy. The stories also inspired a direct-to-video film, The Adventures of Brer Rabbit, released in 2006. The cult film Coonskin, directed by Ralph Bakshi was very loosely inspired by the Uncle Remus stories, but intended for an adult audience.
