Brer Rabbit is back

Press, 2 July 1983, Page 18

Brer Rabbit is back

Uncle Remus: His Songs and Sayings. By Joel Chandler Harris. Edited by R. Hemenway. Penguin, 1983. 222 pp. $5.95 (paperback).

(Reviewed by

Naylor Hillary).

Once upon a time almost everyone, in childhood, met Uncle Remus and Brer Rabbit (and the Tar-baby). Then the stories fell out of favour because Uncle Remus, the gentle plantation darkie, was regarded as an offensive white invention with no place amid fashions of black power and black consciousness. Now, 103 years after the tales first appeared in Georgia, it seems they are back in favour. Professor Hemenway, of the University of Kentucky, in an introductory essay, helps restore their respectability by separating the characters of Harris, Remus, and Brer Rabbit. Harris was a painfully shy Southern printer and journalist, born in 1848, who heard folk-tales in his childhood on the eve of the American Civil War. Years later he printed some of the tales in the Atlanta “Constitution.” They were so popular that they were reprinted in books and by the time Harris died in 1908 the author was famous. Uncle Remus, as Hemenway describes him, was a composite figure made up of several elderly Negroes whom Harris had known. To Harris, Remus was not only a vehicle to tell the tales, but a figure intended to calm fears among post-war Southern whites about the attitude of liberated slaves; he has the classic character of a loyal family retainer. Brer Rabbit is something else. He was created by black storytellers long before Harris heard 'his doings being passed on from one slave generation to the next. “He is the briar-patch representative of a people living by their wits to make a way out of no way.” Most of the Remus stories have been traced back to pre-slavery Africa by modern scholars. The stories emphasise the triumph of the weak over the strong, the victory of helplessness and mischievousness. Brer Rabbit understands his hostile environment. He is the outlaw who knows that a triumph over the fox or the wolf today will not ensure safety tomorrow. He does not always win. All this gives added point to the short, simple stories told by Uncle Remus. They are still highly entertaining, but they cannot be read in large doses. Harris reproduces faithfully the black dialect of the

Georgia he knew. Modern readers will often need to take the text slowly, halfaloud, to get the meaning. To give a rather easy sample, here is what happens when Brer Fox, for once, tricks Brer Rabbit into going fishing with his tail. Brer Rabbit has squatted down and let his tail hang in the water: “He sot dar, en he sot dar, en he drunk his dram, en he think he gwineter freeze, but bimeby day come, en dar he wuz. He makes a pull, en he feel like he cornin’ in two, en he fetch nudder jerk, en lo en beholes, whar wuz his tail?” Uncle Remus still tells splendid stories, well worth the effort of “translation.” Perhaps as a contrast to Uncle Remus, Penguin has also reprinted recently the “Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave,” by Frederick Douglass (159 pp, $4.95). Douglass wrote this vigorous, polished account of his early life in 1845. He tells what it meant to be a slave growing up in Maryland in the early part of the nineteenth century, and of his escape to New York in 1838. The narrative is regarded as probably the most important written account, by a former slave, of life before the Civil War. The book and its author became prominent parts of the abolitionist movement. It is still a sad and exciting story.