Nights with Uncle Remus

by Joel Chandler Harris

Genres: Fairy Tales, Folk Tales, Legends & Mythology

Synopsis

For more than a hundred years, the tales of Joel Chandler Harris have entertained and influenced both readers and writers. Nights with Uncle Remus gathers seventy-one of Harris's most popular narratives, featuring African American trickster tales, etiological myths, Sea Island legends, and chilling ghost stories. Told through the distinct voices of four slave storytellers, indispensable tales like "The Moon in the Mill-Pond" and other Brer Rabbit stories have inspired writers from Mark Twain to William Faulkner, Zora Neale Hurston to Toni Morrison, and helped revolutionize modern children's literature and folktale collecting.

For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,700 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.

Release date: October 28, 2003

Publisher: Penguin Classics

Print pages: 384

Sample

Table of Contents

 

Title Page

Copyright Page

Introduction

 

I - Mr. Fox and Miss Goose

II - Brother Fox Catches Mr. Horse

III - Brother Rabbit and the Little Girl

IV - How Brother Fox Was Too Smart

V - Brother Rabbit’s Astonishing Prank

VI - Brother Rabbit Secures a Mansion

VII - Mr. Lion Hunts for Mr. Man

VIII - The Story of the Pigs

IX - Mr. Benjamin Ram and His Wonderful Fiddle

X - Brother Rabbit’s Riddle

XI - How Mr. Rooster Lost His Dinner

XII - Brother Rabbit Breaks up a Party

XIII - Brother Fox, Brother Rabbit, and King Deer’s Daughter

XIV - Brother Terrapin Deceives Brother Buzzard

XV - Brother Fox Covets the Quills

XVI - How Brother Fox Failed to Get His Grapes

XVII - Mr. Fox Figures as an Incendiary

XVIII - A Dream and a Story

XIX - The Moon in the Mill-Pond

XX - Brother Rabbit Takes Some Exercise

XXI - Why Brother Bear Has No Tail

XXII - How Brother Rabbit Frightened His Neighbors

XXIII - Mr. Man Has Some Meat

XXIV - How Brother Rabbit Got the Meat

XXV - African Jack

XXVI - Why the Alligator’s Back Is Rough

XXVII - Brother Wolf Says Grace

XXVIII - Spirits, Seen and Unseen

XXIX - A Ghost Story

XXX - Brother Rabbit and His Famous Foot

XXXI - “In Some Lady’s Garden”

XXXII - Brother ’Possum Gets in Trouble

XXXIII - Why the Guinea-Fowls Are Speckled

XXXIV - Brother Rabbit’s Love-Charm

XXXV - Brother Rabbit Submits to a Test

XXXVI - Brother Wolf Falls a Victim

XXXVII - Brother Rabbit and the Mosquitoes

XXXVIII - The Pimmerly Plum

XXXIX - Brother Rabbit Gets the Provisions

XL - “Cutta Cord-La!”

XLI - Aunt Tempy’s Story

XLII - The Fire-Test

XLIII - The Cunning Snake

XLIV - How Brother Fox Was Too Smart

XLV - Brother Wolf Gets in a Warm Place

XLVI - Brother Wolf Still in Trouble

XLVII - Brother Rabbit Lays in His Beef Supply

XLVIII - Brother Rabbit and Mr. Wildcat

XLIX - Mr. Benjamin Ram Defends Himself

L - Brother Rabbit Pretends to Be Poisoned

LI - More Trouble for Brother Wolf

LII - Brother Rabbit Outdoes Mr. Man

LIII - Brother Rabbit Takes a Walk

LIV - Old Grinny-Granny Wolf

LV - How Wattle Weasel Was Caught

LVI - Brother Rabbit Ties Mr. Lion

LVII - Mr. Lion’s Sad Predicament

LVIII - The Origin of the Ocean

LIX - Brother Rabbit Gets Brother Fox’s Dinner

LX - How the Bear Nursed the Little Alligator

LXI - Why Mr. Dog Runs Brother Rabbit

LXII - Brother Wolf and the Horned Cattle

LXIII - Brother Fox and the White Muscadines

LXIV - Mr. Hawk and Brother Buzzard

LXV - Mr. Hawk and Brother Rabbit

LXVI - The Wise Bird and the Foolish Bird

LXVII - Old Brother Terrapin Gets Some Fish

LXVIII - Brother Fox Makes a Narrow Escape

LXIX - Brother Fox’s Fish-Trap

LXX - Brother Rabbit Rescues Brother Terrapin

LXXI - The Night Before Christmas

NIGHTS WITH UNCLE REMUS

JOEL CHANDLER HARRIS was born in Eatonton, Georgia, in 1845. Setting type and learning to write under Joseph Addison Turner’s mentoring at nearby Turnwold Plantation, Harris later worked for newspapers in Macon and Forsyth. He served as Associate Editor for the Savannah Morning News (1870-1876) and for the Atlanta Constitution (1876-1900). Harris earned reputations as a literary comedian, a talented and resourceful amateur folklorist, a local-color fiction writer, a children’s author, and a major New South journalist. He wrote 185 Uncle Remus tales, seven volumes of short fiction, four novels and six collections of children’s stories. Harris’s portraits of poor whites and his socio-logically and rhetorically complex Brer Rabbit trickster stories have influenced generations of writers, from Mark Twain to Zora Neale Hurston, William Faulkner, Ralph Ellison, Toni Morrison, and Julius Lester. Harris’s creation of highly animated, believably anthropomorphic animal characters also helped reinvent the modern children’s story, from Rudyard Kipling’s jungle tales to Beatrix Potter’s Peter Rabbit stories. Brer Rabbit and the Tar Baby have also become popular culture icons. Harris died in 1908.

 

JOHN T. BICKLEY earned his B.A. in Literature from Florida State University and his M.A. in English from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He is currently working as a fiction editor and completing his Ph.D. in Medieval English Literature, with a minor in Film, at Florida State. He has published fiction as well as articles on film, the humanities, and Native American anthropology.

 

R. BRUCE BICKLEY, JR., Griffith T. Pugh Professor of English at Florida State University, received his B.A. in English from the University of Virginia and his M.A. and Ph.D. in English from Duke University. He has published The Method of Melville’s Short Fiction and six books on Joel Chandler Harris.

PENGUIN BOOKS

 

Published by the Penguin Group
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First published in the United States of America by James R. Osgood and Company 1883
This edition with an introduction by John T Bickley and R. Bruce Bickley, Jr.,
published in Penguin Books 2003

 

 

Introduction copyright © John T. Bickley and R. Bruce Bickley, Jr., 2003

All rights reserved

 

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

 

 

Harris, Joel Chandler, 1848-1908.
Nights with Uncle Remus / Joel Chandler Harris ; edited and with an introduction by
R. Bruce Bickley and John Bickley.
p. cm.—(Penguin classics)
Includes bibliographical references.

eISBN : 978-1-101-01040-2

1. Remus, Uncle (Fictitious character)—Fiction. 2. Georgia—Social life and
customs—Fiction. 3. African American men—Fiction. 4. Plantation life—Fiction.
5. Animals—Fiction. I. Bickley, R. Bruce, 1942- II. Bickley, John T. III. Title. IV. Series.
PS1806.A2B53 2003
813’.4—dc21 2003050438

 

 

 

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Introduction

Folklore Performance and the Legacy of Joel Chandler Harris

In the summer of 1882, still flush with the popular and critical success of Uncle Remus: His Songs and His Sayings (1880), Joel Chandler Harris was waiting to catch a train in Norcross, Georgia, twenty miles northeast of Atlanta. Harris explains in detail the unique experience he had that night, and he made sure to include this important episode in his introduction to his second book, Nights with Uncle Remus: Myths and Legends of the Old Plantation (1883). The train was late, and darkness had already fallen when Harris overheard several black railroad workers sitting in small groups on the platform and perched on crossties, cracking jokes at each other’s expense and laughing boisterously. Harris sat down next to one of the liveliest talkers in the group, a middle-aged worker. After enjoying their banter for awhile, Harris heard someone in the crowd mention “Ole Molly Har’.” Suddenly inspired, and “in a low tone, as if to avoid attracting attention,” Harris narrated the tar-baby story to his companion, “by way of a feeler.”

Harris reconstructs in some detail what occurred next, a folkloristic event any ethnologist today would swap the SUV for. The lively man next to Harris kept interrupting the tar-baby narration with loud and frequent comments—“Dar now!” and “He’s a honey, mon!” and “Gentermens! git out de way, an’ gin ’im room!” Suddenly, Harris’s audience of one grows exponentially into a storytelling community of thirty.

These comments, and the peals of unrestrained and unrestrainable laughter that accompanied them, drew the attention of the other Negroes, and before the climax of the story had been reached, where Brother Rabbit is cruelly thrown into the brier-patch, they had all gathered around and made themselves comfortable. Without waiting to see what the effect of the ‘Tar Baby’ legend would be, the writer [Harris] told the story of ‘Brother Rabbit and the Mosquitoes,’ and this had the effect of convulsing them. Two or three could hardly wait for the conclusion, so anxious were they to tell stories of their own. The result 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.

 

Harris notes that some of the black workers told stories poorly, “giving only meager outlines,” while others “told them passing well.” And then he adds that “one or two, if their language and gestures could have been taken down, would have put Uncle Remus to shame.” Harris, always the astute observer, stresses that a storyteller’s language and gestures must interact with the audience’s emotions to create a truly memorable oral performance.

That evening, Harris goes on to explain, he heard a few stories he had already included among the thirty-four animal tales in Uncle Remus: His Songs and His Sayings. He also heard several that he had previously “gathered and verified” but had not yet published. Yet “the great majority were either new or had been entirely forgotten.” Then Harris shares an insight that reflects on the collective psyche of his fellow storytellers and, even more importantly, on his own conflicted self. Harris explains that the darkness that night “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 storytelling.” Furthermore, “however favorable the conditions might have been, the appearance of a note-book and pencil would have dissipated them as utterly as if they had never existed.”

Like a professional folklorist, which he never claimed to be, Harris knew the inhibiting effects on his human sources of introducing the reporter’s pad in a natural, unforced, oral-performance setting. Gifted with a remarkably discriminating ear and auditory memory, however, Harris carried off the Norcross stories in his head as surely as he had stored away the Middle Georgia black folk tales he had heard from Aunt Crissy, Old Harbert, and Uncle George Terrell while he worked as a printer’s devil at Turnwold Plantation, outside Eatonton, in the mid-1860s. A decade later, when the Atlanta Constitution’s staff local colorist had taken a leave of absence, Harris had filled in for him. His memory banks had opened up, and out hopped brash Brer Rabbit, aided and abetted by his sly raconteur Uncle Remus—whom critics have proven to be as much the trickster as his wily folk hero.

Harris had named Uncle Remus after a gardener in Forsyth, Georgia; but he also explained that Remus was an amalgamation of three or four black slave storytellers he knew, including Turnwold’s Harbert and George Terrell. Yet Remus is also more: he is a mitigating voice, created in part to comfort anxious minds of Reconstruction-era America. His is the soothing voice of wisdom, reassuring white America with his loyalty to memories of the Old South—and meanwhile working for reconciliation between blacks and whites and between the regions after the War. Uncle Remus is also far more complex than his family retainer role suggests, for he is the product of what Harris would later memorably call his “other fellow”—the deeper and bolder part of Harris’s psyche that takes over from the newspaper journalist and writes folk tales and fiction, the ostensibly plain and Christian voice that suddenly shifts paradigms and tells stories that are anything but plain and Christian. Along with the young white Abercrombie boy, Remus’s devoted pupil, we learn—as Brer Rabbit lures Brer Wolf into a honey-log and burns him alive, or as he tricks Brer Wolf into selling his grandmother for vittles or, indeed, tricks Grinny Granny Wolf into boiling herself alive and subsequently feeds her flesh to her own son—that Brer Rabbit’s morality is not the morality of nineteenth-century white Christianity.

The Norcross evening reveals something else important about Harris’s psyche, too. He was an illegitimate child, and generous citizens of Eatonton, Middle Georgia, had luckily befriended him and his mother. Shy and self-conscious all his life, and afflicted with a mild stammer, he never read his Brer Rabbit stories aloud, not even to his own children. In fact, in May 1882, just prior to the Norcross encounter, Harris had met with Mark Twain and George Washington Cable in New Orleans to discuss joining them for a lucrative national reading tour. But Harris’s inveterate, self-effacing shyness had forced him to decline their attractive invitation. Yet that summer night in the comforting and anonymous darkness at Norcross, Harris was relaxed and unobtrusive. Moreover—and for the only time in his life that we know of—he was actually able to tell some of his beloved folk stories in a public setting. It’s as if Harris’s “other fellow” had taken control again and had spoken for him in a deeper tongue.

Harris’s payoff for temporarily escaping his self-consciousness was two rich and rarefied hours of cross-racial communion and oral folklore performance and story-collecting. Furthermore, the Norcross station tales Harris heard that summer, and the stories they reminded him of, fed directly into his second book, his ambitious and carefully structured collection of seventy-one folk stories, Nights with Uncle Remus: Myths and Legends of the Old Plantation. Published in November 1883, a little over a year after his fruitful Norcross experience, Nights was another popular and critical success for Harris. While its sales would never equal those of Uncle Remus: His Songs and His Sayings, his second book nevertheless sold 25,000 copies across twenty-five print-runs in the mid-1880s. Even two decades later, Nights was still doing well; a 1904 edition sold over 80,000 copies. Including posthumous collections, the Uncle Remus canon would eventually grow to 185 published stories.

In a chapter of his 2001 study, Reading Africa into American Literature: Epics, Fables, and Gothic Tales, ethnologist Keith Cartwright looks back over Harris’s 120-year legacy and his 185 tales and argues persuasively that Nights with Uncle Remus is his true masterpiece. “It is Harris’s understanding of the importance of folk narrative performance, his willingness to go to the source of performance, and his sheer delight in the language of performance that made Nights with Uncle Remus what may be the nineteenth century’s most African American text” (Cartwright’s emphasis). Cartwright sees Harris’s story-telling encounter in Norcross as a direct sign of his increased interest in capturing folk narrative performance on paper, in contrast to Harris’s more anthology-like gathering of miscellaneous materials for Uncle Remus: His Songs and His Sayings. Harris’s first book had immediately appeared in several European-language translations and still primarily owes its reputation to the Brer Rabbit and the tar-baby story, probably the world’s most famous trickster tale. Drawing mostly from his previously published Constitution dialect material, His Songs and His Sayings was an assemblage of thirty Brer Rabbit tales and four other folk stories narrated by Uncle Remus; seventy “Plantation Proverbs” also written in black dialect; nine black gospel, play, and work songs; “A Story of the War” (a revised Constitution short story about how Remus saves his master from a Yankee sharpshooter); and twenty-one minstrelized Atlanta street scenes and sight-gags featuring Harris’s earlier, more cantankerous version of Uncle Remus—the reluctant city-dweller who longed to relocate to Putnam County, Middle Georgia, where life was simpler than it was in the “dust, an’ mud, an’ money” of fast-paced and increasingly impersonal postwar Atlanta.

In his 3,000-word introduction to his first book, Harris was quite explicit about his goals, which also carry over to the Nights volume: to retell black slave stories in their “phonetically genuine” dialect and to present “a new and by no means unattractive phase of negro character.” Although Harris protests that “ethnological considerations formed no part of the undertaking,” we can tell that he has already undertaken at least a preliminary study of folklore origins and transmissivity. In addition to Sidney Lanier’s work on metrical patterns in black songs, Harris cites three comparative studies on North American and South American folklore. Harris also notes that common sense and intuition tell us a great deal about the story-telling rhetoric of these animal tales. Harris observes that it takes “no scientific investigation” to show why the black slave “selects as his hero the weakest and most harmless of all animals, and brings him out victorious in contests with the bear, the wolf, and the fox.” Harris saw that the stronger animals in the African American tales represented the white masters and their slavery power structure and that Brer Rabbit was the slave’s folk-hero. Florence Baer’s motif analysis demonstrates that 122 of the 185 Uncle Remus tales show African origins. We also know, however, from studies by John Roberts, Isidore Okepewho, and other scholars that native, continental African folk stories also portray struggles among the animals that allegorically depict resistance to oppressive authority figures and the competition for status, food, water, and possessions. So Harris actually found himself recreating a complex double-heritage of black trickster tales, both African and African American, that display human guile, ingenuity, and creativity in the face of more powerful or oppressive forces. Thus, the storytellers who were the living models for Harris’s Uncle Remus both recycled and adapted old-world African stories to help reflect the experiences, and affirm the force of the human spirit, of black American slaves in the new world.

By 1883, Harris could barely keep the lid on the folk material that he had acquired after his first book appeared. In his much more ambitious 9,000-word introduction to Nights, three times the length of his 1880 essay, Harris explains that following his first book’s publication, a substantial volume of valuable personal correspondence literally began “to pour in” from as far away as Rio de Janeiro. Additionally, reviewers from London and Berlin to New Delhi were praising Harris’s work. Contributors generously sent him trickster tales they had heard, as well as leads to other story sources and informants. Between his first book and his second, Harris had also been corresponding with Mark Twain about differing versions of the golden-arm ghost tale. Meanwhile, Harris had expanded his own readings in comparative folklore, examining studies of Creek American Indian legends, Amazon tales, South African legends, Kaffir stories from the near east, Gullah tales from the Sea Islands of Georgia, and French Creole patois stories from Louisiana. Harris even printed in his introduction a standard-French translation of a 61-line French Creole story, noting that this particular tale was similar to one of Miss Meadows’s stories in his first volume. In reflecting upon his extensive tale-collecting efforts and research, Harris comments that his second Uncle Remus volume “is about as complete as it could be made under the circumstances.”

Harris had instinctively framed his folk tales and provided realistic oral-performance details in writing the animal stories gathered earlier in His Songs and His Sayings. Typically, we find Uncle Remus sitting in his cabin and performing a minor domestic task (loading his pipe, or carving shoe-pegs, or darning a hole in his coat) when his seven-year-old white listener arrives and asks a question or makes a comment that serves as Remus’s segue to a story. But it is important to note that Harris had set the stories in his first volume during Reconstruction, portraying Remus, on the surface, at least, as a loyal old family retainer who supposedly “has nothing but pleasant memories of the discipline of slavery” and who tells his stories “with the air of affectionate superiority” to the son of the postwar plantation owners, John and Sally Abercrombie. But Harris adjusts the time frame of Nights, explaining in a prefatory note to his readers that these new stories are set before the war. Anthropologically, then, Harris now has the perfect rationale for adding three more slave narrators, of varying ages and experiences, to his gallery of oral performers. Aunt Tempy, the likeable but sometimes officious middle-aged cook in the big house, narrates five stories. ’Tildy, the snappish house-girl, tells three. And, in an ambitious addition to Harris’s folklore reach, Daddy Jack, Remus’s eighty-year-old Gullah friend and sometime-conjurer, who had first come from Africa to the Sea Islands of Georgia, performs ten rhythmic and heavily inflected Gullah stories.

Harris also fleshes out Remus’s character in this new volume; we learn more about his pride and his prejudices, and we feel some jealous tensions at times operating between Remus, foreman of the field hands, and Aunt Tempy, manager of the big house and its kitchen. Harris also gives a more interactive role to Remus’s young white listener—he asks questions more frequently and regularly puts Remus on the defensive. In story XLIV, in fact, Remus pouts that the little boy is outgrowing his britches, outgrowing Remus, and apparently outgrowing the tales, too. So maybe Remus should go ahead and get his “remoovance papers” from Miss Sally, hang his bundle on his walking-cane, and “see w’at kinder dirt dey is at de fur een’ er de big road.” But protestations or apologies from the boy invariably bring Remus back to tell another story. He also makes sure, however, to keep reminding his adoring listener to act respectfully around his seniors—and, as he had advised in the first book, not to play with the white-trash Favers children, who are nearly as disreputable as Faulkner’s den of rodent-like Snopses. After all, Remus explains in story IV, “Ole Cajy Favers, he went ter de po’house, en ez ter dat Jim Favers, I boun’ you he know de inside er all de jails in dish yer State er Jawjy.”

The great majority of the seventy-one tales in Nights are Brer Rabbit trickster stories or trickster tales featuring other resourceful creatures, along with a handful of etiological legends about the origins of human and animal traits and a few ghost stories. To help unify this lengthy cycle of tales and describe their actual performance setting, Harris regularly adds atmospheric imagery and mood coloration. For example, this scene frames Remus’s first story:

It had been raining all day so that Uncle Remus found it impossible to go out. The storm had begun, the old man declared, just as the chickens were crowing for day, and it had continued almost without intermission. The dark gray clouds had blotted out the sun, and the leafless limbs of the tall oaks surrendered themselves drearily to the fantastic gusts that drove the drizzle fitfully before them.

 

In due course, Remus relieves the gloom by telling the little boy how Brer Rabbit helped Miss Goose escape the trap Brer Fox had set for her. Or examine the frame for story XI. Harris first points out that the rainy pre-winter season had indeed settled in, and the little boy felt surrounded by its dreariness. But Remus had put a tin pan under a persistent leak in his roof, which added “a not unmusical accompaniment to the storm.” Harris next describes how Remus’s shadow alternately swoops up to fill the cabin and then fades out among the cobwebs when the old man bends over to add lightwood to his flickering hearth. Then Harris borrows a technique from Edgar Allan Poe and uses synaesthesia to merge visual and auditory imagery:

 

The rain, and wind, and darkness held sway without, while within, the unsteady lightwood blaze seemed to rhyme with the drip-drip-drip in the pan.

Harris also adds an overarching temporal frame and a plot line to provide transitions and link the stories together. Remus and his three fellow slaves tell their stories from the late fall until Christmas eve, and the storytellers in his cabin often narrate subsets of two to five interlocking tales. Also, from chapter XXV on, Daddy Jack and ’Tildy carry on a lively courtship culminating in their wedding, which takes place during the concluding Christmas chapter, number LXXI. The closing chapter also recreates some Old South plantation Christmas festivities, merging into an epiphanic celebration of renewal and rebirth, in aesthetic contrast to the gloominess that Harris evokes to begin his folklore cycle.

The collective result of Harris’s enhancements to this second collection of tales is a much more vital, interactive, and engaging performance environment, for Remus’s circle and for today’s readers, than we experienced in his first book. In addition to the folklore research he cites in his extensive introduction to Nights, Harris occasionally inserts footnotes in his text to explain a source, interpret a dialectal or metaphoric expression, or describe the body language or voicing performance of a certain segment of a story. Carried out well before the advent of portable recording equipment, Harris’s achievement in this volume is all the more remarkable for its thoroughness and systematic attention to anthropological and linguistic detail. Harris even supplies a short explanatory essay on the Gullah dialect, a 39-word glossary of Gullah expressions, and a note explaining that Gullah speakers frequently add postvocalic vowels to words—and how these sounds are elided, so that “heard-a,” becomes “yeard-a,” becomes “yeddy.”

Furthermore, Harris distinguishes phonetically among Remus’s, Tempy’s, ’Tildy’s, and, especially, Daddy Jack’s speech performance patterns, rhythms, sound effects, and enunciations—and visually, among their respective physical poses, gestures, grimaces, and other interpretive and dramatic movements. Frequently, too, Harris describes how the individual audience members interrupt a narration with their spontaneous approval of story events or delivery style—“Enty!” (ain’t he?) affirms Jack; “Dar you is!” interjects ’Tildy; or Aunt Tempy suddenly exclaims, “What I done tell you!” The slave storytellers and the little boy also regularly question story details, because an event seems incredulous or contradicts an earlier plot development, or because a listener had heard a different version of that tale in the past. Additionally, Harris shows his field-collection expertise by pointing out the strong proprietary ownership the storytellers exercise over their material. For example, in narrative XXXV Remus won’t get involved when the little boy asks him to clarify a detail in one of Daddy Jack’s stories; Remus simply says, “ ’Taint none er my tale.” Remus, furthermore, knows from repeated experiences that Jack will always claim his Gullah version of a story to be the more authentic one.

But Remus also regularly deflects inquiries about his own stories. In tale XXXVI, for instan