'Uncle Remus, His Songs and His Sayings'

Abstract

In spite of the fact that Joel Chandler Harris was a white author from the antebellum South, his Uncle Remus stories may be credited with preserving authentic African American speech patterns of the nineteenth century. Harris had befriended a slave, George Terrell, while working on the Turner plantation as an apprentice printer shortly before the Civil War. Terrell was a father-figure to Harris, who recalled stories he had told when he created the character of Uncle Remus. The stories arise from African folklore, and make a link between African tales. Hence we find the true African roots of the contemporary Bugs Bunny.. Although the stories were sometimes used by whites to further racism, especially in a Hollywood production of 1946,and although Harris himself sometimes looked back nostalgically to the time of slavery, in fact these stories replete with trickster characters cannot be seen as anything less than African-American empowerment tales. They have rightfully been recovered by African Americans ranging from James Weldon Johnson in 1917 to jazz musicians and contemporary African American story tellers such as Diane Ferlatte. It also becomes clear that many African American writers who emphasize the oral tradition in their works may owe something to Joel Chandler Harris.