Reading, intimacy, and the role of Uncle Remus in white southern social memory.

You see, my grandmother explained to me that when a black woman went into a white family's house as the cook and the baby sitter, this is the role of the mother.... [T]hat child is nurtured by whoever that person is, but somewhere that child learns to segregate himself, that he's better. She said, "So I really believe they hold classes at night."

Mazie Williams, Birmingham, Alabama 

WHEN JOEL CHANDLER HARRIS PUBLISHED HIS FIRST UNCLE REMUS folktales in the Atlanta Constitution in 1879 and 1880, white southern readers scarcely waited for the ink to dry before they began offering personal testimonials to the authenticity of the white Georgia author's representations of black character and plantation life. Some, like Barton N. Harrison, also gave impromptu readings. A southern-born lawyer living in New York City, Harrison eagerly clipped the reprints of the stories that appeared in the New York World and Evening Post. Unfolding the clippings, which he carried in his pocketbook, he read the tales of Brer Rabbit, Brer Fox, and the other "creeturs," as told by Harris's ex-slave narrator, Uncle Remus, "to all sorts of companies, at dinner parties & elsewhere (& always with shouts of laughter)," until the clippings were "fairly worn out." For these white northern audiences, Harris's stories were, as Harrison reported in a March 1880 letter to the Constitution, "the first graphic pictures of genuine negro life in the South." (1)

Curiously, Harrison had a harder time convincing a white southern politician of the accuracy of Harris's portraits. Although Senator Lamar (probably Lucius Q. C. Lamar of Mississippi) enjoyed the story, "his relish was less keen than mine," Harrison reflected, "for the single reason, I thought, that he has been so recently among the negroes as not to perceive the delicate touches of art in putting them on the stage." Lamar's response led Harrison to the intriguing conclusion that "to fully appreciate the wonderful skill [Harris] has shown in negro dialect, and his rare genius as a dramatist in reproducing the scenes, incidents and characters of plantation life, one must perhaps be, as I am, separated by weary years of time and long miles of space from the haunts of his childhood." (2)

Harrison's conclusion seems remarkable given his emphasis on the authenticity of Harris's work throughout the rest of his letter. Didn't Harrison realize that he was undercutting his own argument by suggesting that both Harris's fiction and his own reaction to it were essentially nostalgic? And if Harris's work was so "graphic" and "genuine," why must white southern readers be separated from rather than "among the negroes," as Senator Lamar was, to appreciate Harris's depiction of a black character type? Harrison might have explained that he was making a distinction between the older and younger generations of blacks, for, as he also put it in his letter, "the conditions of negro life are so changed since the war that, in another generation, the negroes themselves will almost have forgotten" the "homely and unpretentious legends of the time of slavery" that Harris's work had preserved. (3)

A better explanation lies in the fact that Barton Harrison and other white southern readers of Harris's Uncle Remus stories were in the process of constructing social memory--and not simply remembering the South of their childhoods. This essay examines that process. Analyzing both the production and the consumption of the Uncle Remus stories, I ask how Harris, a white southern author, was able to capture both the subversive spirit of African American folklore and the hearts of white southern readers. And, given the complexity of Harris's texts, I examine how white readers like Harrison were able to stitch this material so seamlessly into the fabric of their own developing memories of a plantation past. Addressing this second concern, I argue that reading and family intimacy were key components in the creation and cross-generational transmission of a white racial fantasy of intimacy-within-hierarchy that was at least as important in shaping white supremacist worldviews at the turn of the twentieth century as the more vitriolic rhetoric that dominated formal politics and other aspects of the public sphere. To understand how this could be, we need to begin by considering the nature of memory itself.

As a number of scholars have argued in recent years, there is no such thing as "simply remembering" in the sense of gaining direct, and unmediated, access to the past. Our memories are not like artifacts stashed away in a drawer waiting to be taken out whole and unaltered whenever we want them. Instead, remembering is an act of the present that addresses the needs of the present by shaping and reshaping material from the past (which we could never collect "whole" in the first place). (4) Because the needs of the present are determined at least in part by the world around us--or, as Jacquelyn Dowd Hall puts it, because "[p]ersonal memories tend to disappear unless they are rekindled through repetition, and we repeat what is considered significant by the groups with which we identify"--even our most private and individual memories are to some degree social or collective. Thus, having started with the deceptively straightforward question of how an individual remembers, we are suddenly catapulted into questions of even greater import for historians. For even though the precise nature of "collective" or "social" memory is a subject of much debate, scholars across a wide range of disciplines agree that the memories shared within groups are vital to group identity. Groups define themselves by defining their history--a process that is always ongoing and often hotly contested. Meanwhile, the historical narratives, images, and rituals of commemoration that groups produce become touchstones of unity and identification. As both a product of and a means of producing group identity, collective memory also becomes a "technique," to use Hall's word, of group power. By molding the past, groups give shape to their expectations for the present and the future, which is crucial to their efforts to create a certain social reality using political, economic, and cultural tools. At the same time, their visions of history validate their efforts--and alternative readings of the past offered by competing social groups become one of the grounds for challenging an emerging status quo. (5)

It is primarily as a "technique of power" that collective or social memory has captured the attention of southern historians. Focusing most of their efforts on the "Lost Cause," scholars have developed a rich understanding of an ideology built on certain interpretations of the past: specifically, of slavery as a benign institution; of the Civil War as a heroic struggle over states' rights (and not slavery) in which both North and South fought well; and of Reconstruction as a terrible mistake in which vindictive Yankees corrupted and misled the region's ignorant but naturally docile black population, forcing white southerners to redeem their governments and restore the natural order of things. As a number of historians have shown, white southerners articulated and debated elements of Lost Cause ideology almost from the moment of the Confederate surrender, but it was only at the turn of the twentieth century that this vision of the southern past took hold and solidified--often literally in the hundreds of monuments erected on county courthouse and state capitol grounds. By then, such expressions of white southern social memory reflected turn-of-the-century anxieties and concerns. (6)

Of particular concern were blacks' continuing challenges to white dominance and, more frightening still, the threat of an interracial coalition of the poor embodied in the Populist movement. Led by Democratic politicians who equated black voting with the threat of black-on-white rape, white southerners rallied against both blacks and Populists in the disfranchisement campaigns of the 1890s, and they began to formalize and extend existing patterns of racial segregation at the same time. (7) White southerners also turned their attention to history, where they found legitimacy for their actions in the Lost Cause narrative. By celebrating--and thereby fixing in place--this particular view of the past, supporters of the Lost Cause foreclosed other possibilities, including understandings of the past that might have energized opposition movements such as the one they had just put down, through appeals to white unity and the need to "protect" white womanhood. (8)

Like the work of the United Daughters of the Confederacy and other memorial associations, Joel Chandler Harris's writing performed a political function to the extent that it promoted a Lost Cause view of history. As W. Fitzhugh Brundage points out, promoting such a view, whether by erecting a statue, staging a reunion of Confederate veterans, or writing a book, "provided crucial ideological ballast for white supremacy by rooting the contemporary racial hierarchy in a historical narrative and in a manner that naturalized it." (9)

In the case of Harris's Uncle Remus stories, however, much of that ballast was supplied by white readers such as Barton Harrison rather than by Harris himself. Perhaps more than any other literary works associated with the Lost Cause tradition, Harris's Uncle Remus stories need to be understood in terms of readership as well as authorship. This is true because the Uncle Remus stories are especially complex and multivalent, like the Brer Rabbit folktales on which they are based, and because Harris himself deserves more credit for his relatively progressive racial views than he has generally gotten in the last thirty or forty years. (10) But it is also true because examining how readers like Barton Harrison responded to and used the Uncle Remus stories reveals another important layer in the "social history of remembering in the South." (11) That layer is the construction of deeply personal understandings of the past formed in white households and often in shared experiences between adults and children--children who, as adults in the first half of the twentieth century, would for the most part maintain not only the nostalgic view of slavery but also the deep commitment to segregation and white supremacy that their parents' generation had shown. (12) Thus, a look at Harris's readers sheds light on the transmission of white southern social memory, which lay at the heart of white racial identity. Read in the North, the Uncle Remus stories, like other works depicting stereotyped images of benevolent masters and faithful slaves, helped to foster reconciliation and wider identification among whites across regional boundaries, as scholars such as Nina Silber and Grace Elizabeth Hale have argued. (13) Read in white southerners' own parlors, these stories not only validated adults' racial views but reinforced lessons in white supremacy that white southern children also learned from the entire separate and unequal world around them. To that extent, family readings of the Uncle Remus tales were almost like the "classes at night" that Mazie Williams's grandmother and other black household workers could imagine white southerners holding in order to indoctrinate their children in white supremacy. (14)

Especially in relation to children, however, the Uncle Remus stories had the potential to do much more than this. Indeed, for generations black southerners had been using the Brer Rabbit tales at the heart of Harris's narratives to teach their own children lessons about survival in a decidedly brutal and unjust world. As the quintessential trickster, Brer Rabbit proved that the weak could outsmart and overcome the strong. His victories provided important psychological benefits. As Lawrence W. Levine writes, "The trickster's exploits, which overturned the neat hierarchy of the world in which he was forced to live, became [slaves'] exploits; the justice he achieved, their justice; the strategies he employed, their strategies. From his adventures they obtained relief; from his triumphs they learned hope." Both during slavery and after, blacks' stories about Brer Rabbit and other tricksters also taught subtler lessons about the human condition--in Levine's words, about the "world's irrationality" and "man's fundamental helplessness" --that are often overlooked when trickster tales are characterized as only embodying reversals of power. Above all, though, the Brer Rabbit folktales emphasized the importance of being worldly-wise, a character trait blacks could not afford to lose even long after slavery ended. As one black Texan told pioneering black folklorist J. Mason Brewer, the Brer Rabbit stories he heard from "de ole folks" awakened him "to de fac' dat hit tecks dis, dat an' t'othuh to figguh life out--dat you hafto use yo' haid fo mo'n a hat rack lack ole Brothuh Rabbit do." (15)

The limited evidence available suggests that white readers and especially white children identified with Brer Rabbit and other tricksters in some of the same ways that blacks did. But stronger evidence shows that white adults worked hard to incorporate Harris's potentially subversive Uncle Remus stories into the plantation tradition. In this effort, how whites read Uncle Remus was key. Grace Hale has recently emphasized the "white longing for a now gone and mostly imagined intimacy with blacks" that Harris's portraits of Uncle Remus and other faithful (ex-)slaves tapped into. (16) But parent-child intimacy in the reading experience was also a vital part of the process by which white southern social memory was constructed and passed on. Reading Harris's stories aloud and stressing the authenticity of Uncle Remus's personality and dialect at the same time that they performatively recreated his character, white southerners wrapped their children--and other audiences unfamiliar with plantation life, including northerners--in a richly "imagined" intimacy between blacks and whites in days gone by. But like the "remembering" of the Lost Cause, this "imagining" was taking place in the turn-of-the-century present, as white adults attempted to relive for themselves and recreate for their audiences the same warm relationships with black caregivers that they "remembered" from their own childhoods. To what extent adult white southerners had actually experienced intimacies with blacks in the past is a different question, and one whose answer does not necessarily reflect on the genuineness of whites' feelings. In other words, the emotions white southerners remembered and were imaginatively recreating through Harris's stories might have been real and powerful even if the blacks who figured in those memories had never shared their sentiments. The strength of whites' imagining, in turn, allowed characterizations of the contented slave to become cherished mementos--or, more precisely, mnemonics--of racial identity for southern and nonsouthern readers alike, even if white readers, and especially children, identified with the subversive Brer Rabbit as well as the kindly Uncle Remus. Thus, the "social history of remembering in the South" takes on an added dimension. Not only were white households an important site for the construction of white southern social memory, but household activities such as reading and homey, seemingly personal, emotional concerns such as the desire to share past pleasures with future generations were also important processes and motives in the transmission of historical understandings that served devastating political ends. Little wonder, then, that so many white southerners have found it so difficult over the years to unlearn the lessons of a highly manipulated but also deeply inculcated past.

Considering how great the impact of the Uncle Remus stories has been, we should first ask how Joel Chandler Harris was able to produce such controversial, yet enduring texts. Although dialect literature in general and Harris in particular have been "in bad odor," to quote one critic, since the civil rights era, the fact is that Harris was one of few prominent white southerners willing to speak out against racial injustice during the nadir of southern race relations. (17) Most notably, in 1904 Harris published a series of essays in the Saturday Evening Post in which he denounced lynching, praised the economic and educational gains African Americans had made since emancipation, and urged white readers to judge the race "by its best products, instead of its worst." (18) These essays earned him the admiration of black southerners, including the members of the Phillis Wheatley Woman's Club of New Orleans, who voted to place Harris's name in their "book of friendship" and promised to tell their children of his "encouraging words." Meanwhile, the editors of the Atlanta-based Voice of the Negro pronounced him "cultured, broad-gauged, far-seeing and patient" in his racial views.(19)

Contemporary readers familiar with Harris's editorial work were in a better position to understand his racial thinking than literary critics focused on his most popular writings have been. Far from simply reflecting Harris's own attitudes, the Uncle Remus stories actually presented a multivocal history of the plantation, with narrative authority divided among Harris, the Uncle Remus character he created, and the hundreds of storytellers who had shaped the Brer Rabbit folktales over the years. It is fruitless to attempt to sort out what Harris wanted to say, what he said to appeal to a white audience, and what he said to be true to the folklore. Cultural admixture--"love and theft," as Eric Lott describes it in a different context--is what the Uncle Remus stories were all about. (20) The important question, then, is not whether or to what extent Joel Chandler Harris was a racist, but why and how he, as a white southern author apparently committed to a nostalgic image of the old plantation, was able to capture such a multiplicity of racial views.

The answer lies in Harris's outsider status and in the fact that, although he remained loyal to the white South, his sympathies for black Americans also developed early and ran deep. Harris was born in the small town of Eatonton, Georgia, probably in 1845 or 1846, though he later said it was 1848. His mother was Mary Harris, an unmarried seamstress. His father was most likely an Irish day laborer who abandoned the family shortly after Joel--named after the attending physician, Dr. Joel Branham, and Mary Harris's uncle Chandler--was born. As a boy, Harris was small, sensitive, and prone to stutter; as an adult, he remained painfully shy and, despite his fame, never gave a single public speech. (21)

Because of his poverty and illegitimacy, Harris felt particularly beholden to Putnam County neighbors who helped him get a start in life, including one prominent Eatonton resident who gave him and his mother a small house to live in and paid his tuition at the local grammar school. "It is a great blessing ... for a young fellow in the clutches of poverty to be raised among such people as those who lived in Eatonton when I was a boy, and whose descendants still live there," he acknowledged in a rare interview in 1900. The residents of Eatonton were, as he suggested in an autobiographical short story, "the most democratic people the world has ever seen." (22)

Although Harris praised Eatonton for its democratic spirit, it was in the aristocratic context of the plantation that he found his fortune as a writer. In the spring of 1862 he began a four-year apprenticeship as a typesetter for The Countryman, a weekly newspaper published on the Turnwold plantation, nine miles from Eatonton, by Joseph Addison Turner. Well educated and ambitious, Turner proved a major influence for the teenaged Harris, providing him a male role model and encouraging his love of reading and his early literary efforts. (23)

Other men on the Turnwold plantation turned out to be important influences as well. While his accounts of this period are suspiciously romantic, Harris does seem to have experienced a close relationship with some of Turner's slaves and black hired hands, particularly two older men named Harbert and George Terrell, who first taught Harris many of the Brer Rabbit stories. It was in part to these men that Harris was referring when he told an interviewer that Uncle Remus was "a human syndicate ... of three or four old darkies whom I had known." (24)

If Harbert and Terrell were prototypes for Uncle Remus, Harris was not the "little boy," the unnamed white child to whom Remus tells his tales. Apparently, Harris modeled that role on a younger and more privileged boy's experience. "Did it never occur to you that you might be the little boy in 'Uncle Remus'?" Harris wrote to Joe Syd Turner, Joseph Addison Turner's son, in 1883. "I suppose you have forgotten the comical tricks you played on old George Terrell, and the way you wheedled him out of a part of his gingercakes and cider. Lord! those were the wonderfullest days we shall ever see." As this letter suggests, Harris never wholly identified with the little boy of the stories, however much he might have craved the emotional bond that he thought he saw between Terrell and Joe Syd Turner--and that he manufactured in his stories. Nor did he identify with Uncle Remus, although white readers and his own search for a fictive voice forced this identification upon him. Instead, he remained an outsider even as he retold the tales. "There is nothing here but an old negro man, a little boy, and a dull reporter," he apologized in the introduction to his third volume of stories. (25)

Harris's days at Turnwold did supply him with another role beyond that of the dull reporter: that of the white paternalist. He learned this role both through his interactions with slaves and by observing Joseph Addison Turner, who was a more benevolent master than most. Turner never allowed patrollers to search his plantation for runaways, and he refused to rehire an overseer who had "sometimes been rougher with the negroes than I like." He also allowed his slaves to work for themselves, allotting them small plots of land and paying them the market price for whatever crops or crafts they produced. When talk of a slave insurrection circulated in Putnam County during the Civil War, Turner (as depicted in Harris's autobiographical novel On the Plantation) laughed at other whites' anxieties, assuring his young apprentice that "people who treated their negroes right had nothing to fear from them." (26) Harris absorbed Turner's teachings, remaining convinced in later years that the solution to the South's race problems had really been so simple "that reflecting people are inclined to go off into some quiet place and beat their heads against the wall in sheer vexation." After emancipation, white southerners "had only to hold out our hands to these poor, unfortunate people [the freedpeople] to renew the confidence and affection that had always existed between the white and colored races in the South." Instead, bitterness had grown up between all too many blacks and whites as they tried to adjust to the profound social changes the Civil War had wrought. (27)

The end of the Civil War also brought an end to what may have been the happiest period of Harris's life, as Turner found it impossible to continue to publish The Countryman. Well trained as a printer and greatly improved as a writer, Harris struck out on his own in early 1866 to begin a career in journalism that would take him first to Macon, then to New Orleans, the small town of Forsyth, Georgia, and Savannah. By the time he went to work for the Savannah Morning News in 1870, he had earned a statewide reputation as a humorist. Soon after, Harris met Esther LaRose, a young French Canadian woman who would become his wife and lifelong companion, bearing him nine children, managing his busy household, and, as he became increasingly famous and increasingly reticent, helping to shield him from the public eye. They were married in April 1873. A concern for Essie's health, as well as that of their young sons Julian and Evelyn, born in 1874 and 1875, eventually brought the Harrises to Atlanta. Waiting out a Savannah yellow fever epidemic in Atlanta's healthier climate during the summer of 1876, Harris accepted first a temporary and then a permanent position with the Atlanta Constitution, where he would work until his retirement from journalism in 1900. (28)

Harris's new colleagues reinforced his paternalistic attitude toward African Americans. Working closely with Constitution editor Henry W. Grady, Harris quickly learned that amelioration of the southern "race problem" was an important prerequisite for the reconciliation of North and South, upon which southern economic development depended. Grady and other New South boosters used the rhetoric of paternalism with great facility, offering glowing testimonials to southern racial harmony and countless examples of African Americans' material advancement under the benevolent rule of the "better classes" of southern whites. (29)

Sectional reconciliation was a major concern for Harris as well, "but more from an abhorrence of bitterness," as historian Wayne Mixon puts it, "than from calculation of how much Northern capital could be lured southward." (30) Unlike Grady and other spokesmen of the New South movement, Harris doubted the benefits of industrial development and grew to despise the materialism that he felt industrialization brought. His ideal vision of a New South, which he articulated often in his regular editorials, improved on what he saw as the democratic and agrarian traditions of antebellum Georgia. Harris pursued this vision in fiction as well, contriving in one Reconstruction-era story after another to bring an ex-Union soldier and a southern belle together in a successful marriage that was secured by diversified farming. Former slaves, in the meantime, stayed with their masters and mistresses, slowly overcoming their own prejudices against interloping Yankees. (31)

In addition, although Harris's racial paternalism served the same political and economic expedients as that of Grady and other New South spokesmen, his was deeper and longer lasting. Even after the turn of the century, when vicious racists had won control of southern governments and many former moderates had begun to criticize African Americans for making too little progress, Harris continued to applaud black achievements and preach optimism for the future. Mixon suggests that Harris's retirement from the Constitution in 1900 allowed him to become still more outspoken in his "iconoclastic" racial views, as indicated by forthright articles in the New York Journal in 1901 and the Saturday Evening Post in 1904. (32)

Even before Harris published those essays, his sympathy for blacks had long been evident to sensitive readers, and at least some of his contemporaries believed he was actively trying to improve race relations through his literary efforts. A 1906 letter from Francis J. Garrison, son of abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison, suggests that Harris had told him as much: "When, several years ago, I wrote and thanked you for the humanitarian spirit which has always pervaded your writings, where negroes are concerned[,] ... you replied with your usual modesty and said that you were endeavoring to do by indirection what you never could accomplish by direct methods. I appreciated your position and could take no exception to the wisdom of it, from your standpoint." By 1906, however, Garrison felt the times called for greater urgency. Horrified by the four-day race riot that left twenty-five blacks dead and hundreds more wounded in Atlanta that September, Garrison urged Harris to "stand up" and condemn the violence "in no uncertain terms." Such a stand would represent a change in approach but not a change in attitude on Harris's part, since Garrison knew Harris's "heart and head" to be "sound in this matter." (33)

Although Harris was never willing to speak out as boldly as Garrison wanted, he did continue to work by indirection. A 1907 letter to Andrew Carnegie, though undoubtedly shaped to appeal to Carnegie's interests, offers the best evidence available that eliminating racism was, for Harris, a conscious and long-held goal. In need of funds to help his new monthly, Uncle Remus's Magazine, get on its feet, Harris assured Carnegie that its financial security would enable him "to carry out certain policies that I have in mind with respect to the negro question."

   These policies cannot be successfully exploited in a daily newspaper,
   where they would fly in the face of the schemes of the politicians.
   I am sure that I shall be able to smooth over and sooth [sic], and
   finally dissipate all ill feelings and prejudices that now exist
   between the races. At my time of life, I have no higher ambition;
   in fact, it is the only ambition I have ever had, the only line of
   policy that I have ever deliberately mapped out in my own mind....
   What I am anxious for you to do is to join hands with us, so that the
   policies and principles I have in mind--the obliteration of prejudice
   against the blacks, the demand for a square deal, and the
   uplifting of both races so that they can look justice in the face
   without blushing--may be definitely carried out.

Articulated only in the privacy of a personal letter, this was perhaps Harris's most unequivocal statement against racial prejudice. (34)

Almost equally bold, in the heyday of scientific racism, was his public suggestion in a 1904 essay that race was irrelevant in determining intellect and talent. In response to whites who attributed Booker T. Washington's exceptional qualities to the "white blood" he had received from his father, Harris retorted, "But is it not true that a man like Booker Washington is an exception in any race? He is an orator of great power, a writer of unusual ability, and an extraordinary administrator of large and complicated interests. And as to his negro blood, why not state the fact in a different way? Why does it not operate to hamper and hinder him?" (35)

Harris had questioned the significance of race before but in the guise of fiction, where such thoroughgoing heresies might go unrecognized. For example, a sagacious white character in his 1902 novel Gabriel Tolliver observes that black people offer "a glimpse of how white folks would look an' do wi'out the'r trimmin's." Similarly, Uncle Remus informs the little boy that it is unimportant whether the man in one of his stories is black or white. He also tells a story, "Why the Negro is Black," in which all humans are dark-skinned until they wash in a pool of water, and some remain dark because the pool has all but dried up by the time they reach it. Thus, Remus--and, by implication, Harris--teaches white readers that blacks are not fundamentally different from whites. They have simply been stuck, then as now, at the end of the line. (36)

Tempting as it is to paint Harris as a racial iconoclast--to agree with Wayne Mixon that as "a valuational concept, race was, to Harris at his best, meaningless"--the fact remains that Joel Chandler Harris was not always at his best. (37) He accommodated southern racism more often than he challenged it, and his most serious challenges were so subtle that white southerners could easily ignore them while continuing to take what they wanted from his stories. The stories themselves, though never as romantic as his contemporaries' portraits of the old plantation nor as vulgar as the shams of the minstrel stage, partook of enough of white southern myth and racist humor to make it clear that their author was inconsistent and perhaps even manipulative. Critics are correct in seeing a kind of theft in Harris's appropriation of the Brer Rabbit stories. It was not a theft of materials, however, so much as a theft of meanings. When Joel Chandler Harris retold African American folktales to white readers from a white southerner's point of view, he not only betrayed the trust that had allowed him access to a "hidden transcript" of African American culture, but he also robbed that transcript of some of its subversive content. (38) This consequence, more than any misrepresentation of the tales themselves, is what gives power to Alice Walker's lament that, because of Harris, black children born in the twentieth century began to learn these stories from a "talking teddy bear" like Uncle Remus rather than from their own people. (39)

Although he always described himself as an "accidental author," Harris was sufficiently self-conscious in his efforts to learn and recreate black folklore to know that he was taking something more than mere story lines from his informants. He invented the Uncle Remus character shortly after he joined the Atlanta Constitution in 1876. Sam W. Small, writer of popular dialect sketches about an elderly black man named Old Si, had recently left the paper, and editor-in-chief Evan P. Howell asked Harris to take over the feature. Over the next three years, Harris developed Uncle Remus from a two-dimensional comic figure whose statements about Reconstruction-era social conditions advanced the Democratic Party position to a fully delineated character with a distinct personality and history. At the same time, Harris endowed Uncle Remus with much of his own nostalgia for Turnwold and would eventually move him from the streets of Atlanta to the Middle Georgia plantation of "Mars Jeems" and "Miss Sally." In December 1877 an article in Lippincott's Magazine awakened Harris to the literary possibilities of the Brer Rabbit stories he remembered from his youth. As he considered those tales seriously for the first time, he may also have remembered Joseph Addison Turner's conviction that African American characters should have a prominent place in southern literature and that their language, as well as their songs and stories, ought to be preserved. Harris published his first folklore sketch, "The Story of Mr. Rabbit and Mr. Fox as Told by Uncle Remus," in July 1879. He followed this in mid-November with "Brer Rabbit, Brer Fox, and the Tar-Baby," and his versions of black folktales then became a regular Sunday feature of the Constitution for the next several months. Reprinted in the New York Evening Post and other papers, Harris's stories gained a national audience, and in the spring of 1880 D. Appleton and Company approached him about publishing a collection. Uncle Remus: His Songs and His Sayings appeared in late November, just in time for the Christmas rush. (40)

Even at this early stage in his career as an amateur folklorist, Harris was unwilling to rely solely on his memory of the tales and therefore turned to other white southerners for help. In an April 9, 1880, editorial he explained that he had a dual purpose in writing the folklore sketches: "to preserve in permanent shape those curious mementoes of a period that will no doubt be sadly misrepresented by historians of the future" and to preserve the dialect in which the stories were told. With these goals in mind, he sought out the versions of the stories that seemed most typical of Georgia plantations and refused to publish any that could not be authenticated by white southerners who were familiar with antebellum plantation life. (41)

The success of his first volume, and especially the encouraging letters he received from folklore specialists at home and abroad, alerted Harris to the importance of collecting his stories directly from blacks. (42) As he began to prepare a second and more ethnographically ambitious volume of stories, published as Nights with Uncle Remus in 1883, he tried whenever possible to get his material orally and firsthand. He described one such effort in the introduction to Nights with Uncle Remus. On a summer night in 1882 he found himself at a tiny railroad station in Norcross, Georgia, twenty miles northeast of Atlanta. His train delayed, he eased his way into a group of African American railroad workers who were resting on a nearby pile of crossties. "They seemed to be in great good-humor," he recalled, "and cracked jokes at each other's expense in the midst of boisterous shouts of laughter." Harris listened for a while, then he "told the 'Tar Baby' story by way of a feeler," his excuse being that one of the storytellers had mentioned Ole Molly Har, Brer Rabbit's wife. Apparently free of his legendary shyness in this setting, Harris followed the Tar Baby story with another tale. The result, in addition to "peals of unrestrained and unrestrainable laughter," was "that, for almost two hours, a crowd of thirty or more negroes vied with each other to see which could tell the most and the best stories." (43)

That Harris had gained access to a hidden transcript is obvious. That he knew what he was doing also seems clear. "It was night, and impossible to take notes," he explained, "but that fact was not to be regretted. The darkness gave greater scope and freedom to the narratives of the negroes, and but for this friendly curtain it is doubtful if the conditions would have been favorable to story-telling." Harris was not simply romanticizing the darkness; instead, his awareness that he could not take notes while blacks were talking, coupled with his observation in a letter to Mark Twain that "[i]t is easy to get a story from a negro by giving him a sympathetic cue, but without this it is a hopeless task," indicates that he knew that he was hearing something that African Americans did not normally allow white adults to hear. As his comments on a volume of South African folklore in the same 1883 introduction reveal, he also understood that informants were capable of "cook[ing]" their narratives to suit their audience. (44)

Harris preferred his narratives uncooked, and he was willing to infiltrate black cultural spaces to get them and to ask other whites to do the same. "Can't you get some one, who has the knack, to get in with some old negro, male or female, and secure me a dozen or more specimens?" Harris wrote to R. W. Grubb, a newspaperman in Darien, Georgia. "The only way to get at these stories is for the person seeking them to obtain a footing by telling one or two on his own hook--beginning, for instance, with the tar-baby. There are few negroes that will fail to respond to this." (45)

Apparently, some African Americans required little prompting. In her 1918 biography, The Life and Letters of Joel Chandler Harris, Harris's daughter-in-law Julia Collier Harris speculated that he had extracted promises for more tales from the railroad workers at Norcross, which were later sent to him as "fragments ... scrawled in almost undecipherable characters on scraps of paper and signed 'Jim' or 'Buck.''' She also printed an 1881 letter from an African American informant in Senoia, Georgia, as evidence of the rough form in which Harris received many of the tales. Harris had already published his own version of the Senoia informant's story in 1880 and so did not use this particular outline as a model (which may be why the letter survived, since Harris seems to have destroyed his original notes and drafts as he worked). Nevertheless, the Senoia letter deserves to be reprinted in full as a rare example of the type of black sources from which Harris worked:

   Mr. Harris I have one tale of Uncle Remus that I have not seen in
   print yet. Bro Rabbit at Mis Meadows and Bro Bare went to Bro
   Rabbit house and eat up His childrun and set his house on fire and
   make like the childrun all burnt up but Bro Rabbit saw his track he
   knowed Bro Bare was the man so one day Bro Rabbit saw Bro Bare in
   the woods with his ax hunting a bee tree after Bro Rabbit spon howdy
   he tell Bro Bare he know whare a bee tree was and he would go an
   show and help him cut it down they went and cut it an Bro Rabbit
   drove in the glut while Bro Bare push his head in the hole Bro
   Rabbit nock out the glut and cut him hickry. Mr Harris you have the
   tale now give it wit I never had room to give you all you can finish
   it. (46)

While Julia Harris intended for this example to show that her father-in-law deserved credit as more than a mere "compiler" of folktales, the Senoia letter also bears witness to the rewriting of African American narratives that has earned him so much blame from critics. As folklorist Linda S. Chang points out, a comparison of this story outline with Harris's version of the same tale, published in 1880 as "The End of Mr. Bear," suggests that Harris either chose less violent variants or toned down the violence of the folktales to make them more palatable to whites. As a result, he also robbed the stories of some of their subversive intent and made them all the more available for white readers to use for their own purposes. In Harris's telling of this story, Brer Rabbit's deception of Brer Bear is not a matter of revenge because Brer Bear has not eaten Brer Rabbit's children. Instead, the bee tree is simply a clever ploy on the part of Brer Rabbit, who senses that Brer Bear wants to do him in. Harris's story also ends more ambiguously than the Senoia version. In the latter, Brer Rabbit seizes the moment when Brer Bear has his head stuck in the tree to "nock out the glut and cut him hickry," which presumably means that Brer Rabbit removes some kind of wedge or brace that is holding the partially cut tree in place and lets the tree fall, crushing Brer Bear. Harris's Brer Rabbit lets the bees do the dirty work. He stirs up the hive at the base of the hollow tree and dances and sings gleefully as the bees sting Brer Bear's head until it swells so much that he cannot pull it back out of the trunk. "[D]e way he stir up dem bees wuz sinful," Remus concludes. "But dar ole Brer B'ar hung, en ef his head ain't swunk, I speck he hangin' dar yit." (47)

Assuming Harris had heard this story at least once in a version close to that rendered by the Senoia correspondent, the choices he made in retelling it are instructive. To begin with, if Harris chose to eliminate the prelude in which Brer Bear gobbles up Brer Rabbit's children, then he did not merely rid the story of some of its violence, but he also destroyed the logic behind it. Certainly, the desire for revenge, especially for the loss of children, would have resonated with the slaves and former slaves who told this story. Harris had already told one story about revenge for the loss of children in "The Awful Fate of Mr. Wolf," and he may have thought a second story on the same theme would be repetitious. (48) Nevertheless, the fact that African Americans repeated this theme in more than one tale suggests its significance in their lives, a significance that belied Harris's romantic images of slavery, just as repeated stories about revenge belied his paternalistic images of blacks.

Harris's choices in framing "The End of Mr. Bear" are also important, especially given its audience of white readers. Harris describes Uncle Remus as being "unusually cheerful and good-humored" when the little boy seeks him out for the evening's entertainment. Yet Remus is also outraged that the little boy has received a whipping for throwing rocks at some poor white children who live nearby. "W'en I see deze yer swell-head folks like dat 'oman w'at come en tell yo' ma 'bout you chunkin' at her chilluns, w'ich yo' ma make Mars John strop you, hit make my min' run back to ole Brer B'ar," Uncle Remus explains, making a direct--if rather bizarre--connection between the folktale and Harris's narrative frame. "Ole Brer B'ar, he got de swell-headedness hisse'f, en ef der wuz enny swinkin', hit swunk too late fer ter he'p ole Brer B'ar." A question from the little boy launches the story, which now has another layer of meaning rooted in Uncle Remus's prejudicial love for his white folks, especially the white child. Rather than being primarily a narrative in which the weak take revenge against the strong for the loss of their children, "The End of Mr. Bear" becomes in Uncle Remus's telling a story about the bad things that can happen to those who are prideful, including, in this case, a poor white woman who has criticized the behavior of a child of the white upper class. (49)

This final reading of "The End of Mr. Bear" suggests how much Harris had to stretch to remain true to a character he had created to appeal to a white southern newspaper audience. Just as Uncle Remus has "nothing but pleasant memories of the discipline of slavery," he also "has all the prejudices of caste and pride of family that were the natural results of the system"--prejudices that Harris himself never completely shared. (50) Perhaps this was why Harris was so reluctant to take on the role of Uncle Remus outside of print. Much has been made of Julia Harris's statement that her father-in-law "never told [the Uncle Remus] stories to his own or any other children." His comparative ease around children, his enormous facility with spoken as well as written dialect, and his friends' recollections that "when interested and in the mood, he [was] a capital talker" make his reticence all the more curious. Perhaps he simply found the role of Uncle Remus--the ex-slave character who could turn a trickster tale into an argument against uppitiness--impossible to play. (51)

Instead, Harris fell back on his description of himself as a "dull reporter." Such a role allowed him to deny any responsibility for the way things were and any power to make things change, but it may also have been the only role possible for a man who was too sensitive to ignore injustice in his society yet too emotionally fragile to crusade against it, except occasionally from the safety of his writing desk. "I am really as remote from the activities of the world, and from the commotions that take place on the stage of events as any of the ancients were," Harris wrote to his son Evelyn in 1900. "It is the accident of temperament," he continued, claiming that he was "very sure" that his temperament--what Mark Twain called his "immortal shyness"--had been "moulded by circumstances and surroundings." "All that goes on has a profound significance for me," Harris admitted, "but I seem to be out of the way, a sort of dreamy spectator, who must sometimes close his eyes on the perpetual struggle that is going on." (52) Ambivalent, inconsistent, shy, Harris kept his eyes open at times and even occasionally lent his voice to contemporary struggles in hopes of persuading his white readers to treat African Americans as fellow human beings. Most important, he opened his ears to former slaves' folktales. In the end these tales were better stolen--or robbed of their most subversive meanings--than lost. The Uncle Remus stories and the cultural sensation they created were the result.

If Joel Chandler Harris never told the Uncle Remus stories to children himself, plenty of other white southerners did, and they were joined by northerners, the British, and (as Harris's books were quickly translated) readers all over the world. (53) What did contemporary readers see in the Uncle Remus stories that made them so popular? Some readers' vision was surprisingly clear. Reviewing the British edition of Uncle Remus: His Songs and His Sayings in 1881, an anonymous critic for London's Spectator observed that "the interest of the book is not in its illustrations of slavery, but in its picture of the kind of imaginations in which the negro slave most delighted." The reviewer then took issue with Harris's own weak-kneed analysis of the racial content of the tales. In the introduction Harris had asserted that "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. It is not virtue that triumphs, but helplessness; it is not malice, but mischievousness." "Mr. Harris should have said, 'It is not virtue that triumphs, but cunning,'" the Spectator critic insisted, "for mere 'helplessness' can never triumph; and the object of all these legends is to show that races of inferior physical strength are not helpless, but more able to help themselves by cunning than their adversaries by tooth and claw." Indeed, in overcoming fiercer animals, Brer Rabbit and Brer Terrapin also made their enemies look ridiculous. Thus, the reviewer concluded, the slaves' stories embodied not only their "delight in the astuteness of the weak," but also "the contempt of the weak for the humorously exaggerated stupidity of the strong." (54)

Other contemporary readers picked up on the power reversals the Spectator critic described, but few were so confident in their analyses. A reviewer for the New York Times found it "indeed curious to notice how the negro in all his stories places the rabbit first in the scale of animal intelligence, and the fox second, reversing the white man's ideas of their comparative standing." George Leonard Chaney, a Unitarian minister from Boston, thought he saw something significant in the fact that both Uncle Remus and Aesop were slaves. "It is, perhaps, too much to claim that slavery is peculiarly adapted to the development of the fable," he ventured, "but something to that effect might be plainly made out, by the prevalence and popularity of this form of literature among the former slaves of the country." (55)

Nevertheless, Chaney's observations also reveal the logical fallacies of white readers who brought their own racist preconceptions to Harris's texts. In Chaney's view, slaves concocted "fables" (Harris saw the tales as allegories, a more intellectually sophisticated genre) because "the fable, or preaching by story, is the favorite mode of all ignorant and childish people." Starting with this fixed notion of blacks' mental capacities, Chaney had no trouble accepting Harris's explanation of the power reversals in the tales. Rather than accusing Harris of downplaying the subversiveness of the tales' content, as the Spectator critic did, Chaney praised Harris for turning "a sudden side-light upon negro character which those who have to deal with it will do well to remember. A good-natured monkey playing possum, incarnate mischief making believe dead and helpless, such is the character depicted...." (56)

Scholars pioneering in the new field of comparative folklore may have been more open-minded, on the whole, than Chaney, but they too had many questions about the relationship between Brer Rabbit and Uncle Remus. "Imagine my surprise when I began to receive letters from learned philologists and folk-lore students from England to India, asking all sorts of questions and calling upon me to explain how certain stories told in the rice-fields of India and on the cotton-fields of Georgia were identical, or similar, or at least akin," Harris exclaimed.

     Then they wanted to know why this folk-lore had been handed
     down for centuries and perhaps for thousands of years. They
     wanted to know, too, why the negro makes Brer Rabbit so cunning
     and masterful. These letters came from royal institutes and
     literary societies, from scholars and from travelers. What
     answer could I make to them? None--none whatever. All that
     I know--all that we Southerners know--about it, is that every
     old plantation mammy in the South is full of these stories.

Harris's response, especially his shift from "all that I know" to "all That we Southerners know," was certainly disingenuous, perhaps even a self-conscious dodge. Rather than divulging his own suspicions about the "solemn" and "melancholy" features of the tales, he reaffirmed his identification with the white South and reintroduced the "old plantation mammy" to discourage potentially dangerous speculation: for what could the dear old mammies--or the lovable Uncle Remus--possibly know of cunning? (57)

For the most part, white readers accepted Harris's advice not to analyze the Brer Rabbit stories too much. Although white readers continued to be interested in the folklore and certainly enjoyed the tales' humor, the extent to which they focused their attention on Harris's narrative frames about Uncle Remus and the little boy seems remarkable from a twenty-first-century perspective. And yet, Harris's first newspaper sketches about the Uncle Remus character had been popular enough in their own right that Harris announced plans to collect them into a book over a month before he had Uncle Remus narrate his first folktale. (58) The addition of the little boy as an audience for the charming ex-slave's narratives increased their appeal to white readers tremendously. As literary critic John Goldthwaite has perceptively observed, Harris's popularity resulted largely from his ability to recreate the storytelling experience: "[N]ever before had the image of the storyteller or the occasion of the telling been made so real to life or so appealing as with this old Negro and this compliant white child." (59) Mark Twain said much the same thing. Attempting to reassure an insecure Harris, who thought it must be "the matter and not the manner that has attracted public attention," Twain insisted that "the principle of life" was in the settings as well as in the tales. "In reality," Twain wrote, "the stories are only alligator pears [avocados]--one eats them merely for the sake of the dressing." North and South, white readers embraced Uncle Remus and the little boy and proclaimed Harris an expert on race relations. The New York Evening Post even pronounced Uncle Remus: His Songs and His Sayings to be, in Harris biographer Paul Cousins's words, "the worthiest and most considerable contribution to the literature of Negro life that had yet been made." (60)

Not surprisingly, white southerners praised the accuracy and expert qualities of Harris's sentimental picture of southern life even more fervently than did readers in the North. Reviewers for the New Orleans Daily Picayune and Harris's own Atlanta Constitution insisted that the loving relationship between Uncle Remus and the little boy was not "overdrawn." Georgia poet Sidney Lanier commented on the realism of the Uncle Remus character and wished that he could see and hear Uncle Remus as well as read his words. Vanderbilt University professor William Malone Baskervill's biographical sketch for the Nashville Union described Harris as "one of the brightest, serenest lights of the new literary era in the south." From its very first sentence, Baskervill added, Uncle Remus: His Songs and His Sayings "showed that [Harris] understood and appreciated the peculiar relationship which existed between the white children of the south and the old 'daddie' or 'mammie' of the plantations." (61) Thomas Nelson Page, already an acknowledged master of the plantation romance, was especially generous in his approbation, arguing in an 1891 article in Lippincott's that Harris's work should be singled out "not for its ethnological value" and "not for its dialect, accurate and entertaining as we find it in the hands of a master of sound." Instead, Page averred, the "true secret of the power and value of Uncle Remus and his 'Sayings' lies in the artistic and masterly setting and narration." "Through this medium," Harris had painted an "absolutely true" picture of life in the South. To read the Uncle Remus stories was not to study "animal myths" or learn "phonetic arrangements," Page continued. It was to travel back in time and experience the warmth of Harris's narrator firsthand: "[W]e are translated bodily to the old man's fireside in his cabin, listening with 'Miss Sally's Little Boy' to Uncle Remus himself as he tells us stories the merit of which as stories springs directly from the fact that Uncle Remus knows them, is relating them, and is vivifying them with his own quaintness and humor...." At the same time--and in sharp contrast to the more assertive and much criticized "New Negro" coming onto the southern scene by the late nineteenth century--Uncle Remus was, in Page's view, "impressing us in every phase with his delightful and lovable personality." (62)

Page's sense of being transported back in time to a comforting world of racial harmony was shared by many white southern readers. In their letters to Harris, white southerners often thanked him for restoring childhood memories and for accurately interpreting the South to the rest of the world. Barton Harrison was especially effusive, declaring that "the author of the stories ... has, by writing them, rendered a kind personal service to me, as to thousands of others." But Harrison was not alone. Former vice president of the Confederacy Alexander H. Stephens was equally grateful for the jog to his memory. "My father had an old family servant whose name was Ben," Stephens told Harris in a letter. "Often have I sat up late at nights in his house, and heard nearly every one of those stories about Brer Rabbit, Brer Fox, and Brer Terrapin, as you have reproduced them. In reading them, I have been living my young life over again." (63)

White southern readers lauded Harris's representation of black dialect for much the same reason that they praised his narrative frames. Harris's language, like his sketches, carried white southerners back to a time they found more pleasant than the 1880s and 1890s and reintroduced them to black folks they considered more pleasant as well. This fact was not lost on Harris, who worked hard on the dialect and recognized, as he put it in the introduction to Uncle Remus: His Songs and His Sayings, that dialect was "the medium" through which the Brer Rabbit stories had "become a part of the domestic history of every Southern family." (64) As Harris seems to have understood, sound could trigger white southerners' memories just as effectively as characterization--indeed, it was probably a surer tool since few of the "old family servants" whom readers like Alexander Stephens remembered could possibly have been as uniquely lovable and unfailingly devoted as the fictional Uncle Remus. Dialect was a simpler mnemonic.

Georgia state senator A. O. Bacon suggested how this mnemonic process worked. "[T]here is no other man in America who can write [dialect] as you do," Bacon wrote to Harris in 1883. "I recognize it where I see it or hear it but could not myself produce it although my entire childhood was spent among them [Lowcountry blacks].... I repeat that your accuracy is perfectly marvelous. I read it with a broad grin as the dialect comes back with its familiar and grotesque features." Meanwhile, such a "familiar and grotesque" way of speaking defined a certain African American character type in white southerners' minds. As Helen Barclay of Darien, Georgia, lamented, "The younger generation apes the white people so as to almost lose the soft accent & expressive pause between parts of sentences ... --but oh, the 'Yaas!' in the mouth of one of the old time darkies surpasses by far the shrug of the German or the uplifted hands or 'Je ne sais pas' of the French." Thus, like his sentimental sketches of Uncle Remus and the little boy at the fireside, Harris's use of dialect resurrected the (uneducated) "old time darkies" whom Barclay and other white southerners preferred and whose perceived qualities of inferiority and acceptance made the southern social order make sense in white southerners' minds. "If I could only read one of these stories to a Yankee audience as it sh[oul]d be read--no drawl, no nasal twang--and not have them guessing and messing it all up!" Barclay exclaimed, emphasizing, as Harris's readers often did, a desire to see the South's story told "as it should be" in all of its details. (65) Northern audiences were certainly willing to listen, as Barton Harrison's account of reading Uncle Remus stories at New York dinner parties suggests. Twenty years later, northerners' Curiosity about the South and their love for Harris's dialect were still strong. "These people up here know so little of the real negro and seem to enjoy your writing[s] so much since I have told them that they are real," a Georgian living in Vermont wrote Harris in 1901. Like many other southerners, she had been asked to read Harris's dialect aloud and interpret his stories because she "was from 'The South.'" (66)

As these examples suggest, southerners often took it upon themselves to interpret Harris's work to audiences unfamiliar with plantation life, particularly to children in both the North and the South. "Some of those stories ... were the delight of my own childhood," Barton Harrison wrote:

   I have often lamented that they were beyond reach
   here and I now rejoice in the prospect of having them
   all introduced to the little ones of the rising generations
   in my nursery.... Now is the very time to have had them
   written out--the conditions of negro life are so changed since
   the war that, in another generation, the negroes themselves
   will almost have forgotten such homely and unpretentious
   legends of the time of slavery. (67)

Although few expressed themselves as clearly as Harrison did, many white southerners felt the same way. They embraced Harris because his work fulfilled not only their nostalgic longing for childhood but also their desire to recreate the best aspects of their own childhood experiences for their growing sons and daughters. Coupled with lamentations about changes in the nature of southern race relations after the Civil War, white southerners' delight in Uncle Remus and the little boy makes it clear that one part of the past they fervently wished to recreate was their own remembered intimacies with African Americans. Whether the blacks involved understood or would have remembered these relationships with an equally rosy glow is almost beside the point; the emotions white readers experienced felt real enough, even if their memories often exaggerated the closeness between their childhood selves and black caretakers. Even more complex, white southerners' desire for cross-racial harmony could be entirely genuine despite the fact that all such acts of nostalgic remembering required an enormous amount of repression and willful denial of racial realities, past and present, that these same white southerners had to see, if not fully comprehend, as adults living through the nadir of southern race relations.

Particularly in their roles as parents, white southerners were willing and able to deny the racial violence and systematic social and economic oppression of blacks they saw all around them. Indeed, Harris's stories helped them to reinterpret and rationalize a system that they themselves perpetuated and from which they drew considerable benefits. As a writer for Georgia Education put it in 1900, Harris's white readers were "refreshed by the devotion and loyalty that existed between ['the old ante-bellum negro'] and his master" in Harris's accounts. Instead of guiltily seeing blacks as victims of their own racism, white southerners could remember or reimagine them as happy and loving elders whose "songs and sayings supply amusement for many a home and fireside." (68) In this respect, the trickster tales' subversive content may actually have been a plus precisely because it showed that blacks were not completely downtrodden but remained creative, amusing, even spunky--and, of course, whites needed not dwell on the question of how serious blacks' desire to see the weak triumph over the strong might still be. Indeed, white readers did not have to recognize themselves as "the strong" in the South's racial equation. The success of turn-of-the-century politicians' wildly exaggerated threats of "Negro domination" proves that white southerners were more than capable of turning a blind eye to the reality of just how imbalanced southern power relations were. (69)

Absorbed as evidence of blacks' vitality and "mischievousness," to use Harris's word, the stories' subversive potential merely added to their humor. And associating blacks with humor must have been quite a comfort to white southerners in a world where political rhetoric, in particular, made the racial situation seem grim. Told to view every black man as a threat, even as a natural-born rapist, white readers eagerly embraced the witty and lovable Uncle Remus as a safe and satisfying alternative. "[E]ach tale we would pronounce more clever than the last," the Georgia Education writer noted chirpily. "With their absolute artlessness and sincerity they go straight to the heart of the people." (70)

And from the hearts of white southerners to the ears of white children. Black men might seem newly dangerous, and black servants might seem less dedicated in the New South than they had been in the Old--or so white southerners said over and over, cursing the younger generation with one breath and praising their "old black mammies" with the next. (71) But by turning Harris's Uncle Remus tales into a literature for children, whites could at least demonstrate to the young how the "love" of black caretakers bad felt. At the same time, white southerners' dramatic readings helped them to naturalize racial power relations and assuage their own consciences; to explain themselves and the society they lived in to the rising generation; to teach their children how, but for a Civil War and Reconstruction that had ruined everything, black folks and white folks could get along just fine. Blacks might no longer be slaves, but they still could cheerfully love and serve whites.

Even in relation to children, the ambiguities of the Brer Rabbit stories failed to shake whites' confidence in the gratifying emotions embodied in Harris's narrative frames. "I have sometimes wondered what the effect of such stories upon susceptible children would be," George Leonard Chaney, the Unitarian minister, mused at a meeting of the Atlanta Literary Circle in the late 1880s. One of few to criticize Harris's stories at all, Chancy soon made it clear that his concern was not about race but about morals, particularly the "unmixed admiration with which [children] greet the cunning, duplicity, deceit, ingenuity, [and] the absence of conscience or conviction in which Brer Rabbit excels." It "must have a damaging effect upon them," he admitted. "And yet, the antagonist of Brer Rabbit is commonly such a rascal, that there is a sort of moral tonic in having him caught up with, by whatever means." (72)

Writing about her own reproductions of African American folklore in 1892, amateur folklorist Abbie Holmes Christensen expressed the same concern for children's morals, but with a clearer understanding of the stories' racial content. A northerner and daughter of abolitionists, Christensen saw more--or was willing to discuss more--of the subversive content of black folklore than most whites. The stories might "seem as innocent of any moral motif as the animals themselves," Christensen wrote, clearly feeling a need to educate her readers. But "[i]t must be remembered that the Rabbit represents the colored man":

   He is not as large nor as strong, as swift, as wise,
   nor as handsome as the elephant, the alligator, the bear,
   the deer, the serpent, the fox, but he is 'de mos' cunnin'
   man dat go on fo' leg'--and by this cunning he gains success.
   So the negro, without education or wealth, could only hope
   to succeed by stratagem.

"If we believe that the tales of our nurseries are as important factors in forming the characters of our children as the theological dogmas of maturer years," Christensen concluded, "we of the New South cannot wish our children to pore long over these pages." (73)

Yet the white children of the New South did pore over the pages of the Uncle Remus stories, many searching the Constitution for them before they appeared in book form. One Atlantan writing in the 1940s described his "own earliest endeavor in the field of literature" as "the frantic search for missing pages from our frazzled copy of Uncle Remus, long since read to pieces by older brothers, cousins, and grown-ups, too." (74) Grown-ups frequently read Harris's stories out loud, in part because Uncle Remus's dialect was difficult for young readers even in an age when dialect literature was popular, but also because adults and children alike loved to hear Harris's words and repeat them. Reading aloud gave adults additional opportunities to influence children's thinking by telling them what they had long been telling northerners: that Uncle Remus was typical of "good old-time Negroes," that the affection between Uncle Remus and the little boy was genuine, that they themselves or someone they knew had experienced the "love" of African Americans. By taking on the role of Uncle Remus in dialect-driven performances of Harris's stories, they Recreated the ego-swaddling affection of blacks they "remembered" of their own antebellum or Civil War-era childhoods. Self-consciously or not, adults were also teaching white children fundamental lessons about the kinds of remembering and the willful self-deceptions involved in being white.

What white children took away from such directed readings of Harris's work is difficult to say. Certainly, they loved his stories. "Why, the people--including the children--are calling for you, & that has not happened to any author of late years," a promoter wrote to Harris in April 1885, in hopes of persuading him to go on a reading tour (which the diffident Harris never did). (75) Children also wrote to Harris by the hundreds, although their letters, only a handful of which survive, reveal comparatively little about why they loved his books so much. Significantly, the rare glimmers of explanation in children's letters suggest that, as Reverend Chaney feared, white children loved the duplicitous Brer Rabbit even more than the doting Uncle Remus. For example, the fifty-seven girls and boys of the sixth and seventh grades of a Rockwall, Texas, public school wrote to Harris to thank him for his stories "over and over again." "[W]e hope that there are many happy years ahead of you," they added. "And should difficulties arise, that you shall as effectively conquer them as 'Brer Rabbit' did his." Clearly, these young readers understood something of how Brer Rabbit repeatedly triumphed over adversity, but mention of Uncle Remus is nowhere to be found in their letter. As much as adult readers praised the accuracy of Harris's plantation settings, as much as they cherished the "peculiar relationship" between Uncle Remus and the little boy, the children who wrote to Harris at the turn of the century had little to say on these matters. (76)

Although it would be a historical to draw conclusions based solely on later generations' love of the subversive characters created by Roald Dahl and other popular children's authors--not to mention several generations' love of Bugs Bunny--it hardly seems surprising that white children liked the Brer Rabbit stories. Wholly apart from questions of race, young readers may have understood Brer Rabbit's comparative weakness to be analogous to their own weakness in relation to the adult world. In short, they may have identified with the trickster putting one over on the establishment. In this, white children would have been very much like, if racially more privileged than, the black children for whom the Brer Rabbit stories had long served as both humorous and cautionary tales. (77) Lewis M. Killian, a white Georgian who grew up in the 1920s, suggests as much in his 1994 autobiography Black and White: "To me as a little boy, Uncle Remus was simply a wonderful storyteller; his characters and their exploits were of first importance. Br'er Rabbit, Br'er Fox, Br'er B'ar, Br'er Wolf, and others were semihuman figures portraying human virtues and frailties." (78)

Nevertheless, as a retired sociologist who devoted much of his career to the study of racial attitudes, Killian also understands his love of the Uncle Remus stories in the context of his own subtle indoctrination into a "genteel" white supremacy. "Images, beliefs, and practices that I would later question, and even abhor, seemed natural then to me," he writes. "Some of the earliest stories I remember having read to me are considered racist today. I loved them." Precisely how these stories contributed to his racial socialization is something Killian ultimately cannot explain. "If old Uncle Remus conveyed the stereotype of the black man as Uncle Tom, I was not aware of it," he asserts. Nor did he grasp the "veiled protest theme" that he later came to see in the folklore. Such "themes were as far beyond my comprehension as was the notion that Uncle Remus might be a symbol of the subservient black and the little boy a 'role model' from whom I would learn that I could call black men 'uncle,' but not 'mister.'" (79)

Killian's reflections do, however, shed some light on how the Uncle Remus stories became part of his education on race. In particular, his comments suggest that the pleasure of the reading experience was as important as the stories themselves. Discussing other black characters now considered to be racist stereotypes, Killian notes that he liked the story of dimwitted Epaminondas even more than "the heroic figure Little Black Sambo outwitting the tigers," perhaps, he adds, "because my mother told it in dialect." Uncle Remus, too, was a character whom Killian's mother brought to life orally, reading the stories in her own version of Harris's version of black Georgians' speech. (80) The implication, it seems, is that stories have more appeal and thus more significance for children when adults perform the part of the storyteller. Harris, moreover, had supplied not only a comparatively melodious dialect for a script, but also a richly depicted storyteller and idealized setting in which the telling was supposed to take place.

Although they rarely mention his characterizations of Uncle Remus and the little boy, children's letters to Harris almost always describe the pleasures of reading and being read to, pleasures they came to associate with a black man named Uncle Remus, which was also many readers' name for Harris himself. A young girl from Brooklyn undoubtedly captured many children's enjoyment of the tales, in a short letter written in her own uncertain hand:

   Dear Mr. Harris,
   The book that you sent to us [is] very fine.
   The tar baby story we made mama read ovar and ovar
   becase it is so fine. We thout that all the stor[ies]
   [were] so funy that mama bout me your new book for Christmas.
   With love, Hazel R. Lafrentz (81)

Along with children's consumeristic delight in wanting and getting, as one twelve-year-old put it in a letter to Harris, "one of your books for my very own," the domestic pleasures of reading may have been the most significant part of the Uncle Remus phenomenon as far as the perpetuation of white racial identity is concerned. (82) The Uncle Remus stories were a form of entertainment that adults and children could share and that children probably enjoyed as much for the adult attention they received as for the stories' content, subversive or otherwise. Parents' letters are even more suggestive in this regard. "[M]y little girl, now ten years of age, has for the past four or five years derived more absolutely genuine pleasure from Uncle Remus than from any other book or story whatsoever," a father wrote to Harris in 1901, adding that "her father in reading the book to her over and over again has derived but little, if any, less pleasure therefrom than the child." (83) Associating Uncle Remus's voice with that of a mama or papa or teacher who read the stories to them over and over in more or less exaggerated dialect and who gave them attention and allowed them to have books "of their very own," white children familiar with Harris's work came to know blacks as lovable characters, in the same intimate, domestic context that would yield countless tributes to "Mammy" and other stereotypical "good, old-time Negroes."

That young readers saw Uncle Remus in this light is suggested in the most detailed account of white children's response to Harris on record. At the end of April 1882, Harris traveled to New Orleans to meet Mark Twain and George Washington Cable to discuss a joint lecture tour that never did materialize. As Twain recorded in Life on the Mississippi, during his stay in New Orleans Harris "deeply disappointed a number of children who had flocked eagerly to Mr. Cable's house to get a glimpse of the illustrious sage and oracle of the nation's nurseries." Piling into Cable's parlor, they exclaimed, "Why, he's white!" "They were grieved about it," Twain continued. "So, to console them, the book was brought, that they might hear Uncle Remus's Tar-Baby story from the lips of Uncle Remus himself--or what, in their outraged eyes, was left of him." As these children learned, to their further disappointment, Harris had never read his stories out loud and was too shy to attempt to do so now. "Mr. Cable and I read from books of ours, to show him what an easy trick it was," Twain concluded, "but his immortal shyness was proof against even this sagacious strategy, so we had to read about Brer Rabbit ourselves." Cable verified Twain's story in a letter to Julia Harris in January 1918. "Your father[-in-law] could not overcome his shyness enough to read in our parlor to the family circle and Mark read for him," Cable wrote. "The children were inconsolable to find Uncle Remus nothing but a white man!" (84)

That white southern children might be surprised to discover that Harris was white is understandable, but why should they be "inconsolable, "why "grieved"? Perhaps because they felt they had been lied to, because a white Uncle Remus cast doubt upon all that adults had told them about black folks and their contentment on the old plantation and the natural love they felt for whites. All their lives such children had heard their parents and other white adults lament that African Americans were no longer as good and loving as they had been in the past. Now Uncle Remus turned out not to be a black man at all, but a white imitation who refused even to perform the black character for them as their own parents and teachers had routinely done. As these children in New Orleans discovered, the real "Uncle Remus" was neither black nor uniquely loving and lovable. Instead, he was "nothing but a white man," while the black man who loved to entertain white children did not exist. He was a figment of white readers'--and Joel Chandler Harris's--minds.

Because most white southern children never had to confront Harris's whiteness, though, and because they learned the Uncle Remus stories within the intimacy and comfort of their own family circles, generation after generation of white southerners could accept their elders' performances of blackness as a pleasant substitute for the South's racial realities. As they matured and were no longer protected from guilty knowledge of the violence and inequality that underlay the southern system, they too could understand the desire to wrap their children in the warm, soft love of the "good old-time Negroes" whom Harris's stories had made an almost real part of their own young lives. For even if they voted for hatemongers like "Pitchfork" Ben Tillman and James K. Vardaman, few white southerners liked to think of themselves as hateful people. Even if some blamed a younger generation of blacks for degeneracy and thought a race war was imminent--as one college professor found 29 percent of his students did in 1909--few wanted to believe, or wanted their children to believe, that violence and antagonism were the natural order of things. (85) Nor was it easy to admit their own culpability in denying all opportunity to blacks. Better to preserve what they could of an earlier innocence, both the supposed innocence of racial interactions under slavery, when blacks "knew their place," and the more tangible innocence of childhood, when white southerners simply did not have to think about such distressing subjects. Harris's fiction and, more broadly, the plantation literature that flourished well into the twentieth century in and beyond the South, filled a gap left by the loss of childhood innocence of race by becoming part of the "domestic history" of many southern (and nonsouthern) families for several generations. At the same time, these home truths based in fantasy and performance shaped a regional and increasingly national white memory in which, not slavery per se, but the kind of intimacy-within-hierarchy that the relationship between Uncle Remus and the little boy depicted became white Americans' "Lost Cause."

(1) Barton N. Harrison to the Editor of the Atlanta Constitution, March 23, 1880, Folder 2, Box 6, Joel Chandler Harris Papers (Special Collections Department, Robert W. Woodruff Library, Emory University, Atlanta, Ga.). For their generous help and insightful comments on my work on Harris at various stages, I would like to thank Jacquelyn Dowd Hall, Suzanne Lebsock, John F. Kasson, Joel Williamson, Reginald F. Hildebrand, James L. Leloudis, Molly Rozum, Melody Graulich, Daniel J. McInerney, Susan Ryan, Susan Matt, Leigh Edwards, Kirsten Wood, Allison Sneider, Jason McGill, Gavin Campbell, Glenda Gilmore, Edward D. C. Campbell, Anne Firor Scott, and the anonymous readers for the Journal of Southern History. I am also grateful to the Special Collections librarians at Emory University and to the Department of History and the Graduate School of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill for financial support.

(2) lbid. According to the online Biographical Directory of the United States Congress (http://bioguide.congress.gov), Democrat Lucius Q. C. Lamar of Mississippi, who served from 1877 to 1885, is the only Lamar ever to serve in the U.S. Senate. However, Harrison might have been referring to a state senator, a possibility I have not pursued.

(3) Barton N. Harrison to the Editor of the Atlanta Constitution, March 23, 1880, Folder 2, Box 6, Harris Papers.

(4) Our memories never begin with "whole" understandings of the past because our experiences of the present are always partial and subjective. On this point see Edward M. Bruner, "Experience and Its Expressions," in Victor W. Turner and Edward M. Bruner, eds., The Anthropology of Experience (Urbana and Chicago, 1986), 3-30; and Joan W. Scott, "The Evidence Of Experience," Critical Inquiry, 17 (Summer 1991), 773-97.

(5) Jacquelyn Dowd Hall, "'You Must Remember This': Autobiography as Social Critique," Journal of American History, 85 (September 1998), 440 n. 2 (first quotation), 441 (second quotation). The literature on memory is extensive and growing. For a valuable overview that encompasses many disciplines and outlines the major theoretical debates, see Jeffrey K. Olick and Joyce Robbins, "Social Memory Studies: From 'Collective Memory' to the Historical Sociology of Mnemonic Practices," Annual Review of Sociology, 24 (1998), 105-40. Also helpful is Barbie Zelizer, "Reading the Past Against the Grain: The Shape of Memory Studies," Critical Studies in Mass Communication, 12 (June 1995), 214-39. My own Approach to social memory has been influenced most by Hall, "'You Must Remember This,'" 439-65; and W. Fitzhugh Brundage, "No Deed but Memory," in Brundage, ed., Where These Memories Grow: History, Memory, and Southern Identity (Chapel Hill and London, 2000), 1-28.

(6) On the monuments and architecture of the Lost Cause see Catherine W. Bishir, "Landmarks of Power: Building a Southern Past in Raleigh and Wilmington, North Carolina, 1885-1915," in Brundage, ed., Where These Memories Grow, 139-68; and Kirk Savage, Standing Soldiers, Kneeling Slaves: Race, War, and Monument in Nineteenth-Century America (Princeton, 1997). On the Lost Cause more generally see Hall, "'You Must Remember This,'" 439-65 (quotation on p. 441); Gaines M. Foster, Ghosts of the Confederacy: Defeat, the Lost Cause, and the Emergence of the New South, 1865 to 1913 (New York and Oxford, 1987); Nina Silber, The Romance of Reunion: Northerners and the South, 1865-1900 (Chapel Hill and London, 1993); Charles Reagan Wilson, Baptized in Blood: The Religion of the Lost Cause, 1865-1920 (Athens, Ga., 1980); and Fred Arthur Bailey, "The Textbooks of the 'Lost Cause': Censorship and the Creation of Southern State Histories," Georgia Historical Quarterly, 75 (Fall 1991), 507-33.

(7) On the disfranchisement campaigns of the 1890s see Glenda Elizabeth Gilmore, Gender and Jim Crow: Women and the Polities of White Supremacy in North Carolina, 1896-1920 (Chapel Hill and London, 1996), 61-118; C. Vann Woodward, Origins of the New South, 1877-1913 (Baton Rouge, 1951), 235-63, 321-49; and J. Morgan Kousser, The Shaping of Southern Politics: Suffrage Restriction and the Establishment of the One-Party South, 1880-1910 (New Haven and London, 1974). On the origins of legal segregation see C. Vann Woodward, The Strange Career of Jim Crow (3d rev. ed.; New York, 1974). Howard N. Rabinowitz summarizes the numerous critiques of Strange Career in "More Than the Woodward Thesis: Assessing The Strange Career of Jim Crow," Journal of American History, 75 (December 1988), 842-56.

(8) As much recent work has shown, white women were not only symbols but also important participants in the memorialization campaigns. See W. Fitzhugh Brundage, "White Women and the Politics of Historical Memory in the New South, 1880-1920," in Jane Dailey, Glenda Elizabeth Gilmore, and Bryant Simon, eds., Jumpin' Jim Crow: Southern Politics from Civil War to Civil Rights (Princeton and Oxford, 2000), 115-39; Anastatia Sims, The Power of Femininity in the New South: Women's Organizations and Politics in North Carolina, 1880-1930 (Columbia, S.C., 1997), esp. chap. 4; Drew Gilpin Faust, Mothers of Invention: Women of the Slaveholding South in the American Civil War (Chapel Hill and London, 1996), 252-54; Grace Elizabeth Hale, Making Whiteness: The Culture of Segregation in the South, 1890-1940 (New York, 1998), 79-80; Cheryl Thurber, "The Development of the Mammy Image and Mythology," in Virginia Bernhard et al., eds., Southern Women: Histories and Identities (Columbia, Mo., and London, 1992), 87-108; and Catherine Clinton, Tara Revisited: Women, War, and the Plantation Legend (New York and other cities, 1995), 174-87.

(9) Brundage, "White Women and the Politics of Historical Memory," 126.

(10) On one extreme is critic Bernard Wolfe, who in 1949 challenged more than half a century of widespread admiration for Harris by portraying him as a frustrated "neurotic" who "virulently hated," as well as loved, the black storytellers whose material made him famous. Wolfe, "Uncle Remus and the Malevolent Rabbit: 'Takes a Limber-Toe Gemmun fer ter Jump Jim Crow,"' reprinted in R. Bruce Bickley Jr., ed., Critical Essays on Joel Chandler Harris (Boston, 1981), 70-84 (first quotation on p. 71; second quotation on p.83, emphasis in original). In the 1960s and 1970s, scholars tended to share Wolfe's disparaging view of Harris as someone who manipulated black folklore, though few scholarly analyses were as damning as Wolfe's popular polemic. For example, see Darwin T. Turner, "Daddy Joel Harris and His Old-Time Darkies" (1968), reprinted in Bickley, ed., Critical Essays on Joel Chandler Harris, 113-29. By the 1980s and 1990s, some literary critics and historians were acknowledging the complexity of the Uncle Remus tales and the fact that Harris's black characters were not merely one-dimensional stereotypes. Thus, on the other extreme, we find scholars such as Wayne Mixon, who has argued persuasively that "a major part of [Harris's] purpose as a writer was to undermine racism." Mixon, "The Ultimate Irrelevance of Race: Joel Chandler Harris and Uncle Remus in Their Time," Journal of Southern History, 56 (August 1990), 457-80 (quotation on p. 461). Anyone wishing to trace the literature on Harris should begin with two invaluable annotated bibliographies: Robert Bruce Bickley Jr., Karen L. Bickley, and Thomas H. English, Joel Chandler Harris: A Reference Guide (Boston, 1978); and R. Bruce Bickley Jr. and Hugh T. Keenan, Joel Chandler Harris: An Annotated Bibliography of Criticism, 1977-1996, With Supplement, 1892-1976 (Westport, Conn., 1997). Despite the salvage work of Mixon and others, Harris is still sometimes dismissed as a racist and, as Hugh T. Keenan noted in 1996, Bernard Wolfe's essay "is still often cited and reprinted as if it were valid." Keenan, "Rediscovering the Uncle Remus Tales," Teaching and Learning Literature, 5 (March/April 1996), 34.

(11) Brundage, "No Deed but Memory," 3.

(12) Both Jacquelyn Dowd Hall's work on Katharine Du Pre Lumpkin and Fred Hobson's But Now I See: The White Southern Racial Conversion Narrative (Baton Rouge, 1999) remind us that some white southern children who were indoctrinated in the Lost Cause later renounced white supremacy as adults. Interestingly, as Hall points out, Lumpkin attributed her rebellion not only to adult experiences but also to the habits of reading and debate her parents instilled in her and to the "contradictions and contingencies" within Lost Cause ideology itself. Hall, "'You Must Remember This,'" 458.

(13) Silber, Romance of Reunion, 139-41; Hale, Making Whiteness, esp. chap. 2.

(14) Mazie Williams, interviewed by Paul Ortiz, Birmingham, Ala., July 1, 1994, from Behind the Veil: Documenting African American Life in the Jim Crow South, Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University (Rare Book, Manuscript, and Special Collections Library, Duke University, Durham, N.C.).

(15) Lawrence W. Levine, Black Culture and Black Consciousness: Afro-American Folk Thought from Slavery to Freedom (New York, 1977), chap. 2, esp. 114 (first quotation), 120 (second and third quotations), 113 (fourth and fifth quotations).

(16) Hale, Making Whiteness, 59.

(17) Robert Bone, "The Oral Tradition," reprinted in Bickley, ed., Critical Essays on Joel Chandler Harris, 130-45 (quotation on p. 130).

(18) Joel Chandler Harris, "The Negro of Today," Saturday Evening Post, January 30, 1904, reprinted in Julia Collier Harris, ed., Joel Chandler Harris: Editor and Essayist (Chapel Hill, 1931), 130-46 (quotation on p. 132); hereinafter cited as Harris, ed., Editor and Essayist. The other essays in the Saturday Evening Post series were "The Negro as the South Sees Him," January 2, 1904, and "The Negro Problem," February 27, 1904; both are also reprinted in Harris, ed., Editor and Essayist, 114-29 and 146-59, respectively.

(19) Mary C. Turner to Joel Chandler Harris, February 20, 1904, Folder 7, Box 6, Harris Papers; "Vardaman and Uncle Remus," Voice of the Negro, 1 (March 1904), 119-20 (quotation on p. 119).

(20) Eric Lott, Love and Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy and the American Working Class (New York and Oxford, 1993).

(21) Walter M. Brasch, Brer Rabbit, Uncle Remus, and the "Cornfield Journalist": The Tale of Joel Chandler Harris (Macon. Ga., 2000), 2-4; Julia Collier Harris, The Life and Letters of Joel Chandler Harris (Boston and New York, 1918); Paul M. Cousins, Joel Chandler Harris: A Biography (Baton Rouge, 1968); R. Bruce Bickley Jr., Joel Chandler Harris (Boston, 1978); Hugh T. Keenan. ed., Dearest Chums and Partners: Joel Chandler Harris's Letters to His Children: A Domestic Biography (Athens, Ga., and London, 1993). On the question of Harris's birth date see W. J. Rorabaugh, "When Was Joel Chandler Harris Born? Some New Evidence," Southern Literal Journal, 17 (Fall 1984), 92-95; and Brasch, Brer Rabbit, Uncle Remus, and the "Cornfield Journalist," 18 n. 1, 19 n. 11.

(22) "Joel Chandler Harris Talks About Himself." Atlanta Daily News, October 10, 1900, quoted in Cousins, Joel Chandler Harris, 21-22 (first quotation); Harris, Life and Letters, 8 (second quotation).

(23) Cousins, Joel Chandler Harris, 34-67.

(24) Harris, Life and Letters, 34, 146 (quotation).

(25) Ibid., 159-60 (first quotation); Joel Chandler Harris, Uncle Remus and His Friends: Old Plantation Stories, Songs, and Ballads with Sketches of Negro Character (Boston and New York, 1892), x (second quotation). In his autobiographical work On the Plantation, Harris suggests that, unlike the little boy in his stories, he may have had to earn blacks' trust, as his alter ego Joe Maxwell does by abetting a runaway slave. Joel Chandler Harris, On the Plantation: A Story of a Georgia Boy's Adventures During the War (New York, 1892), 28-33.

(26) Cousins, Joel Chandler Harris, 42-43 (first quotation); Harris, On the Plantation, 50 (second quotation).

(27) Atlanta Constitution, January 17, 1880, quoted in Harris, ed., Editor and Essayist, 61-2.

(28) Cousins, Joel Chandler Harris, chap. 5; Brasch, Brer Rabbit, Uncle Remus, and the "Cornfield Journalist," 16-18, chap. 2; Bickley, Joel Chandler Harris, 24-29. For a sympathetic description of Esther LaRose Harris see Harris, Life and Letters, esp. 111, 123-24. Three of the Harris children died young. Four sons (Julian, Lucien, Evelyn, and Joel Chandler Harris Jr.) and two daughters (Lillian and Mildred) survived into adulthood.

(29) On the New South rhetoric of Henry Grady and others see Paul M. Gaston, The New South Creed: A Study in Southern Mythmaking (New York, 1970).

(30) Wayne Mixon, Southern Writers and the New South Movement, 1865-1913 (Chapel Hill, 1980), 75.

(31) Harris followed this "romance of reunion" theme most notably in "A Story of the War," which appeared in his first volume of Uncle Remus stories, Uncle Remus: His Songs and His Sayings (New York, 1880). According to Brasch, Harris also depicted North-South marriages in "An Amuscade," "At Teague Poteet's," "Rosalie," "Trouble on Lost Mountain," and "Azalia." Brasch, Brer Rabbit, Uncle Remus, and the "Cornfield Journalist," 126 n. 11. On the prevalence of this theme in the postbellum North see Silber, Romance of Reunion.

(32) Mixon, "Ultimate Irrelevance of Race," 461-62 (quotation on p.461), 477-78. For these articles see Harris, ed., Editor and Essayist, 130-59; and Harris, Life and Letters, 500-503.

(33) Francis J. Garrison to Joel Chandler Harris, September 27, 1906, Folder 9, Box 6, Harris Papers. For a concise account of the Atlanta riot see Leon F. Litwack, Trouble in Mind: Black Southerners in the Age of Jim Crow (New York, 1998), 315-19.

(34) Joel Chandler Harris to Andrew Carnegie, November 2, 1907, Folder 3, Box 4, Harris Papers.

(35) Harris, "Negro of Today," 143.

(36) Joel Chandler Harris, Gabriel Tolliver: A Story of Reconstruction (New York, 1902), 189; Joel Chandler Harris, The Complete Tales of Uncle Remus, comp. Richard Chase (Boston, 1955),459, 109-11.

(37) Mixon, "Ultimate Irrelevance of Race," 479.

(38) On the Brer Rabbit stories as part of black southerners' "hidden transcript," see James C. Scott. Domination and the Arts of Res istance: Hidden Transcripts (New Haven and London, 1990), esp. 19, 163-66.

(39) Alice Walker, "The Dummy in the Window: Joel Chandler Harris and the Invention of Uncle Remus," in Walker, Living By the Word: Selected Writings, 1973-1987 (New York and other cities, 1988), 31.

(40) Joel Chandler Harris, "An Accidental Author," Lippincott's Monthly Magazine,37 (April 1886), 417-20; Cousins, Joel Chandler Harris, 54, 95-107, 112, 131. Harris never specified the title or date of the Lippincott's article that encouraged his interest in black folklore, but Cousins (p. 105) speculates that it was "Folklore of the Southern Negroes" by William Owens, which appeared in December 1877. For a thorough account of Harris's development of the Uncle Remus character between 1876 and 1880, see Eric L. Montenyohl, "The Origins of Uncle Remus," Folklore Forum, 18 (Spring 1986), 136-67.

(41) Cousins, Joel Chandler Harris, 111.

(42) For an excellent study of Harris's ambivalent relationship with the professional folklore community, see Kathleen Light, "Uncle Remus and the Folklorists," reprinted in Bickley, ed., Critical Essays on Joel Chandler Harris, 146-57.

(43) Joel Chandler Harris, Nights with Uncle Remus: Myths and Legends of the Old Plantation (Boston and New York, 1883), xv-xvi.

(44) Ibid., xvi (first quotation), xvii (third quotation); Joel Chandler Harris to Samuel L. Clemens, August 4, 1881, in Harris, Life and Letters, 168 (second quotation).

(45) Joel Chandler Harris to R. W. Grubb, February 3, 1883, in Harris, Life and Letters, 192-93.

(46) Harris, Life and Letters, 197 (quotations). Folklorist Florence E. Baer suggests that Harris's method of composing the Uncle Remus stories probably resulted in the destruction of the original outlines in Sources and Analogues of the Uncle Remus Tales (Helsinki, 1980), 17-18.

(47) Linda S. Chang, "Brer Rabbit's Angolan Cousin: Politics and the Adaptation of Folk Material," Folklore Forum, 19 (Fall 1986), 42-14; "The End of Mr. Bear," in Harris, Complete Tales of Uncle Remus, 90-94 (quotations on p. 94). Brer Bear appears in four stories prior to "The End of Mr. Bear" and is duped each time. Harris, Complete Tales of Uncle Remus, 74-80, 83-90.

(48) "The Awful Fate of Mr. Wolf," in Harris, Complete Tales of Uncle Remus, 42-45. In this story, Uncle Remus explains that Brer Rabbit could not "leave home 'cep' Brer Wolf 'ud make a raid en tote off some er de fambly"--a situation that eventually makes Brer Rabbit "mad" (p. 42).

(49) "The End of Mr. Bear," in Harris, Complete Tales of Uncle Remus, 90-94 (first quotation on p. 90; second and third quotations on p. 92).

(50) Harris, Complete Tales of Uncle Remus, xxvii.

(51) Harris, Life and Letters, 159 (first quotation); Forrest Adair, "Joel Chandler Harris," American Illustrated Methodist Magazine. 2 (October 1899), 126 (second quotation). See also Ray Stannard Baker, "Joel Chandler Harris," Outlook, 78 (November 5, 1904), 601-2. Walter Hines Page assured readers, "l have Mr. Harris's own word for it that he can think in the Negro dialect. He could translate even Emerson, perhaps Bronson Alcott, in it, as well as he can tell the adventures of Brer Rabbit." Quoted in Harris, Life and Letters, 164. Alice Walker interprets Harris's reluctance to tell his stories out loud less charitably than I do, arguing that "to base the personality of the storyteller on such a preposterous foundation [the idea that Uncle Remus had 'nothing but pleasant memories of the discipline of slavery'] constituted a deception beyond Harris's attempt somehow to pass himself off as a black man. As a white man, when he opened his mouth to speak as 'Uncle Remus,' perhaps he felt this." Walker, "Dummy in the Window," 29.

(52) Joel Chandler Harris to Evelyn Harris, April 5, 1900, in Keenan, ed., Dearest Chums and Partners, 351. For Twain's comment see Mark Twain, Life on the Mississippi (Boston, 1883), 472.

(53) Brasch notes that Harris's first book, Uncle Remus: His Songs and His Sayings (1880), sold about 10,000 copies within six months, making it a best-seller. Brasch, Brer Rabbit, Uncle Remus, and the "Cornfield Journalist," 82. Harris's second book, Nights with Uncle Remus (1883), sold almost 25,000 copies in twenty-three printings and another 80,000 copies after it was reprinted by Houghton Mifflin in 1904. Hugh T. Keenan, "Joel Chandler Harris," in Glenn Estes, ed., Dictionary of Literary Biography. Vol. XLII: American Writers for Children Before 1900 (Detroit, 1985), 229.

(54) "Uncle Remus," Spectator, April 2, 1881, pp. 445-46, reprinted in Bickley, ed., Critical Essays on Joel Chandler Harris, 6-7 (first quotation on p. 6; third, fourth, and fifth quotations on p. 7); Harris, Complete Tales of Uncle Remus, xxv (second quotation). The title of the British edition was Uncle Remus and His Legends of the Old Plantation (London, 1881).

(55) "Negro Folk-Lore," New York Times, December 1, 1880, p. 3, reprinted in Bickley, ed., Critical Essays on Joel Chandler Harris, 3 (first quotation); Wallace Putnam Reed, "Joel Chandler Harris," Literature: A Weekly Magazine, October 27, 1888, pp. 430-31 (second quotation).

(56) Chaney quoted in Reed, "Joel Chandler Harris," 431. In the introduction to Uncle Remus: His Songs and His Sayings Harris wrote that one of the stories of Brer Rabbit and Brer Fox "seems to me to be to a certain extent allegorical, albeit such an interpretation may be unreasonable." Harris, Complete Tales of Uncle Remus, xxv. Despite the racist remarks, Chaney appears to have been comparatively progressive for his day. Founding minister of the first Unitarian congregation in Atlanta, Chaney supported black education and, from 1893 to 1900, served on the boards of trustees of both Atlanta University and Tuskegee Normal and Industrial Institute. A biographical sketch is available in the George Leonard Chaney Papers (Special Collections Department, Robert W. Woodruff Library, Emory University, Atlanta, Ga.).

(57) Harris, Life and Letters, 162. In his introduction to the first volume of Uncle Remus stories, Harris suggests his awareness that the folklore was more than just funny: "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." Harris, Complete Tales of Uncle Remus, xxi.

(58) The Atlanta Constitution printed a notice about Harris's intention to bring out a collection of Uncle Remus stories on June 8, 1879. The first folklore story did not run until July 20. See Montenyohl, "Origins of Uncle Remus," 156-58.

(59) John Goldthwaite, The Natural History of Make-Believe: A Guide to the Principal Works of Britain, Europe, and America (New York and Oxford, 1996), 254.

(60) Harris, Life and Letters, 168 (first quotation), 169 (second quotation), 169-70 (third quotation); Cousins, Joel Chandler Harris, 115 (fourth quotation).

(61) New Orleans Daily Picayune, December 19, 1880, p. 4; E. T. W., "Paul H. Hayne: A Visit to the Home of the Southern Poet," Atlanta Constitution, September 29, 1881, p. 5 (first quotation); Sidney Lanier, "The New South," Scribner's Monthly, 20 (October 1880), 847 (second quotation); W. M. Baskervill, "Joel Chandler Harris," Nashville Union, January 31, 1886, p. 2 (third and fourth quotations).

(62) Thomas Nelson Page, "Literature in the South Since the War," Lippincott's Monthly Magazine, 48 (December 1891), 749. Leon Litwack offers a concise definition of the "New Negro" as white southerners saw him: "To listen to white Southerners in the late nineteenth century, the New Negro, born in freedom and undisciplined by slavery, was devoid of the habits of diligence, order, faithfulness, and morality that had been taught their elders; young blacks possessed neither the temperament, demeanor, nor humility of the former slaves, and they were said to be more restless, less deferential, and, still worse, less fearful of whites." Litwack, Trouble in Mind, 198.

(63) Barton N. Harrison to the Editor of the Atlanta Constitution, March 23. 1880, Folder 2, Box 6, Harris Papers; Stephens is quoted in Harris, Life and Letters, 165.

(64) Harris, Complete Tales of Uncle Remus, xxi.

(65) A. O. Bacon to Joel Chandler Harris, August 26, 1883, and Helen S. Barclay to Joel Chandler Harris, February 27, 1883, both in Folder 3, Box 6, Harris Papers.

(66) Callie Spullock Butler to Joel Chandler Harris, March 12, 1901, Folder 6, Box 6, Harris Papers. Butler's letter makes it clear that she was reading from Harris's Chronicles of Aunt Minervy Ann (New York, 1899), rather than the Uncle Remus stories, but the general point about dialect still holds.

(67) Barton N. Harrison to the Editor of the Atlanta Constitution, March 23, 1880, Folder 3, Box 6, Harris Papers.

(68) Marie Clowe Therrel, "Southern Authors: Joel Chandler Harris," Georgia Education, 2 (March 1900), 21 (emphasis added), copy in Folder 46, Box 18, Harris Papers.

(69) For a parallel discussion of whites' failure to grasp the nature and extent of their racial privileges in the late twentieth century, see George Lipsitz, "The Possessive Investment in Whiteness: Racialized Social Democracy and the 'White' Problem in American Studies," American Quarterly, 47 (September 1995), 369-87, esp. 380-83.

(70) Harris, Complete Tales of Uncle Remus, xxv (first quotation); Therrel, "Southern Authors," 21 (second quotation).

(71) On the Mammy phenomenon in the turn-of-the-century South see Thurber, "The Development of the Mammy Image and Mythology," 87-108; Hale, Making Whiteness, 98-119; and M. M. Manring, Slave in a Box: The Strange Career of Aunt Jemima (Charlottesville and London, 1998).

(72) Quoted in Reed "Joel Chandler Harris," 431.

(73) A.M.H. Christensen, Afro-American Folk Lore: Todd Round Cabin Fires on the Sea Islands of South Carolina (Boston, 1892), xi-xii. On Christensen see Monica Maria Tetzlaff, Cultivating a New South: Abbie Holmes Christensen and the Politics of Race and Gender, 1852-1938 (Columbia, S.C., 2002)

(74) Munroe d'Antignac, "Where Uncle Remus was Born," Atlanta Journal Magazine, October 27, 1947, p. 20. Walter McElreath, founder of the Atlanta Historical Society, and Mitchell B. Garrett both described searching the Constitution for Uncle Remus stories in their autobiographies. See Albert B. Saye, ed., Walter McElreath: An Autobiography (Macon, Ga., 1984), 29; and Mitchell B. Garrett, Horse and Buggy Days on Hatchet Creek (University, Ala., 1957), 41

(75) James B. Pond to Joel Chandler Haris, April 9, 1885, Folder 3, Box 6, Harris Papers.

(76) Pupils of the sixth and seventh grades, Rockwall, Texas, to Joel Chandler Harris, February 28, 1902, Folder 7, Box 6, Harris Papers; Baskervill, "Joel Chandler Harris," 2 (last quotation). Children's tendency to focus on the folklore more than on Harris's Narrative frames is also suggested in the wording of some letters. For example, twelve-year-old Marie Harrison of Harrison, Georgia, wrote, "Our teacher has been telling us about 'Uncle Remus' and read to us some of your delightful stories. I liked them so much that I want one of your books for my very own." As the pronoun them indicates, it was the stories, not "Uncle Remus" (which may have been a reference to Harris himself), that captured her interest. Marie Harrison to Harris, January 18, 1906, Folder 9, Box 6, Harris Papers. Similiarly, a group of children from Austin, Texas, wrote Harris that they were "very much pleased with your stories about Uncle Remus, especially 'Brother Fox catches Mr. Horse."' They also noted that their favorite story in Uncle Remus and His Friends was "Why Brer Wolf Did Not Eat the Little Rabbits." Again, the emphasis seems to be on the folktales more than on the Uncle Remus character. Vivian McKean et al. to Harris, January 22, 1903, Folder 6, Box 6, Harris Papers.

(77) Since the late 1960s, a number of authors have reworked the Brer Rabbit stories for children, most dropping Uncle Remus and the rest of Harris's narrative frames. For an overview of this literature see Brasch, Brer Rabbit, Uncle Remus, and the "CornfieM Journalist," 306-14. Lawrence Levine discusses the continuing oral tradition of the Brer Rabbit stories among black children in Black Culture and Black Consciousness, 370-74. For an interesting analysis of the Uncle Remus stories as children's literature see Goldthwaite, Natural History of Make-Believe, chap. 6.

(78) Lewis M. Killian, Black and White: Reflections of a White Southern Sociologist (Dix Hills, N.Y., 1994), 5.

(79) Ibid., 2 (first quotation), 4 (second and third quotations), 5 (remaining quotations).

(80) Ibid., 4-5 (quotations on p. 4). In Helen Bannerman's The Story of Little Black Sambo (New York, 1900) a boy persuades several tigers not to eat him by giving each one a piece of his clothing. The tigers become jealous of one another's clothes and chase each other around a tree until they turn into melted butter, which Sambo's mother uses to make pancakes for supper. Sara Cone Bryant's Eparminondas and His Auntie (Boston, 1907; reprint, Boston, 1938) features a small boy who must carry various gifts--a piece of cake, a pound of butter, a puppy, a loaf of bread--from his aunt's home to his mother. Each time, he fails in his errand because he follows his mother's advice about how to carry the previous item instead of using his own common sense.

(81) Hazel R. Lafrentz to Joel Chandler Harris, December 31, 1899, Folder 5, Box 6, Harris Papers. What I have transcribed as "fine" may actually be "fune," possibly a misspelling of "funny." Below her signature, Hazel added that "Mr. Black sent 'Uncle Remus' to Papa." One wonders if she was correcting herself, since the first sentence of her letter suggested that Harris had sent her family the book. This is intriguing: did Hazel's pleasure in the stories extend to a mistaken assumption that the author had given them especially to her?

(82) Marie Harrison to Joel Chandler Harris, January 18, 1906, Folder 9, Box 6, Harris Papers. On children and consumeristic desire see Susan J. Matt, Keeping Up with the Joneses: Envy in American Consumer Society, 1890-1930 (Philadelphia, 2003), esp. chap. 5.

(83) John G. Baines to Joel Chandler Harris, June 4, 1901, Folder 6, Box 6. Harris Papers.

(84) Twain, Life on the Mississippi, 471 (first through fourth quotations), 472 (fifth quotation); George Washington Cable to Julia Collier Harris, January 22, 1918, Folder 2, Box 4, Harris Papers.

(85) English professor Carl Holliday tallied the views of forty-eight young male students of Southwestern Presbyterian University (now Rhodes College in Memphis) and found that fourteen of the forty-eight thought a race war was "highly probable." Holliday, "The Young Southerner and the Negro," South Atlantic Quarterly, 8 (April 1909), 130.

MS. RITTERHOUSE is an assistant professor of history at Utah State University.