Nights with Uncle Remus (3 page)

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 instance, Mammy-Bammy Big-Money had drowned Brer Wolf; yet the wolf is alive and well in the next story. When the little boy challenges this miraculous resurrection, Remus responds defensively, “Now, den, is I'm de tale, er is de tale me? . . . Dat w'at de tale say.” And then he resumes his narrative: “Dead er no dead, Brer Wolf was living in the swamp, found a lady-friend, and. . . . ” Similarly, when the boy queries Remus about his use of “jiblets” to refer to a cow's liver, lungs, and heart in story XXXXVII, the old narrator responds “Tooby sho, honey.” He then briefly explains that some people call them jiblets and some people call them hasletts. “You do de namin',” he concludes, “en I'll do de eatin'.”

Although Remus and Aunt Tempy are occasionally jealous of the other's status on the Abercrombie plantation, they essentially understand and sympathize with each other and enjoy telling folk stories from the old days; they also acknowledge that the “ole times” are about all they have left. They both value the oral traditions passed down through their families and relish the storytelling sessions in Remus's cabin. In terms of human comedy and sheer slapstick, however, Harris especially likes playing off the wizened old conjurer Daddy Jack against saucy 'Tildy, who initially laughs at his awkward attempts at courtship and their five- or six-decade age difference. In a satiric allusion to Jack's Sea Islands background, 'Tildy protests that she's not going to be chased by a “web-foot.” In story XXIX, 'Tildy tells a highly animated, progressively more intense narrative of Harris's version of the golden-arm ghost story (in his variant, a man steals silver coins off a dead woman's eyes). She then springs on Daddy Jack and frightens him at the climax of the story, to get even with him for earlier calling her “pidjin-toed.” Critics have also observed that the comic byplay among these four narrators and their differences in language and gesture may operate as a burlesque of white social-class structures.

Probably the most entertaining, although not the most anthropologically or dialectally complex, tale in
Nights with Uncle Remus
is story XIX, the often-anthologized “The Moon in the Mill-Pond.” Uncle Remus explains that occasionally all the creatures would “segashuate tergedder,” as if they were all part of “de same fambly connexion.” Harris may be referring indirectly to his career-long belief—much elaborated in his
Atlanta Constitution
essays, articles in
The Saturday Evening Post
, and local-color short stories—in the need for cross-racial harmony and mutual understanding following the ravages of the Civil War and sectional and racial strife. Yet, as James Baldwin once observed, the true artist is “an incorrigible disturber of the peace.” Cocky, boundary-crossing Brer Rabbit simply cannot stand to see the neighborhood too quiet and the stronger creatures (allegorically, the white power-structure) too comfortable.

So, trickster to the core, Brer Rabbit invites everyone to a fishing party at the mill-pond, making sure that “Miss Meadows en Miss Motts, en de yuther gals” would be there, too. (Although Harris always deflected this question, Miss Meadows and the gals, also present in the first volume, run a fancy house and apparently belong to the world's oldest profession.) As I have pointed out in other writings, Remus swings into wonderfully engaging narrative performance rhythms at this point in his story. “Brer B'ar ‘low he gwine ter fish fer mud-cats,” and Brer Wolf “gwine ter fish fer horney heads,” and Brer Fox “gwine ter fish fer peerch fer de ladies,” and Brer Tarrypin “gwine ter fish fer minners.” Brer Rabbit, with a wink at Brer Tarrypin, “low he gwine ter fish fer suckers.”

Then Brer Rabbit announces that nobody can fish in the pond that night after all, because “de Moon done drap in de water.” All the creatures see the moon's reflection swaying in the bottom of the pond. “Well, well, well,” “Mighty bad, mighty bad,” and “Tum, tum, tum,” observe the critters, in chorus, while Miss Meadows “she squall out, ‘Ain't dat too much?' ” The animals agree that they should borrow Mr. Mud-Turtle's fishing net and seine out the moon. Brer Rabbit's straightman and accomplice, Brer Tarrypin, also just happens to remind the crowd of the folk belief that a pot of gold awaits anyone who can successfully fetch the moon out of the water. The physically stronger creatures in Uncle Remus's African American folklore canon are invariably “intellectually challenged,” an enduring part of the sociology of slave tales. Sooner or later, the slave will make ol' massa look gullible and stupid, because he is. So each of the larger creatures wades out into the pond, steps off over his head, and dunks himself. Miss Meadows and the gals ridicule the dripping animals, and Brer Rabbit sends them home for dry clothes. Then Brer Rabbit observes wryly: “I hear talk dat de moon'll bite at a hook ef you take fools fer baits, en I lay dat's de onliest way fer ter ketch ‘er.” Remus ends his story with a final rhetorical variation of his narrative rhythm: “Brer Fox en Brer Wolf en Brer B'ar went drippin' off, en Brer Rabbit en Brer Tarrypin, dey went home wid de gals.”

In tale LVI, Aunt Tempy tells a story about how Brer Rabbit convinced Mr. Lion that a hurricane was coming and tied the lion to a tree, supposedly for his own safety. When the other creatures came by, they marveled at how Brer Rabbit could have pulled off that particular power play. Yet nobody laughs at Aunt Tempy's story; moreover, when the little boy asks why Brer Rabbit would want to tie up the lion in the first place, Aunt Tempy does not have a ready answer. So Uncle Remus comes to her rescue and explains that a long time ago Mr. Lion had driven Brer Rabbit away from the branch where he went to get some water—and that Brer Rabbit had been waiting from that time on to get even. Angry, Aunt Tempy says that she's never going to tell another story, because nobody has fun listening to her narratives. Then she observes pettishly that if Remus had told this tale, “dey'd a bin mo' gigglin' gwine on dan you kin shake a stick at.” Uncle Remus replies to her comment “with unusual emphasis”:

 

Joel Chandler Harris certainly knew that these racial folk tales were not just entertaining giggle-stories for children. The predatory and violent world allegorized in these animal stories often portrays those literally and figuratively dark “nights with Uncle Remus,” where the slaves' only chance for survival was to use their brains faster than the white race could use its brawn or cruelty, where evasion was not a sign of cowardice but a path to safety, where a seemingly cheerful and uncomplaining “Doin' jest fine, suh” when you met massa on the big road was a coded earlier version of Paul Laurence Dunbar's “We Wear the Mask”—the mask that “grins and lies.” In his introductory essay to the Penguin Classics edition of
Uncle Remus: His Songs and His Sayings
, Robert Hemenway reminds us that “Brer Rabbit expresses archetypes of human emotion because one identifies with his liberating sense of anarchy—an imperative of liberation embedded deep in [African American] history.” Without believing in the possibility of revolution, continues Hemenway, slaves “could scarcely have endured their physical pain.” Trickster folk tales are popular in every culture—because they promise that oppressed peoples can cross boundaries, shift shapes, psyche out their opponents, and even get inside the system in the cause of freedom.

Cheating, revenge-taking, whippings and beatings, starvation, selling family members for food or money, death by fire, cannibalism, and the death of grandmothers and offspring are plot elements in twenty-six of the seventy-one stories in
Nights with Uncle Remus
. A similar ratio of violence applies to the tales in
Uncle Remus: His Songs and His Sayings
. When Brer Rabbit uses his celebrated reverse-psychology ploy in the tar-baby story to insist with Brer Fox that burning, drowning, hanging, being skinned alive, and having his eyes, ears, or legs torn from his body are fates preferable to being thrown into the dreaded briar patch, Harris graphically enumerates documented forms of slave punishment and death. Yet, when the little white boy protests in story LIV of
Nights
because Granny Wolf was parboiled and her flesh fed to her own son, Remus replies obliquely, “Dat was endurin' der dog days. Dey er mighty wom times, mon, dem ar dog days is.” Generations of black storytellers, whom Harris helps to recreate and honor in Daddy Jack, Uncle Remus, 'Tildy, and Aunt Tempy, constantly wove into their tales coded references to the dog days of full-blown chattel slavery in America. Furthermore, before blacks met slavery in the Americas, many of their ancestors had also known, or known about, slavery in their native lands, as Olaudah Equiano and other former African slaves have documented.

Yet even in the face of the violent motifs and themes in the Uncle Remus tales, we also see how Harris's stories have worked their iconographies into popular culture. The Disneyfication of Harris has helped to make Brer Rabbit, Brer Fox, and Brer Bear household images. “Zip-a-Dee-Doo-Dah,” the hit song from
The Song of the South
, won an Academy Award for best song in 1946, but James Baskett could only receive his Oscar for portraying Uncle Remus in a private ceremony. Disney re-released the movie four times and also reincarnated dense-brained Brer Bear as Cousin Albert, the lead singer in the “The Country Bear Jamboree” animatronics band at Orlando's Walt Disney World. Cousin Albert loves singing “I've got blooood on the saddle / I've got blooood on the ground.” “I'm gonna knock your head clean off,” Brer Bear keeps saying to Brer Rabbit, in a litany of threatened violence that children, and adults, will catch themselves repeating after seeing the animation sequences from
Song of the South
that still run on the Disney Channel's “Vault Disney.” On your way to the water-ride at Orlando Disney's Splash Mountain, you first walk past Uncle Remus's empty cabin living room, wired with speakers from which you hear—but don't see—a non-dialectal Remus-voice narrating a Brer Rabbit tale. Then you ride your fiberglass raft through Brer Rabbit's Laughing Place and The Briar Patch of disconcertingly phallic 18-inch vinyl thorns on the way to the waterfall, where Brer Fox or Brer Rabbit grins at you from the bow as you plummet five stories down a 45-degree slope at forty miles an hour.

A hardware manufacturing company used to sell Tar Baby Nails, guaranteed to clinch tight, while Atlanta silversmiths regularly ran ads for genuine Uncle Remus spoons, their handles decorated with his smiling visage. At your local supermarket today you can buy a 12-ounce bottle of Brer Rabbit Molasses, distributed by Del Monte in San Francisco. Bugs Bunny and Yosemite Sam, the Road Runner and the Coyote, Tweetie and Sylvester, and the rest of the Saturday morning cartoon herd reinvent Brer Rabbit's tricksterisms. Both Melville's White Whale and Harris's Tar Baby have become literary and popular culture icons, and they each derive from a world of violent assaults and revenge-taking to appease personal insults. Jeff MacNelly captures the image of Saddam Hussein as America's exasperating “Iraqi Tar-Baby” in his 1991 Gulf War political cartoon showing a long-eared Uncle Sam stuck hand-and-foot to Saddam's oil-rich but dangerously adhesive self.