by Jack McKeon
I recently purchased, reluctantly,
The Complete Tales of Uncle Remus by Joel Chandler Harris, reluctantly
because of my belief about its racist condescension towards the
character of Remus, its flaunting of illiteracy in the dialect and the
exploitation of an oppressed culture’s tales for the oppressor’s purpose. But I love the Brer Rabbit tales and there
seems to be no other source for them.
The Julius Lester versions I’ve read, updated with contemporary
insertions, just didn’t do it for me. I
haven’t been able to find any versions “translated” from the dialect and
without the presence of the slave context except the old compilation Disney
made to go along with the release of “Song of the South” in 1946. I owned that book, and my mother used to read
me the stories. Now I wanted all these
tales and figured I could modernize them myself easily enough. I’d have to bite
the bullet and suffer through the racism, made more difficult after I read Harris’s
appalling description of Remus as having “nothing but pleasant memories of the
discipline of slavery.”
Zip-a-dee-doo-dah and blue birds!
Remus was the happy slave companion of our other relatives, Uncle Ben and
Aunt Jemima grinning with pleasure from the master’s kitchen, and that other
uncle, Tom, whose goodness as a slave has made him a pejorative. Even so, I started reading the first of the
books, “Uncle Remus: His Songs and Sayings.”
Now
I have to confess. I like and admire
Uncle Remus. I wish I had known
him. I wish I had been the 7 year old
boy fortunate enough to have had his company.
And part of my admiration for the man comes from his reaction to ”the
discipline of slavery.” To do this,
though, means taking the man from his context.
I don’t know if it’s morally or historically correct, or even possible,
to do this without seeming to defend the “silver lining” version of slavery,
but if we can look at Remus as just a man living in adversity, in a
dehumanizing situation beyond his control, he becomes a person who has centered
himself and has found peace in his own sense of dignity and self-worth. He has taken himself out of the context and
it no longer defines him, however Harris may have perceived him. He demands from the little boy that he be
treated with respect and takes him to task when he feels liberties have been
taken (Whether he would do this with “Miss Polly”, however, is another
thing). He dresses down the boy for his
behavior, even when Remus himself is not involved, and once reduces him to
tears almost cruelly, but the boy loves him and respects him, and relaxes into
the peacefulness of the cabin, as does the reader. We are almost always in this cabin watching
Remus perform the skills of the poor:
mending his jacket, making a new sole for a shoe, making an ax handle,
roasting a sweet potato in the fireplace, sharpening his knife on the palm of
his hand. (How this reveals that
slavery, even for Remus, wasn’t always peace in the cabin!) There’s a calm in him. He’s the still center around which whirl the
action and mayhem of the tales, accounts of the harshness and turbulence of
life. He answers the boy’s questions
about the stories honestly, with cynical observations on the fallen nature of
man and beast. You wonder how the young
boy digests this wisdom, but Remus pulls no punches.
I
also confess to thoroughly enjoying the dialect. It’s rollicking, colorful, evocative and
funny. It’s both readable and
delightful. Harris spent a lot of time
trying to get it accurate, and for Mark Twain, no one else had done it
better. It does not, as I expected, come
across as mocking or condescending but as a folklorist’s effort to capture the
feeling, the culture and the true voice of the storyteller. I recently told “Brer Rabbit’s Riddle” at the Detention
Center. The version I first went to was
in an anthology, told in modern English.
Updating the language, though, made a crucial part of it
incomprehensible. I went to Harris’s
version, and though I had to look up a couple of words, it made much better
sense and sounded right. I combined the
new and the old when I told it, and, though it needed some explanatory material
at the outset, it worked. It would be
impossible for me, certainly, to tell the stories as written, even if I wanted
to, but reading them in the original puts in a place and an outlook that modern
English can’t convey. Modern versions
can give us the story. Harris’s versions
give us the people. Maybe it’s difficult
to ignore that he is a white man trying to portray the speech of an oppressed
people, purposefully denied the education given to their oppressors, but he’s
walking the same road as Zora Neal Hurston, with the same purpose.
Harris
(1848-1908) did not grow up on a plantation, but as a teenager he worked for a
newspaper on one and spent much of his time in the slave quarters listening to
stories. The tellers became the models
for his creation. While he never quite lost his patronizing idea that blacks
depended on white assistance, he went on to spend much of his career as a
journalist advocating for the emancipated African-American. He promoted reconciliation between the races,
education, suffrage, and equality for African -Americans. He condemned racism in Southern culture and
condemned lynching. His collection of
tales was not a product of a racist mentality, but the work of a serious
folklorist trying to preserve the best versions of tales he loved in the voice
in which they were told. It was a labor
of love and affection.
If
you read Harris’s introduction to the tales, you need to contend with his
benign version of the slave-holding South.
His forays into the quarters as a youth evidently presented him with
this vision - Disney’s vision- and he did not know about, or chose to ignore,
the horrors of the institution. “The
realities (of slavery),” he once wrote concerning Uncle Tom’s Cabin,
“under the best and happiest conditions, possess a romantic beauty and
tenderness all their own.” In spite of
our understanding that romantic beauty might have been in short supply during
this period, this is clearly the spirit
in which he wrote his Remus books. There
are certainly cringeworthy elements in the books. There’s a liberal sprinkling of the n-word,
not with any negative intent but dropped casually as a part of the language, as
it is in Twain and Hurston (or in August Wilson’s Fences today). Still the word jars, mainly because of the
slave context. Also, Remus, whatever
else he may be, exemplifies Harris’s ideal of the dedicated, loyal servant of
the family, staying with them through generations, during and after the Civil
War.
You
want to see some anger, some sense of injustice and desire for
retribution. You won’t find it in Remus,
but it’s there in the stories he tells which are filled with conflict, mischief
and sometimes sadistic violence. The
physically weak use their wits to overcome and punish those who would prey on
them. They are funny but not
gentle. Remus doesn’t make the point
obvious, but it is clear why these stories were so popular in the
quarters. One would like to think that
Harris realized this.
But
maybe he didn’t. Anyway, I’ll read on,
even though the first paragraph of the next book, “Nights with Uncle Remus”,
introduces a woman as “the owner of Uncle Remus.” Just a simple statement of fact, as if
nothing could be more reasonable. Still, on I go, keeping Beloved
clearly in mind, so I can hear a very human, wise old man tell a little boy
some wonderful stories.
