Sure as you're born, something somewhere is bound to come loping down the big road of life and catch you completely unawares.
    For better than a hundred years now, a collection of tall tales told by Dixieland bard Joel Chandler Harris-stories that first blind-sided readers in 1880-have been playing all kind of mischief with popular culture, if not with the most fundamental questions of what it means to be human.
    That Harris, whose fame among American men of letters at the turn of the century was second only to Mark Twain's, left us an extraordinary literary gift isn't debated, even by his legion of critics. It's the nature of the gift that, like a truly fine dog, keeps giving up surprises, keeps sniffing the air-and likely as not, keeps stirring up trouble.
    Harris has been in plenty of the latter with critics almost from the day his first collection of black folktales, Uncle Remus: His Songs and His Sayings, hit the pressroom floor in November 1880. Today, in some circles Harris may very well be the most vilified-yet most unread-American author who ever made the big time. His very name invokes an almost Pavlovian response among some who associate him with what is arguably the worst kind of racist stereotyping-the depiction of ex-slaves identifying with the plantation system of the Old South.
    Were he still around, chances are Harris would find the controversy stupefying, although hardly worth the horror of addressing on a TV talk show. Described as being "pathologically shy" by his best biographers, Harris likely would treat any wounds in extreme privacy and long even more fervently for the antebellum calm he claimed to know as a child growing up in the red dust of middle Georgia.
    This year marks-officially-Harris's 150th birthday. Even this anniversary hasn't arrived without argument. Buried in his hometown of Eatonton, 69 miles southeast of Atlanta, Harris rests beneath a tombstone advertising his birth year as 1848. Just recently, scholars have mounted compelling evidence that the date is most likely 1845. The finding only feeds learned convictions that even from the grave, the "cornfield journalist"-as Harris once described himself-is still out there pitching curves.

Tar-Baby Sticking Power

    When he talks about Joel Chandler Harris, Dr. R. Bruce Bickley, Jr. (Ph.D. Duke) is smack in the middle of his self-made briar patch.
    "Harris was an Old South storyteller with a New South vision," says Bickley, with a conviction borne of his 25 years as a Harris scholar. A professor of English at Florida State, Bickley also directs the university's Honors Program.
    "Harris turned folklore critters into highly energetic, engaging human beings who not only were humorous and entertaining, but who had something powerful to say to us all."
    On the eve of Harris's sesquicentennial year, Bickley's fifth book on the man, an annotated bibliography, was published by Greenwood Press last fall. Compiled with co-author Hugh T. Keenan of Georgia State University, also a noted Harris scholar, the work is an attempt to keep up with the commentary that Harris's work keeps prodding from scholars, journalists and essayists.
    A sequel to an earlier volume, Bickley's Joel Chandler Harris: A Reference Guide , 1862-1976 (G.K. Hall, 1978), this latest work summarizes two decades of Harris discussion-and as nearly 500 entries show, it's been a talkative 20 years. Together, the two volumes demonstrate that during the last century, it has been the rare year when Joel Chandler Harris has been spared serious attention from either academics or the public eye.
Bickley's own contributions, besides the five books-a Harris biography among them-include several essays, book chapters and reviews. The body of work easily makes him the country's foremost Harris scholar.
    That Harris is still being talked about in some earnest today is testimony that his works, which at least in the public mind will be confined eternally to the Uncle Remus tales, carry a wallop of staying power. Even though he wrote 35 books, more in fact than did Mark Twain, as far as his literary impact was concerned Harris might just as well have switched to farming after his second Remus volume, Nights with Uncle Remus, appeared in 1883.
     Bickley is quick to place Harris in his proper place in American letters, characterizing him as a "major minor figure."
    "Harris is not a stand-alone figure with the power of Twain or Faulkner. But he influenced so many writers, including Twain and Faulkner, all over the world."
    What mere "minor" writer, asks Bickley, can claim to have works translated into 27 foreign languages? In 1939, one of Harris's Remus books sold 275,000 copies in Russia alone. With all the sticking-power of the tar baby he made famous the world over, Harris has survived a tidal wave of criticism over the years, as demonstrated by the fact that his first Remus book has never been out of print.
    Still, public reproach has left an indelible mark. America's civil rights movement saw Harris's stock drop to an all-time low among scholars and popular writers, particularly those in the black community, who attacked Mark Twain with equal gusto, angry at these writers' depictions of former slaves and black people in general. Disney's 1946 release of Song of the South, though greeted with stellar box-office performances everywhere it played, didn't help Harris's image with its shallow, cartoon treatment of Remus framed by a select few animated-and highly adulterated-tales.
    Harris's entire canon of Remus tales (nine volumes in all) began disappearing off the shelves of school libraries in the early '60s, along with some of Twain's most celebrated works, most commonly The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Today, particularly in predominantly black school districts, Remus often is still as rare a find as Huck.
    "Harris fell out of favor with black critics and scholars in the '60s, but in recent years we've seen him return to favor among some of these same critics," says Bickley. "They're beginning to realize that Harris saved an important legacy, no matter what one might think about the man who saved it."
    On the publishing front, since the mid-1980s, Harris has enjoyed a revival, with the appearance of three sets of children's books devoted to re-telling his original folktales. The most popular of these are the multi-volume series Jump! by Van Dyke Parks (Harcourt Brace, 1986, '87, '89) and Tales of Uncle Remus: The Adventures of Brer Rabbit, by Julius Lester (Dial Books, 1987, '88, '90, '94). None of the books mentions Remus beyond the title page-further evidence of the figure's corrosive influence on African-American sensitivities-but these highly popular works are now common in children's libraries throughout the country, thus giving a new generation at least a glimpse of the single largest body of African-American folktales ever published.
    "This has been wonderful to see," Bickley said. "It's an affirmation that these materials are important, that we should study them, that they represent the human spirit, that they go beyond race, beyond culture, and carry teachings of universal meaning...
    And we have a stammering, red-haired, self-conscious, rural, city-fied newspaperman from Georgia to thank for that."

The Cornfield Journalist

The essential facts of Harris's early years suggest much about the somber, frequently depressed figure that his family and few close friends saw in Harris's adulthood.
    Harris never knew his father, apparently an Irish laborer, who abandoned Harris's mother, Mary, shortly after his birth in Eatonton, a small town in Putnam County. Unmarried, Mary thus bore the sting of social stigma, being initially shunned by her family and forced to work as a seamstress to support herself and her child. A kind-hearted, prominent Eatontonian, Andrew Reid, soon gave Mary a small cottage behind his house. This became the only home that Joe, as Harris would be called through much of his life, would ever know as a child.
    In grammar school, Harris showed his true colors-mostly shades of red. His shock of Irish-red hair too often matched his face, which could flush at even the slightest social encounter, especially any that involved girls. Short for his age, pudgy, carrot-topped, and sensitive about the clouded circumstances of his birth, as a schoolboy Harris developed an almost morbid shyness. To help mask it, he became a cut-up, a class clown, a prankster-a role that would serve him well in later years.
    Early biographers have Joel dropping out of school at 13 to go to work to support his mom, but some scholars now believe he may have been 16. The distinction is notable, since the South was at war at the time and 16-year-olds were in line for the draft. Harris may have dodged a stint in the Confederate Army by going to work for Joseph Addison Turner, owner of a thousand-acre plantation nine miles outside of Eatonton. Turner had a contract to supply felt hats for the Confederacy. He also had the means of providing good propaganda for the war effort, a printing press. He hired Harris as a "printer's devil," vernacular for print-shop helper, to help publish his weekly newspaper, The Countryman.
    Harris spent four years at Turnwold, the name of Turner's plantation, and in that span soaked up enough of the essences of life and learning to succeed as a writer. Turner, who developed a fondness for Harris early on, gave Harris plenty of lead to peruse his estate as his interests and curiosities led him. Not only did Harris learn the typesetting trade, but Turner gave him access to his prodigious library holdings and encouraged him to read Shakespeare, Chaucer, Milton, Emerson and Pope, along with such Southern writers as Edgar Allan Poe and Henry Timrod.
    Young Harris also missed few opportunities to indulge a passion for listening to Turner's slaves tell stories. In later years, Harris would write about sitting in on storytelling sessions with such figures as Uncle George Terrell, Old Harbert and Aunt Crissy. Often he was joined by Turner's small son, Joseph Sidney, who years later would learn in a letter from Harris that he may have been the inspiration for the boy in the Remus series. Terrell, Harbert and Crissy had long since fused into Remus himself.
    After Appomattox, Turner, like all plantation owners, found himself in dire financial straits. He was forced to shut down his newspaper, leaving Harris without a job. But the youth's return to Eatonton was short-lived, thanks to his apprenticeship in the journalism trade. A number of poems and short, humorous pieces he'd written as a press boy at Turnwold had wound up in print, boosting his confidence as a writer.
    From 1866 to 1870, Harris held four jobs, including a brief stay on the staff of a literary magazine in New Orleans. By the fall of 1870, he was making good money-$40 a week-as an associate editor of the Savannah Morning News, one of Georgia's top daily newspapers. Here, he developed skills as an editorial writer, a sober counter to his stock-in-trade lighter side. In 1873, he sufficiently throttled his bashfulness to get married and start a family. By this time, with his humorous, local-color sketches being picked up regularly by newspapers all around the state, Harris was well on his way to being recognized as Georgia's "funny man."
    A deadly yellow fever outbreak along the coast in 1876 prompted Harris to move his family to Atlanta, where he accepted what was to be a temporary job with the Atlanta Constitution. He stayed 24 years, finally retiring in 1900, having made himself an icon both in American literature and in American folklore.

The Rise of Remus

    In his second year at the Constitution, Harris inaugurated the figure of Uncle Remus in a series of lightly drawn, humorous vignettes about life in Atlanta. A piece published in October 1877, "Uncle Remus as a Rebel," was the first to place the character in a plantation setting, where the storyline has Remus saving the life of his master by shooting a Yankee sharpshooter out of a tree.
    In the December 1877 issue of Lippincott's, a popular literary magazine of the day, an article by William Owens entitled "Folklore of the Southern Negroes" caught Harris's eye. The article included a tale called "Buh Rabbit and the Tar Baby," which triggered an avalanche of memories from Harris's days at Turnwold Plantation.
    Harris criticized Owens's article, writing that it was "remarkable for what it omits rather than for what it contains." Not only did he find Owens's limited use of dialect clumsy, but he found objectionable his "literary treatment" of the tales which he likened to the "intolerable misrepresentations of the minstrel stage."
    But the article made Harris realize that American folktales commanded considerable interest not only from the public but from certain scholars as well. Even so, he sensed that there was little evidence that anybody was doing more than a fair job of collecting, authenticating and recording the rich oral traditions of southern blacks.
    Harris decided to turn Uncle Remus into a teller of authentic folktales, to the extent his creator could document and piece together the scraps of stories he'd held in his head since his days at Turnwold. In the July 20, 1879 issue of the Constitution, under the heading "Negro Folklore," Harris published his first Brer Rabbit trickster tale, "The Story of Mr. Rabbit and Mr. Fox as Told by Uncle Remus." He would write 184 more tales during the next 27 years.
    This first tale was followed four months later with the second-an abbreviated account of the tar baby story. Both drew a flood of fan letters. As Bickley characterized it in his Harris biography, "...to Harris's great astonishment, Uncle Remus was suddenly on everyone's lips."
    Somewhat embarrassed by his sudden fame, Harris soon felt he owed his enthusiastic audience an explanation for his Remus series. In an April 9, 1880 editorial, he wrote that he sought to "preserve in permanent shape those curious mementoes (sic) of a period that will no doubt be sadly misrepresented by historians of the future."
    Within four months of the November 1880 debut of his first collection of Remus tales, Uncle Remus: His Songs and His Sayings, the book had sold 10,000 copies. Among his heartiest readers was Mark Twain, who in 1881 began a lifelong friendship with Harris, whom he soon invited to join his famous lecture circuit. The two met in New Orleans in April 1882 in as memorable an encounter as Twain ever recorded.

The Accidental Folklorist

Even before publication of his first Remus volume, Harris was aware that in his quest to capture on paper some of the oral traditions of former slaves he was getting into a relatively new discipline about which he not only had no formal training, but little direct knowledge.
    When some of his first published tales were roundly praised by several leading folklore scholars of the day, he became intrigued with the young "science of ethnology." He became a charter member of the American Folklore Society (along with Twain) and began to fill his home library with ethnological texts, journals and folklore collections. He had become intrigued by the fact that the tales he was collecting bore striking resemblances to tales from cultures in other parts of the world.
    In writing the introduction to his first book, Harris felt sufficiently confident in his own amateur findings to argue his conviction that the animal tales of Southern blacks originated in Africa. On this point he would remain adamant the rest of his life. In an expanded (32-page) argument that introduced his second volume, he quarreled with a Smithsonian Institution ethnologist who suggested that blacks picked up their stories from American Indians, rather than vice versa.
    Writing for Bickley's Critical Essays on Joel Chandler Harris (G.K. Hall, 1981) California folklorist Florence E. Baer called Harris's second introduction "the first truly comprehensive survey of the probable origins and dissemination of Afro-American folktales documented with comparative texts from African, South American, and Northern American Indian sources."
     Harris had thus backed into distinction as an amateur folklorist, clearly motivated, Baer said, by a strong desire to have his work taken seriously by professionals. Fueling this desire was Harris's underlying conviction that the Brer Rabbit trickster tales possessed vastly more significance than the average reader suspected.
      In the introduction of the first volume, Harris wrote:
"...it needs no scientific investigation to show why (the Negro) selects as his hero the weakest and most harmless of all animals, and brings him out victorious in contests with the bear, the wolf, and the fox."
    "Harris knew that Brer Rabbit was the black slave's hero," says Bickley. "Brer Fox, Brer Bear, Brer Wolf and Brer Buzzard were all representatives of the white master, the white race. Brer Rabbit had to use his wits and trickery to survive."
    Born with "needer huff ner hawn" (neither hooves nor horns) into a world of powerful creatures, Brer Rabbit sees life as a jungle, where anything goes to stay alive. On the surface, Brer Rabbit's audacious, frequently amoral (and immoral) antics provide the reader (or listener) with high entertainment, whereas Harris fully understood-although he sometimes hedged the point-that the tales themselves were a thinly veiled code for out-foxing old massa.
    Exactly what motivated Harris-as dedicated a son of the South as ever there was-to try to preserve the latent, revolutionary oral tradition of Southern blacks is the subject of several spirited essays in Bickley's collection. Some explanations jump head-long into the psychoanalysis of what obviously was a very conflicted, insecure and patently neurotic individual. Whatever his reasons, Harris nonetheless went about his collecting work with extraordinary conscientiousness, at least for his first two animal-tale volumes, making up the rules as he went along.
    For both of his first two books, Harris maintained a personal standard of hearing, or having heard, oral versions of the tales as the chief means of "verifying" their authenticity. He professed to abhor what he called the practice of "cooking" folktales-or altering them in any way-which he observed in other collections. Only rarely did he venture into the field to collect tales himself, with the most notable exception occurring in 1882 when he engaged a group of blacks at a railway station near Atlanta. By his own account, he won the group's confidence by telling the tar baby story, which touched off a lengthy-and ultimately lucrative-storytelling session among the ex-slaves present.
    In later volumes, though, Harris relaxed some of his standards and even went so far as building entire tales from as little information as paragraph summaries sent to him from obliging readers. Since as early as 1879, Harris had used his handy pulpit at the Constitution to advertise his need for folktales, and by 1882 he was perfectly willing to pay for them, says Bickley's co-author, Hugh Keenan.
    "When he ran out of stuff from his own experience, he did that," he said. "I also found where he took some stories from books, mostly French folktales, and retold them in black dialect."
    After the publication of his second volume, Nights with Uncle Remus, in 1883, the degree of authenticity of Remus's animal tales waned along with Harris's interest in professional folklore. By 1892, he had dropped his memberships in both the British and American Folklore Societies, according to Florence Baer, having grown tired of the incessant academic debate over the origins of the tales and their "scientific value." So put off was he by the pedantic habits of academicians that he resorted to spoofing them in letters and in at least one book, Wally Wanderoon and His Story-Telling Machine (1903).
    "Collector, yes; folklorist, no," is how Baer sums up Harris in her 1981 essay, "Joel Chandler Harris: 'An Accidental Folklorist'," which she wrote for Bickley's Critical Essays. But Baer's exhaustive, 1980 analysis of the origins of the 184 folktales told by Remus and other Harris-made characters upholds Harris's central thesis that most of stories were born in Africa. She documented that fully 122 of the tales were African in origin, with the remainder coming from Europe and the New World.
    Harris's contribution to the study of American folklore, she concludes, was thus "the first serious attempt to record the folktales, songs, and sayings of southern American Negroes in the precise language and style in which they existed."

Seeds of Protest

    Harris died in 1908, much too soon to hear serious complaints about his creation of Uncle Remus, arguably the most controversial literary device ever seen in American literature. It wasn't until well after World War II, in fact, that American public consciousness over racial issues reached the point where any white author writing about blacks could expect to be seriously challenged.
    As Bickley's broad assemblage of criticism attests, the character of Uncle Remus-to a much greater extent than Harris's trademark use of dialect-serves as the lightning rod for most latter-day social and literary criticism of Harris and his work.
    "Folklorists tell us it's important to try to reconstruct, if you can, the narrative situation when stories were originally told," Bickley explains. "Harris tried to capture that by having an older black man tell a young member of the white race-a boy who is still malleable-things about the black experience."
    What sticks in the throat of so many modern readers is how Harris drew Remus. To be sure, he depicted the aging, former slave as something of the shaman of his race, rich not only in the folk-wisdom of his African roots, but shrewd in the ways of all people. But he also made Remus into a caricature of servile obedience and loyalty to his former master, something of a wiser Steppin Fetchit who ridiculed uppity blacks and longed for a return to the Zip-a-dee-doo-dah days of the pre-war plantation.
    Harris himself made no bones over his creation, saying in the introduction to his first book that Remus "has nothing but pleasant memories of the discipline of slavery...."
    Considering the tenor of his deeply troubled times-and his powerful drive to become a respected writer-Harris had clear reasons for painting Remus the way he did, says Bickley.
    "Harris was very strong on reconciliation between the North and the South," he says. "He makes Remus into this warm, engaging, likable figure, with the intention of building a bridge to northern audiences, partly as an olive branch in the cause of sectional harmony."
    In this effort, Harris was joining a number of so-called Plantation School writers who were trying to smooth over the North-South rift with books extolling the many virtues of Old South values. Like these writers, Harris wanted to convince northern readers that in the defeated South new and better relationships between blacks and whites were emerging, built to a large extent on a sense of trust and respect that genuinely existed between some slaves and their masters in the antebellum South.
    From a practical standpoint, Harris also knew that a paternalistic Remus, with his beloved white boy sitting in rapt attention at his knee, was a potent device-and perhaps the only device-for getting the attention of white readers, always his primary target audience. Harris knew enough about racial attitudes of the day, on both sides of the Mason-Dixon Line, to realize that if he had any hope of making his published tales a commercial success, he would have to pander to white tastes and prejudices, which he obviously was very capable of doing, says Bickley.
    "There's no question that Harris shared in the racial prejudices of his day, and he certainly supported the segregationist line. But at the same time, Harris was a progressive conservative who clearly supported the cause of blacks when other whites did not."

The Malevolent Rabbit

    For the multitudes who have laughed along with Walt Disney's Song of the South-re-released four times in the U.S. since its 1946 debut-the entertainment value inherent in the Uncle Remus tales is obvious. Anyone who can sit stone-faced through the scene where Brer Bear spits out a stream of angry bees while standing in Brer Rabbit's "laughin' place" is a candidate for serious psychoanalysis.
    But the film, which drew protests from blacks even while it was being shot (in Phoenix, Arizona-see sidebar), remains a sore point for many critics who don't appreciate what Disney set out to do, which was to make a highly entertaining film with mass appeal rather than a socio-political statement.
    Critics such as Frances Clarke Sayers and others have pointed out various "distortions" of Harris's work in the film-namely that Disney makes folklore "very lovable...sweet...(and) cute" and in the process undermines the tales' "anthropological, spiritual and psychological truths."
    If Disney stands guilty of exalting the tales' humor over their seriousness, in all likelihood this would have made Joel Harris a critic of the movie as well. Harris was so concerned that the tales would be dismissed as little more than funny childrens' stories that he began his introduction to his first volume with this disclaimer:
    "I am advised by my publishers that this book is to be included in their catalogue of humorous publications, and this friendly warning gives me an opportunity to say that however humorous it may be in effect, its intention is perfectly serious; and, even if it were otherwise, it seems to me that a volume written wholly in dialect must have its solemn, not to say melancholy features."
    In one episode of tale-telling in the second volume, Harris has Uncle Remus himself arguing the higher value of the stories, telling Aunt Tempy, another ex-slave, that if the tales were just "fun, fun, fun" and "giggle, giggle, giggle," he would've "drapt (dropped) um long ago."
    "Harris knew the trickster stories were much more than entertainment," says Bickley. "He knew they carried serious messages about life, the human spirit, about violence, about human survival."
    At the least, he had to know that Brer Rabbit was no role model for Sunday Schoolers. While folklorists have found various trickster figures in the folklore of dozens of cultures around the globe, forerunners of Brer Rabbit actually pre-date Christianity-Buddhist folklore has its own rabbit as a trickster, for example. But evidence suggests that the descendants of the wily, long-eared character Harris introduced to the world didn't develop their decidedly nasty habits until the advent of slavery. And by the time Harris heard of him, Brer Rabbit was bearing the distinct marks of surviving two centuries of forced labor in the land of moonlight and magnolias.
    As anyone who reads the unvarnished Uncle Remus tales realizes, the stories are hardly a Disney-esque confection of sweetness and light. Brandishing a jaunty air of superiority over his dimwitted adversaries, in tale after tale Brer Rabbit displays all the scruples of a common criminal. The picture of innocence, merrily loping "lippety clippety" down the big road, this is the rare hare who knows how to hit hard below the belt-and often does just for the sheer fun of it.
    Whatever it takes to beat somebody out of food, money, prestige, or even their peace of mind is fair game for what Bernard Wolfe called "the malevolent rabbit" in a 1949 essay that remains one of the most revealing commentaries on the meaning of the Brer Rabbit tales of the Old South. Stealing, lying, cheating-even cold-blooded murder, torture and savage beatings-heavily flavor what millions of adults since Twain have regarded as fine bedtime fare for tender ears.
    Even the tar baby story-easily the most recognized tale Remus ever told-invokes images of Brer Rabbit facing the prospects of being either skinned, roasted alive or drowned by his captor Brer Fox. But this oft-told tale of reverse psychology is pabulum compared to the likes of "The Sad Fate of Mr. Fox," in which Brer Rabbit not only tricks Brer Fox into getting himself beaten to death by Mr. Man, but takes Brer Fox's severed head to his wife under the pretext that it's beef for her soup pot.
    Another story has Brer Rabbit slowly scalding Brer Wolf to death, another shows him apparently killing Brer Bear by engulfing him in a swarm of bees. Several stories even have sex as a predominant theme, typically with Brer Rabbit out-competing Brer Fox and the other critters for the attentions of "Miss Meadows and de gals," who make merry in a little-disguised bawdy house.
    Perhaps no better tale demonstrates Brer Rabbit's supreme wickedness as "Mr. Rabbit Nibbles Up the Butter." In the story, Brer Rabbit steals and eats the animals' communal supply of butter and then puts a buttery smear on the paws of a sleeping Brer Possum to incriminate him. After the crime is discovered the next morning, Brer Possum suggests a trial by fire to determine the true guilty party. All the critters easily leap over the fire except "lumberin'" Brer Possum who ironically gets burned to death in his own fire.
    The story mightily upsets the moral equilibrium of Remus's sole audience, the little white boy, who argues indignantly that Brer Rabbit stole the butter so he should have been punished for it, not poor Brer Possum. To which Remus shrugs and says: "In dis worl', lots er folks is gotter suffer fer udder folks sins."
     Some critics argue that it's such homey aphorisms as this, which Harris frequently has Remus telling his young charge, that make the tales' often violent, cruel and malicious themes ultimately worthwhile not only for children, but for adults as well as object lessons in reality.
    Writing in Natural History in 1991, Samuel M. Wilson compared Harris's Brer Rabbit to historic trickster figures in other cultures and noted remarkable similarities in how such figures portray common themes in the human experience. From Anansi the spider-the colorful trickster in African-Caribbean folklore-to Bugs Bunny, Wilson found compelling examples of how tricksters use humor to teach elemental insights into "family interactions, struggles against authority," and "love and death."
    Wilson is only one of many writers intrigued with messages about "the darker secrets of life" that seem to course through trickster tales in general, but in particular, the peculiar way they pervade the dialog of Harris's Uncle Remus. The upshot is that Harris pulled a trick himself-turning his "faithful darky" narrator into a far more complex character than casual readers and Disney could ever imagine. Exactly why he did that has stumped scholars for more than a century, and is a phenomenon that even Harris himself may never have fully realized or understood.

"The Other Fellow" A Subversive?

    At a dinner party once called in his honor in an Atlanta hotel, Joel Harris jumped panic-stricken out of an open window to escape his admirers. At his home, whenever he spied a stranger approaching his house, he would suddenly vanish out the back door.
    For a man who so obviously sought success, fame and public acceptance all his life, Harris's odd character ill prepared him for handling it. From his youth, his confounding mannerisms-a bad stutter, a loathing of all social situations, for example-tortured him constantly and led him to contemplate suicide.
    Though a definitive psychoanalysis of Harris's career has yet to be done, scholars have amassed enough evidence to link Harris's extreme inferiority complex to his fatherless childhood. Branded early on as illegitimate, Harris would see the stigma manifest itself in insidious ways throughout his adulthood. While the public saw a funny man given to writing hilarious stories and playing pranks on office co-workers, Harris's family often saw a brooding, cynical and frequently depressed writer who frequently drank too much.
    This dual nature, though, ultimately served Harris well. By the time he had found his voice in the Uncle Remus tales, he was keenly aware of "the other fellow," his fiercely creative side that allowed him to jump through a window of imagination to escape his personal demons. By day he worked the journalist trade, writing editorials that too often parroted prevailing political rhetoric-the South's "march toward progress" being a familiar drumbeat. By night he let "the other fellow" take up the pen and "work off his energy in the way he delights."
    Some writers speculate that Harris deliberately drew Uncle Remus as a vehicle not only for expressing his creative energies but also for venting his pent up frustration from beginning life essentially as an outsider.
"There's no question that as a teenager on the (Turnwold) plantation, Harris identified with the slaves," says Bickley. "They were outside mainstream society, and in many ways he felt he was, too. He felt comfortable in the black community. They told him stories, and he was a good listener."
    A good 15 years after he left Turnwold, Harris's first Remus tales greeted an expectant-and predominantly white-audience who lapped them up with relish. Despite Harris's insistence on the serious nature of the tales, few readers picked up on anything but the humorous aspects of the stories and Uncle Remus's colorful dialect.
Mark Twain himself, hardly deaf to literary humor, somewhat dismissed the tales themselves, favoring the narrative by Remus whom he called "a delightful creation." He wrote that the stories "are only alligator pears (avocados)" which one eats just "for the sake of the salad-dressing."
    Yet many literary critics, probing beneath Harris's humor, have registered amazement at what the "cornfield journalist" got away with in the midst of a constitutionally racist society. Right in the parlor of a completely unsuspecting white America, Harris rolled out what amounted to a literary Trojan Horse filled with assorted symbols and subtexts that struck at the very heart of white Americans' most cherished institutions.
"Remus, of course, identifies with the old plantation system, no doubt about that," says Hugh Keenan. "But he also works against it at the same time. He's presenting a counter view of society and religion in those tales. The fact is, he was very subversive."
    Harris apparently knew that Brer Rabbit represented, as Bernard Wolfe said, "a covert assault on white power," and he gave free reign to his "other fellow" to let Remus virtually shout this message through the tales and soft-sell it through his aw-shucks dialogue with the master's little boy.
    "What's interesting is that what's going on in the stories and what's going on in the frame (Remus and the boy) are often diametrically opposite," Keenan said. "In the frame, everything is fine, there's no hostility, no problems between the black man and the white boy, but in the tales, everybody's in there to do each other in."
    Taken as a whole, the tales represent "a pretty negative view of civilization," Keenan said, a portrait of society which Harris's fractured persona readily endorsed. The journalist side of him sought the unembellished stories themselves while his creative side-at least in the Remus tales-sought to capture a genuine slice of unsentimental reality-and what better way to do that than through the voices of a subjugated people who knew all too painfully well what reality actually meant.
    At one point, Remus instructs the white boy about the differences in perceptions of right and wrong between "de critters" and "folks." "In dem days," he explains, de critters bleedzed (were obliged) ter look out fer deyse'f....Dey dunno right fum wrong. Dey see what dey want, en dey git it if dey kin, by hook er by crook." He went on to say that "folks got der laws, an' de creeturs got der'n, an' it bleeze ter be dat away."
     This rejection of a universal moral code permeates the Remus tales, and captures "the moral atmosphere of slavery," says essayist Robert Bone of Columbia University. He wrote that the tales describe an "unrelenting state of war" waged by people who "have been brutalized, degraded, rendered powerless-and yet who manage to survive by dint of their superior endurance and mother wit, their cunning artifice and sheer effrontery."
Bone said that in such an "intolerable situation" as slavery, "all moral scruples are discarded in a fierce effort to survive," a principle that most whites aren't equipped to understand.
    Wolfe, in his 1948 essay, quipped: "Before Harris, few Southerners had ever faced squarely the aggressive symbolism of Brer Rabbit, or the paradox of their delight in it." The overtones of his work did hoist a few eyebrows in polite Southern society, and Harris found himself facing questions about his intentions. Was he launching a veiled threat against white America or did he mean to support a common white assumption that in the tales, the Negro is basically railing against his "biological fate" of inferiority?
    In typical fashion, Harris dodged the issue by making a series of fundamentally contradictory statements that satisfied no one, apparently including himself. In the end, Wolfe said Harris may have sympathized with the plight of poor Southern blacks far more than he consciously realized. Harris "seems to have been a man in permanent rebellion against his own skin," wrote Wolfe, and in fact may have been an Old South wannabe who found his own psychic emancipation in the creative imagination and joie de vivre that he saw in black culture.
    Whatever the case, despite enormous effort Harris never was able to achieve anywhere near the level of literary artistry in any of his other works that he did in the Remus series. Most of his novels were virtually stillborn, given over to sentimentality and simply uninspired writing. When he died, any secrets of his soul would be found largely in his first few volumes of tales told by a cherished figment of his troubled imagination.
    "The multiple meanings of the Remus tales will intrigue scholars and critics for a long, long time," says Bickley.
    "Writers can't agree on what these stories mean, nor to what degree Harris understood the black experience."
But as scholars such as Samuel Wilson, Bickley, and many others argue, Harris's aim transcended race and culture. Whether it was deliberate or not may forever be an open question, but Harris succeeded in calling to mind some sobering, universal truths about human nature.
    Writing in Critical Essays, Louis D. Rubin, Jr. says:
    "Harris knew very well that the rabbit was a Negro....(but) the matter is a trifle more complex than that," he says. "What the rabbit exemplifies is the capacity to survive and flourish in a world in which society can be and often is predatory....
     Harris shows us that "power is in the hands of the strong; the weak cannot trust to any supposed belief in benevolence or fair play, (because) the real rules are those of power."

Heat and Light

     North Carolina's Jackie Torrence, arguably the queen of American storytellers, calls the incident "the most humiliating experience" she's faced in her 30-odd years of telling folktales.
     In the early 1980s, a group of young black people surrounded her Brer Rabbit storytelling session in New York's Central Park and began jeering and calling her names. She was forced to abandon the program and return to her hotel.
    On other occasions, she's been shouted off stages, interrupted in mid-story and told to switch tales or quit. In recent years, things have improved considerably, she says, but she's still careful not to invoke the name "Uncle Remus," something she's only rarely done in all her years of telling Brer Rabbit stories.
    Torrence, an African-American who heard her first trickster tales on her grandfather's knee, knows better than most about the problems black people have with Brer Rabbit, whom they associate with Joel Chandler Harris, whom they associate with racism.
    "It's the (baby) boomers who get offended, and usually it's the dialect that they find embarrassing," says Torrence, who once told a Brer Rabbit tale on David Letterman's TV show despite being asked not to by the show's producers.
    Hugh Keenan echoes Torrence on the issue of dialect, which Harris-with a gifted ear-came close to making into a literary art form all its own. Twain called Harris "the only master of black dialect in America," yet his own dialect writing and characterizations of blacks were sufficient to win him condemnation from today's black community that is clearly on a par with Harris's.
    "People think (the dialect) is demeaning and degrading," says Keenan. "It's also very hard to read and sometimes understand."
    Some of Harris's contemporary critics thought the latter true enough. Even in 1880, to many readers his stories seemed written in a foreign tongue as they most surely seem to many today. Harris defended his heavy use of dialect, claiming that it showed "the really poetic imagination," the "quaint and rugged humor," and "the sensitiveness of the Negro."
    But some black writers see Harris's dependence on dialect as just another way he exploited blacks for his own gain, making fun of speech patterns that were the product of centuries of forced illiteracy. Noted black author James Weldon Johnson eschewed dialect writing for this and other reasons.
    Harris's most vociferous modern-day critics, however, are bothered much less by his use of black dialect than what they perceive as more serious offenses Harris committed against the African-American heritage. Among the most vocal black critics of Harris is Pulitzer Prize-winning author Alice Walker (The Color Purple, 1982) who, by a quirk of history, was born in Eatonton, Harris's hometown.
    In a searing essay appearing in Southern Exposure in 1981 entitled "Uncle Remus, No Friend of Mine," Walker accuses Harris of stealing "a good part of (her) heritage"-by "making (her) feel ashamed of it." Walker is among a number of black critics who believe that Harris not only plagiarized her ancestors' folktales but basically usurped their opportunities to publish the stories themselves.
    Noted folklorist Roger D. Abrahams, in his Afro-American Folktales: Stories from Black Traditions in the New World (New York: Pantheon Books, 1985) decried what he called the "racist resonances that the Uncle Remus-style tellings continue to carry." His collections are an attempt to "celebrate the Black Achievement" in a context devoid of the kinds of racial stereotypes he finds in Harris.
    Dominating the criticisms of Harris, from both black and white writers, is his stereotyping of blacks. His portrayal of Uncle Remus as the ideal, subservient field hand who dearly loves his former masters and endorses their values is all the evidence many critics need to dismiss Harris outright.
    "There's a sense that Harris romanticized slavery," says Dr. Jerrilyn McGregory, an African-American folklorist in FSU's English department. "He created the between-story frame that in lots of ways tried to restore the plantation as this happy-go-lucky place, maybe fulfilling some kind of psychic need of his. So it's basically a fabrication, which is why (Harris) isn't upheld in scholarship today."
    As an indication of how the issue can polarize even African-American scholars, black author Julius Lester of the University of Massachusetts-Amherst takes a markedly different view. In the forward of his first volume of reconstituted Uncle Remus tales for children, he takes the issue of Remus's stereotyping head on, writing:
    "There are no inaccuracies in Harris's characterization of Uncle Remus. Even the most cursory reading of the slave narratives collected by the Federal Writer's Project of the 1930s reveals that there were many slaves who fit the Uncle Remus mold."
    Lester agrees that Remus did become a negative stereotype that subsequently was interpreted as a justification for slavery. But instead of being a result of Harris's fantasies, this fact "reflects the times in which (the Remus tales) appeared," he says.
    Lester, who admits to having grown tired "of the academic Remus wars," told Research in Review that as an African-American with roots in the South, he "was not embarrassed or ashamed" of any of the characters drawn by Harris.
    "I think people do their humanity an injustice by being ashamed of them," he said. "There are a lot of responses to living under oppression, and one response is to identify with the oppressor, with the slave master. This is something commonly seen even today in prisoner of war camps.
    "So, I am not going to stand here in the comfort of 1998 and look back and condemn somebody because they might have been obsequious or servile under conditions that I really cannot imagine."
    The point that gets buried in the "Remus wars," he said, is that Harris saved an invaluable legacy from oblivion. "The man made an important contribution, and I thank him for that. Without him, these tales would have been lost. That's what's really important."
    FSU's McGregory agrees with Lester on this point.
    "When it comes to the oral tradition, a lot will be lost unless someone comes along to write it down," she said. "There's a sense that these narratives may not even be recorded and there would not have been an emphasis on collecting them had it not been for Joel Chandler Harris."
    Bickley believes that the sudden interest in collecting folktales sparked by Harris's books may, in fact, prove to be the most enduring aspect of Harris's legacy. The immense popularity of the tales in the early 1880s triggered a fevered collecting binge across America that continued well into this century, he said. Black collectors were among the first to benefit from the phenomenon.
    The poetry of Paul Laurence Dunbar received wide circulation in the 1890s, although his adherence to quaint plantation themes drew fire from some leading critics of the day. Easily the most well-respected black writer directly influenced by Harris was a contemporary, Charles W. Chestnutt (1858-1932), regarded as the first major black novelist in American history. Chestnutt's fictionalized collection of tales and short stories, Conjure Woman, (1899), featured an Uncle Julius figure that one critic calls "the antidote" to Uncle Remus.
    In the 1920s, Arthur Huff Fauset became the first serious black collector of authentic folktales. Fauset was a contemporary of Zora Neale Hurston, a self-taught anthropologist, folklorist and now-canonized African-American author whose work with the Federal Writer's Project during the Depression produced a remarkable collection of authentic black folktales. Hurston's work may have influenced a succession of black writers and other well-known African-American folktale collectors, including J. Mason Brewer of Texas, William J. Faulkner of South Carolina and Richard Dorson of Ohio.
    Harris's legacy lives on in the first line of American novelists as well, says Bickley. On several occasions, Twain and Faulkner borrowed from Harris in framing their own settings, characters and narratives. Most recently, Harris's stamp may be seen in the novel, Tar Baby (Knopf, 1981), by African-American Nobelist Toni Morrison. In the book, Morrison presents four modernized, psychological treatments of the tar baby folktale, whose Harris version she heard as a child growing up in Ohio.
    "I believe Harris's impact on both American literature and popular culture in general may never be fully appreciated," Bickley said. "But I also think his insight into black consciousness, for his day, was impressive."
Critic Louis Rubin, writing in the mid-1970s, agreed, describing Harris's characterization of blacks "an important advance in the literary representation of the black man's humanity (at a time) when that humanity was generally (not) acknowledged...
    "If the attitudes of today seem far removed from those of the 1880s and 1890s," Rubin writes, "it might be proper to suggest that writers such as Joel Chandler Harris had something to do with that."

Letting Remus Go