Brer Coon Origin Joel Chandler
Harris Uncle Remus
- Uncle Remus Tales
Uncle Remus, the literary character who would eventually become a worldwide
phenomenon, had a modest beginning in a small newspaper column in Atlanta,
Georgia.In 1876, a humor columnist named Joel Chandler Harris (1848-1908) began contributing African-American dialect sketches to The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. These columns were based on the stories and dialect he absorbed from slaves while working on a plantation near his boyhood home of Eatonton, Georgia. Harris wanted to promote an understanding between the races in the post-Civil War South, and to give white America a rare glimpse into African culture.
One of his first columns, "Jeems Rober'son's Last Illness" (1876), featured an unnamed black man waiting on a train to Jonesboro, Georgia. The black man had to be coaxed to finish his story for the reading audience at the risk of missing his train. Weeks later, Harris came up with a name for this fictional narrator: Uncle Remus. Remus would comment on the current Atlanta scene and express his preference for plantation life in the Old South. In the columns that followed, Uncle Remus's personal history on the plantation began to unfold.
Three years later, the first Uncle Remus tale, "The Story of Mr. Rabbit and Mr. Fox," appeared on the editorial page under the heading, "Negro Folk Lore." The columns appeared intermittently in the Atlanta paper, and were an immediate success. Now, Uncle Remus was an aging slave who chose to remain on the plantation after the Civil War. He tells his stories to a little white boy who is the son of Miss Sally, a Southern woman, and John Huntingdon, a Union officer. Oddly enough, the audience later learned that Uncle Remus once wounded the Union soldier in defense of Miss Sally during the war, and stayed on the plantation out of obligation to both the original family and to the wounded officer.
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Old slave cabin on Turnwold Plantaion, where a young Joel Chandler Harris first heard African-American folktales. |
Whether they were completely accurate from a historical perspective or not, the Uncle Remus tales, in some small way, helped foster racial healing when it was needed most. Unlike other accounts of plantation life at that time, the Uncle Remus tales moved the focus from the "big house" to the slave cabins, from white to black. Harris's stories were amazingly detailed about everyday slave life, right down to how they made shoe pegs and baked yams and ashcakes. Harris painstakingly wrote his stories in authentic African-American dialect, with many words in Gullah.
Like Aesop's Fables, the characters in the Uncle Remus tales were frequently "critters": Brer Fox, Brer B'ar, Brer Wolf and so forth. The most popular, of course, was Brer Rabbit, a trickster whose occasionally amoral acts were not always approved of by Harris himself. But the Uncle Remus tales were meant to be entertaining, not moral lessons. Whenever Harris would intervene in his stories, he would tell his audience through Uncle Remus that the animals' conduct shouldn't always be considered proper conduct for human beings , and that their acts were frequently lessons in the art of survival. This is in keeping with African tradition, where overt moralizing is rare and stories can be amoral and grim. As the Uncle Remus newspaper stories became a national phenomenon, Harris collected them and had them published in an anthology called Uncle Remus: His Songs & His Sayings (1880). The book was an international hit, and Harris ended up producing nine more volumes of the stories, preserving 183 distinctive tales. Harris never claimed to be the author of these stories, but "only the compiler" of tales he'd heard from others. The Uncle Remus tales were eventually translated into 27 different languages.
The enormous popularity of the Uncle Remus tales dwarfed everything else
Harris would write. To this day, his name is so synonymous with Uncle
Remus that many people believe that he is Uncle Remus. Harris was never
comfortable with his fame, and chose to stay at home with his family and
his typewriter until his death in 1908.A new and younger audience was introduced to the Uncle Remus tales in the 1940s, when Walt Disney used a tale called "The Wonderful Tar Baby" as the focus of their movie Song of the South. The movie's centerpiece song, "Zip-a-dee Doo Da," won an Academy Award for Best Song in 1946. Walt Disney himself visited Harris's home that year and donated a diorama built by the Disney studios. Song of the South continues to be a popular film all over the world, although it is one of the few Disney films to have never been released on home video in the United States.
To learn more about Joel Chandler Harris and his writings, follow these links:
Uncle Remus - Web site with information on Harris and his Uncle Remus tales.
The Internet Movie Database - To learn more about Song of the South, Walt Disney's take on the Uncle Remus tales, look it up in this essential film database.
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Photos courtesy of The Wren's Nest, Atlanta, Georgia |
© 1997-2006