On the Plantation

On the Plantation: A Story of a Georgia Boy's Adventures during the War (1892), written by famed New South journalist and folklorist Joel Chandler Harris, is a fictionalized memoir of Harris's adolescence during the Civil War (1861-65). It is both an idealized portrait of plantation life on Turnwold, the estate of Joseph Addison Turner in Eatonton (Putnam County), and a sanitized treatment of the war. Purchased by publisher S. S. McClure in New York for $2,500, the narrative was first serialized in several national newspapers, beginning in 1891. A year later On the Plantation appeared as a book published by D. Appleton and Company, the same firm that had published Harris's first volume of Uncle Remus stories. On the Plantation never achieved the popularity or critical acclaim of the Uncle Remus folktales, however, and most scholars subsequently ignored it.

Origins and Influences

Born in Eatonton in 1845

 

Joel Chandler Harris

 

, Harris was the illegitimate son of Mary Ann Harris and an Irish immigrant laborer. In March 1862 Harris found employment as a typesetter—or printer's devil—for Turner's The Countryman, a widely read Confederate newspaper. In return for his services, he received lodging on Turner's plantation. He remained there for the duration of the war, leaving in June 1866 to pursue a career in journalism. In his capacity as a journalist, Harris gained considerable recognition, especially in his efforts to foster reconciliation between the North and the South, but it was his stories—largely inspired by his experiences at Turnwold—that made him a cultural icon. While there, Harris spent hundreds of hours in the slave quarters. Much of his self-consciousness about his own origins receded during that time, and his humble background enabled him to form a bond with the slaves, which in turn gave him opportunity to learn their stories, language, and inflections. He later incorporated much of what he had absorbed during this time into his literary works, including On the Plantation.

Portrayal of War

On the Plantation closely parallels Harris's adolescence on Turnwold Plantation between 1862 and 1866. In this semiautobiograph

Turnwold Plantation

ical work of fiction, the Civil War years provide the narrative framework; the towns of Eatonton and Hillsborough, as well as the Turnwold Plantation, serve as the primary locales; and, in many instances, the names of Turner and of Harris's slave acquaintances remain unchanged. Harris did, however, replace his own name with that of Joe Maxwell. The first chapters detail Maxwell's childhood in Eatonton, including the circumstances that led him to Turnwold; descriptions of the adjustments to his new job and setting; and colorful sketches of plantation acquaintances, both black and white. The reader is made especially aware of a romanticized portrayal of slavery. On Harris's fictionalized plantation, the slaves are happy, loyal, and well behaved, and they purportedly enjoy comfortable lives, never considering desertion or rebellion. The remaining chapters detail how Turnwold and its residents internalize and adapt to the realities and aftermath of the Civil War.

 

 

Historical marker outside of Turnwold Plantation, northeast of Eatonton, Putnam Co., GA. Joseph Addison Turner (1826-1868) was a cousin (obviously, a long-dead one).

 

The ways in which Harris chose to remember his Civil War experience and, in turn, to fictionalize it often do not conform to reality. Many salient aspects of Harris's life on the home front are omitted and/or significantly downplayed, creating an account that does not accord with the memories of most middle Georgians who lived through similar experiences. Although On the Plantation chronicles life on Turnwold during the Civil War years, Harris does not introduce details of the conflict until well into his work, and when he does, they receive cursory treatment. Particularly surprising, considering the magnitude of the event for both whites and blacks, is Harris's scant attention to Union general William T. Sherman's march to the sea. The left wing of Sherman's army—led by General Henry Slocum—did, in fact, raid areas of Putnam County in November 1864. Turnwold was invaded on November 20-21, 1864, and Union soldiers stole horses and other valuables from the plantation. Neighboring properties suffered more extensive damage; however, Harris, through Joe Maxwell, characterizes these invaders as good-natured and sometimes even benevolent. Few, if any, Georgians would have concurred with Harris's depiction of Sherman's troops, and the reader has little sense of the hardships and deprivations that Georgians suffered during the war.

In

 

Turnwold Plantation

 

the final chapters of On the Plantation, after Sherman vacates middle Georgia, Turner frees his slaves. However, in Harris's version of events, most of the Turnwold slaves choose to remain with their master, where "peace and quiet reigned on the plantation." In point of fact, "peace and quiet" most probably never typified Turnwold prior to hostilities and certainly did not typify it afterward; financially ruined by the Civil War, Turner lost his plantation and died in 1868 at the age of forty-one.

 

 

The existing house of Turnwold Plantation, Putnam Co., GA.

 

While writing On the Plantation and numerous other stories, Harris doubled as an associate editor for the Atlanta Constitution. Along with Henry W. Grady, his close colleague and friend, Harris was a significant voice for the New South. Together, as highly placed journalists, Harris and Grady promoted racial and especially regional reconciliation, hoping to soften northern animosities toward the South. Harris's arguably sanitized portrayal of the Civil War in On the Plantation may have helped to foster some harmony between the North and South at a time when it was most needed.

Source: Internet

Joel Chandler Harris

Joel Chandler Harris

Joel Chandler Harris (December 9, 1845 – July 3, 1908) was an American journalist, fiction writer, and folklorist best known for his collection of Uncle Remus stories. Harris was born in Eatonton, Georgia, where he served as an apprentice on a plantation during his teenage years. He spent the majority of his adult life in Atlanta working as an associate editor at the Atlanta Constitution.

Harris led two significant professional lives. As editor and journalist Joe Harris, he ushered in the New South alongside Henry W. Grady, stressing regional and racial reconciliation during and after the Reconstruction era. As Joel Chandler Harris, fiction writer and folklorist, he recorded many Brer Rabbit stories from the African-American oral tradition and revolutionized children's literature in the process.

Life

Eatonton: 1845 - 1862

Joel Chandler Harris was born in Eatonton, Georgia in 1845 to Mary Ann Harris. His father, whose identity remains unknown, abandoned his family shortly after Harris was born. The parents had never married, so Harris took the name Joel from his attending physician, Dr. Joel Branham. Chandler was the name of his mother's uncle. Harris remained self-conscious of his illegitimate birth throughout his life.

A prominent physician, Dr. Andrew Reid, gave the Harris family a small cottage behind his mansion. Mary Harris worked as a seamstress and helped neighbors with their gardening to support herself and her son. She was an avid reader and instilled her son with a love of language: "My desire to write—to give expression to my thoughts—grew out of hearing my mother read The Vicar of Wakefield."

Dr. Reid also paid for Harris' school tuition for several years. In 1856, Joe Harris briefly attended Kate Davidson's School for Boys and Girls, but transferred to Eatonton School for Boys later that year following an undistinguished academic record and a habit of truancy. Harris excelled in reading and writing, but was mostly known for his pranks, mischief, and sense of humor. Practical jokes helped Harris cloak his innate shyness and insecurities about his red hair, Irish ancestry, and illegitimacy, leading to both trouble and a reputation as a leader among the older boys.

Turnwold Plantation: 1862 - 1866

Harris quit school early to help alleviate the financial burden on his mother. In March 1862, Joseph Addison Turner, owner of Turnwold Plantation nine miles east of Eatonton, hired Harris to work as a printer's devil for his newspaper The Countryman. Harris worked for clothing, room, and board. The newspaper reached subscribers throughout the Confederacy during the American Civil War and became one of the larger newspapers in the South with a circulation of about 2,000. Harris learned to set type for the paper, and Turner allowed him to publish his own poems, book reviews, and humorous paragraphs.

Turner's instruction and technical expertise exerted a profound influence on Harris. During his four year tenure at Turnwold Plantation, Joe Harris consumed the literature in Turner's library. He had access to the works of Chaucer, Dickens, and Sir Thomas Browne, as well as to Arabian Nights, Shakespeare, Milton, Swift, Thackeray, and Edgar Allan Poe. Turner, a fiercely independent Southern loyalist and eccentric intellectual, emphasized the work of southern writers, yet stressed that Harris read widely. In The Countryman Turner insisted that Harris not shy away from including humor in his journalism.

While at Turnwold Plantation, Harris spent hundreds of hours in the slave quarters during time off. Much of his self-consciousness disappeared in the slave quarters, and his humble background as an illegitimate, red-headed son of an Irish immigrant helped foster an intimate connection with the slaves. He absorbed the stories, language, and inflections of people like Uncle George Terrell, Old Harbert, and Aunt Crissy. The African-American animal tales they shared later became the foundation and inspiration for Harris's Uncle Remus tales. George Terrell and Old Harbert in particular became models for Uncle Remus as well as role models for Harris.

Savannah and the South: 1866 - 1876

Joseph Addison Turner shut down The Countryman in May 1866. Joe Harris left the plantation with useless Confederate money and very few possessions.

The Macon Telegraph hired Harris as a typesetter later that year. Harris found the work unsatisfactory and himself the butt of jokes around the office, in no small part due to his red hair. Within five months, he accepted a job working for the New Orleans Crescent Monthly, a literary journal. Just six months after that, homesick, he returned to Georgia, but with another opportunity at the Monroe Advertiser, a weekly paper published in Forsyth, Georgia.

At the Advertiser Harris found a regional audience with his column "Affairs of Georgia." Newspapers across the state reprinted his humorous paragraphs and political barbs. Harris' reputation earned him the position of associate editor at the Savannah Morning News, the largest circulation newspaper in Georgia. Though he relished in his position in Forsyth, Joe Harris accepted the $40-a-week job, a significant pay increase, and quickly established himself as Georgia's leading humor columnist while at the Morning News.

In 1872 Harris met Mary Esther LaRose, a seventeen year-old French-Canadian from Quebec. After a year of courtship, Harris and LaRose married in April 1873. LaRose was 18 and Harris, 27 (though publicly admitting to 24). Over the next three years, the couple had two children. Their life in Savannah came to an abrupt halt, however, when they fled to Atlanta to avoid a yellow fever epidemic.

Atlanta: 1876 - 1908

 
Harris in 1873

In 1876 Harris accepted a position from Henry W. Grady at the Atlanta Constitution, where he would remain for the next 24 years, most of that time in association with other writers including Frank Lebby Stanton who was in turn an associate of James Whitcomb Riley. Not long after taking the job, Harris began the Uncle Remus stories as a serial to "preserve in permanent shape those curious mementoes of a period that will no doubt be sadly misrepresented by historians of the future." The tales were reprinted across the United States, and Harris was approached by publisher D. Appleton and Company to compile them for a book.

Uncle Remus: His Songs and His Sayings debuted near the end of 1880. Hundreds of newspapers reviewed the best-seller, and Harris found himself in the national spotlight, albeit reluctantly. Of the press and attention Walter Hines Page noted, "Joe Harris does not appreciate Joel Chandler Harris."


Joel Chandler Harris's Home

The Wren's Nest



Royalties from the book were modest, but allowed Harris to rent a six-room house in West End, an unincorporated village on the outskirts of Atlanta, to accommodate his growing family. Two years later Harris bought the house and hired architect George Humphries to transform the farmhouse into a Queen Anne Victorian in the Eastlake style. The home, soon thereafter called The Wren's Nest, would be where Harris spent most of his time.

Harris preferred to write at the Wren's Nest, and would often take the mule-drawn trolley to work, pick up his assignments, and bring them back home. Not only was Harris writing for the Constitution and compiling more stories for Nights with Uncle Remus (1883), but he also contributed local-color stories to magazines like Scribner's, Harper's, and The Century.

Harris published prodigiously throughout the 1880's and 1890's, trying his hand at novels, children's literature, and even a translation of French folklore. Yet he rarely strayed from home and work during this time, choosing to remain close to his family and his gardening. Harris and his wife Essie had six more children in Atlanta, with a total of six (out of nine) surviving past childhood. The oldest, Julian LaRose Harris, won a Pulitzer Prize with his wife Julia Collier Harris in 1926, in part for their "energetic fight" against the Ku Klux Klan.

By the late 1890's, Harris tired of the newspaper grind and suffered from health problems most likely stemming from alcoholism. At the same time, he grew more comfortable with his creative persona. Harris retired from the Constitution in 1900, yet continued experimenting with novels and writing articles for outlets like The Saturday Evening Post. Still, he remained close to home, refusing to accept honorary degrees from the University of Pennsylvania and Emory College. In 1905 Harris was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

Harris did travel to accept an invitation to the White House by President Theodore Roosevelt. Two years earlier, Roosevelt had said, "Presidents may come and presidents may go, but Uncle Remus stays put. Georgia has done a great many things for the Union, but she has never done more than when she gave Mr. Joel Chandler Harris to American literature."

On July 3, 1908, Joel Chandler Harris died of acute nephritis and complications from cirrhosis of the liver. In his obituary, the New York Times Book Review echoed Roosevelt's sentiment, stating: “Uncle Remus cannot die. Joel Chandler Harris has departed this life at the age of 60 [...] but his best creation, [Uncle Remus] with his fund of folk-lore, will live in literature."

Writing

Folklore

Harris created the first iteration of the Uncle Remus character for the Atlanta Constitution in 1876 after inheriting a column written by Samuel W. Small, a colleague who had taken leave from the paper. In these character sketches Remus would visit the newspaper office to discuss the social and racial issues of the day. By 1877 Small had returned to the Constitution and resumed his column.



Harris had no intention to continue the Remus character. But when Small once again left the paper, Harris reprised Remus and this time realized the literary value of the stories of his youth from the slaves of Turnwold Plantation. Harris set out to record the stories and insisted that they be verified by two independent sources before he would set them into print. The pursuit proved more and more difficult given his professional duties, urban location, race and, eventually, fame.

On July 20, 1879, Harris published "The Story of Mr. Rabbit and Mr. Fox as Told by Uncle Remus" in the Atlanta Constitution. It was the first of 34 plantation fables that would comprise Uncle Remus: His Songs and His Sayings in 1880. The stories, mostly collected directly from the African-American oral storytelling tradition, were revolutionary in their use of dialect, animal personage, and serialized landscape.

Brer Rabbit and the Tar-Baby

Remus' stories featured a trickster hero called Br'er Rabbit ("Brother" Rabbit), who used his wits against adversity, though his efforts did not always succeed. Br'er Rabbit is a direct interpretation of Yoruba tales of Hare, though some others posit Native American influences as well. Scholar Stella Brewer Brookes asserts, "Never has the trickster been better exemplified than in the Br'er Rabbit of Harris." Br'er Rabbit was accompanied by friends and enemies alike, such as Br'er Fox, Br'er Bear, Br'er Terrapin, and Br'er Wolf. The stories represented a significant break from the romantic fairy tales of the Western tradition: instead of a singular event in a singular story, the critters on the plantation existed in an ongoing community saga, time immemorial.

The Uncle Remus stories garnered critical acclaim and achieved popular success well into the 20th century. Harris published at least twenty-nine books, of which nine books were compiled of Uncle Remus stories, including Uncle Remus: His Songs and His Sayings (1880), Nights with Uncle Remus (1883), Uncle Remus and His Friends (1892), The Tar Baby and Other Rhymes of Uncle Remus (1904), Told by Uncle Remus: New Stories of the Old Plantation (1905), Uncle Remus and Brer Rabbit (1907). The last three books written by Joel Chandler Harris were published after his death which included Uncle Remus and the Little Boy (1910), Uncle Remus Returns (1918), and Seven Tales of Uncle Remus (1948). The tales, 185 in sum, became immensely popular among both black and white readers in the North and South. Few outside of the South had ever heard accents like those spoken in the tales, and no one had ever seen the dialect legitimately and faithfully recorded in print. To the North and those abroad, the stories were a "revelation of the unknown." Mark Twain noted in 1883, "in the matter of writing [the African-American dialect], he is the only master the country has produced."
The stories introduced international readers to the American South. Rudyard Kipling wrote in a letter to Harris that the tales "ran like wild fire through an English Public school.... [We] found ourselves quoting whole pages of Uncle Remus that had got mixed in with the fabric of the old school life." The Uncle Remus tales have since been translated into more than forty languages.

James Weldon Johnson called the collection "the greatest body of folklore America has produced."

Journalism

Early in his career at the Atlanta Constitution, Joe Harris laid out his editorial ideology and set the tone for an agenda that aimed to help reconcile issues of race, class, and region: "An editor must have a purpose. [...] What a legacy for one's conscience to know that one has been instrumental in mowing down the old prejudices that rattle in the wind like weeds."

Harris served as assistant editor and lead editorial writer at the Atlanta Constitution primarily between 1876 and 1900, and published articles intermittently until his death in 1908. While at the Constitution, Harris, "in thousands of signed and unsigned editorials over a twenty-four-year period, [...] set a national tone for reconciliation between North and South after the Civil War."

Throughout his career, Joe Harris actively promoted racial reconciliation as well as African-American education, suffrage, and equality. He regularly denounced racism among southern whites, condemned lynching as barbaric, and highlighted the importance of higher education for African Americans, frequently citing the work of W.E.B. DuBois in his editorials. In 1883, for example, editorials from the Atlanta Constitution challenged those of the New York Sun that alleged "educating the negro will merely increase his capacity for evil." The Atlanta Constitution editorial countered, stating if "education of the negro is not the chief solution of the problem that confronts the white people of the South then there is no other conceivable solution and there is nothing ahead but political chaos and demoralization." Harris's editorials were often progressive in content and paternalistic in tone. Harris was unwavering in his commitment to the "dissipation of sectional jealousy and misunderstanding, as well as religious and racial intolerance", yet "never entirely freed himself of the idea that the [southern whites] would have to patronize the [southern blacks]."

Paradoxically, Harris also oversaw some of the Atlanta Constitution's most sensationalized coverage of racial issues, most notably regarding the 1899 torture and lynching of Sam Hose, an African-American farm worker. Harris resigned from the paper the following year, having lost patience for publishing both "his iconoclastic views on race" and "what was expected of him" at a major southern newspaper during a particularly vitriolic period.

In 1904 Harris wrote four important articles for the Saturday Evening Post discussing the problem of race relations in the South that highlight his progressive yet paternalistic views. Of these, Booker T. Washington noted: "It has been a long time since I have read anything from the pen of any man which has given me such encouragement as your article has. [...] In a speech on Lincoln's Birthday which I am to deliver in New York, I am going to take the liberty to quote liberally from what you have said."

Two years later, Harris and his son Julian founded what would become Uncle Remus's Home Magazine. Harris wrote to Andrew Carnegie that its purpose would be to further "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.” Circulation reached 240,000 within one year, making it one of the largest magazines in the country.

Other Works

Harris wrote novels, narrative histories, translations of French folklore, children's literature, and collections of stories depicting rural life in Georgia. The short stories "Free Joe and the Rest of the World", "Mingo", and "At Teague Poteets" are the most influential of his non-Uncle Remus creative work. Many of his short stories delved into the changing social and economic values in the South during Reconstruction. Harris's turn as a local colorist gave voice to poor white characters and demonstrated his fluency with different African-American dialects and characters.

Legacy

Harris's legacy has largely been ignored by academia, in no small part due to the Uncle Remus character, use of dialect, plantation setting, and Disney's adaptation of the stories. Harris's books exerted a profound influence on storytellers at home and abroad, yet the Uncle Remus tales effectively have no critical standing. His legacy is, at the same time, not without considerable controversy: Harris's critical reputation in the 20th and 21st centuries has been wildly mixed.

Criticism

Critic H. L. Mencken held a less than favorable view of Harris: "Once upon a time a Georgian printed a couple of books that attracted notice, but immediately it turned out that he was little more than an amanuensis for the local blacks--that his works were really the products, not of white Georgia, but of black Georgia. Writing afterward as a white man, he swiftly subsided into the fifth rank." Keith Cartwright, however, asserts, "Harris might arguably be called the greatest single authorial force behind the literary development of African American folk matter and manner."

Alice Walker accused Harris of "stealing a good part of my heritage" in a searing essay called "Uncle Remus, No Friend of Mine". Toni Morrison wrote a novel called Tar Baby based on the folktale recorded by Harris. In interviews, she said she learned the story from her family and owed no debt to Harris.

Some scholars are skeptical of the validity of the stories collected by a white man, citing the difficulty that many white folklorists had in persuading African-Americans to divulge their folklore. Other critical scholars cite Uncle Remus as a problematic and contradictory figure: sometimes a mouthpiece for white paternalism, sometimes a stereotype of the black entertainer, and sometimes poetically subversive.

Black folklorist and university professor Julius Lester sees the Uncle Remus stories as important records of black folklore. He has rewritten many of the Harris stories in an effort to elevate the subversive elements over the purportedly racist ones. Regarding the nature of the Uncle Remus character, Lester said, "There are no inaccuracies in Harris's characterization of Uncle Remus. Even the most cursory reading of the slave narratives collected by the Federal Writer's Project of the 1930s reveals that there were many slaves who fit the Uncle Remus mold."

Author Ralph Ellison also responded to Harris' work positively: "Aesop and Uncle Remus had taught us that comedy is a disguised form of philosophical instruction; and especially when it allows us to glimpse the animal instincts lying beneath the surface of our civilized affectations."

Some 21st century scholars have argued that the Uncle Remus tales satirized the very "plantation school" that readers believed his work supported. Critic Robert Cochran noted: "Harris went to the world as the trickster Brer Rabbit, and in the trickster Uncle Remus he projected both his sharpest critique of things as they were and the deepest image of his heart’s desire." Harris omitted the Southern plantation house, disparaged the white Southern gentleman, and presented miscegenation in positive terms. He violated social codes and presented an ethos that would have otherwise shocked his reading audience. These recent acknowledgements echo early observations from Walter Hines Page who wrote in 1884 that Harris "hardly conceals his scorn for the old aristocracy" and makes a "a sly thrust at the pompous life of the Old South."

Links:

Eatonton, Ga

Catholic Encyclopedia (1913)/Joel Chandler Harris

1911 Encyclopædia Britannica/Harris, Joel Chandler

Uncle Remus: His Songs and His Sayings

Brother Rabbit's Cradle Story

Click Here to read the story.

The Moonlit Road

Strange Tales Of the American South

Audios of American Short Stories

Uncle Remus Stories On Youtube

Song Of The South Webring

Tar Baby Story

Source: Wikipedia

Joel Chandler Harris

A native of Eatonton, Joel Chandler Harris gained fame a century ago as the writer of children's stories told in dialect by Uncle Remus, a slave who entertained a young white boy with American folktales. While scholars debate Harris's actual birth year, 1845 or 1848, the young boy born December 9 in Billy Barne's Tavern to the unwed Mary Harris suffered the pangs of illegitimacy by stammering in public and being self-effacing. Obviously bright, Harris received the attention of Andrew Reid who paid his tuition at Union Academy. He befriended elderly slaves George Terrell and Old Harbert who entertained him with trickster tales about Brer Rabbit and Brer Fox and the other critters in the Briar Patch. In 1862 Harris left Eatonton to work as a printer's devil on The Countryman published by Joseph Addison Turner on his Putnam County plantation, Turnworld. Here he studied the trade of the journalist under Turner's watchful eye and from a fence post at Turnwold witnessed Sherman's March to the Sea, an event he captured in his tribute to Turner, the 1892 memoir On the Pantation. With defeat, Harris left Putnam County for newspaper jobs in New Orleans and Savannah before landing at the Atlanta Constitution in 1879. The next year appeared the collection Uncle Remus, His Songs and Sayings and in 1883, Nights with Uncle Remus. The animated exposure of Walt Disney's 1946 "Song of the South" has obscured the true Uncle Remus tales that are more complex than presented in the movie and represent only part of Harris's corpus of work. Unlike the moonlight and magnolias of the popular southern fiction of his day, Harris wove complicated stories filled with humor and pathos. In Mingo, and Other Sketches in Black and White, published in 1884, Free Joe, published in 1887, and Daddy Jake the Runaway, published in 1889, Harris presented a darker side to slavery than had previously appeared in the Uncle Remus tales. These stories epitomized the tragedy and realism of the age. Like his contemporary and friend, Mark Twain, Harris composed a national literaturethat used localism to describe the universal. This shy red-headed and freckled man understood more of humanity and the world because of personal circumstances which enables him to relate to those society deemed less fortunate. He died at his Atlanta home, the Wren's Nest.




The Wren's Nest from the cover of Rich's Menu

Joel Chandler Harris House


HABS photo from 1985

Joel Chandler Harris House, also known as The Wren's Nest or Snap Bean Farm, is a Queen Anne style farmhouse in Atlanta, Georgia built in 1870. It was home to Joel Chandler Harris, editor of the Atlanta Constitution and author of the Uncle Remus Tales, from 1881 until his death in 1908. He is most known as author of the "Uncle Remus" tales, based upon stories he heard slaves tell during his youth.

The home still contains furnishings owned by Harris and utilizes the original paint colors. The house became known as Wren's Nest in 1900 after the Harris children found a wren had built a nest in the mail box; the family built a new mailbox in order to leave the nest undisturbed. The structure was designated a National Historic Landmark in 1962.

The organization that maintains the Wren's Nest offers tours and sponsors a storytelling festival but struggles to raise its $120,000 annual budget due in large part to the negative perception of Harris's portrayals of the old South.



The Wren's Nest in 2009

It is located at 1050 Ralph D. Abernathy Blvd., SW, formerly named 1050 Gordon Street., SW.

Source: Internet

Uncle Remus

Uncle Remus in Uncle Remus, His Songs and His Sayings: The Folk-Lore of the Old Plantation, 1881

Uncle Remus is a fictional character, the title character and fictional narrator of a collection of African American folktales adapted and compiled by Joel Chandler Harris, published in book form in 1881. A journalist in post-Reconstruction Atlanta, Georgia, Harris produced seven Uncle Remus books.


"Old Plantation Play Song", from Uncle Remus, His Songs and His Sayings: The Folk-Lore of the Old Plantation, 1881

Structure

Uncle Remus is a collection of animal stories, songs, and oral folklore, collected from Southern United States blacks. Many of the stories are didactic, much like those of Aesop's fables and the stories of Jean de La Fontaine. Uncle Remus is a kindly old slave who serves as a storytelling device, passing on the folktales to children gathered around him.

The stories are told in Harris's version of a Deep South slave dialect (Gullah language). The genre of stories is the trickster tale. At the time of Harris' publication, his work was praised for its ability to capture plantation negro dialect.

Br'er Rabbit ("Brother Rabbit") is the main character of the stories, a likable character, prone to tricks and trouble-making who is often opposed by Br'er Fox and Br'er Bear. In one tale, Br'er Fox constructs a lump of tar and puts clothing on it. When Br'er Rabbit comes along he addresses the "tar baby" amiably, but receives no response. Br'er Rabbit becomes offended by what he perceives as Tar Baby's lack of manners, punches it, and becomes stuck. Using the phrase "tar baby" to refer to the idea of "a problem that gets worse the more one struggles against it" became part of the wider culture of the United States in the mid-20th century.

Controversy and Legacy

The animal stories were conveyed in a manner in which they were not deemed as ostensibly racist by many among the audiences of the time. By the mid-20th century, however, the dialect and the "old Uncle" stereotype of the narrator, was considered politically incorrect and demeaning by many black people, on account of what they considered to be racist and patronizing attitudes toward blacks. Providing additional controversy is the story's context in the Antebellum south on a slave owning plantation, a setting that is portrayed in a passive and even docile manner, contrary to modern attitudes that slavery was a terrible travesty in United States history and should be portrayed as such. Nevertheless, Harris' work was, according to himself, an accurate account of the stories he heard from the slaves when he worked on a plantation as a young man. He claimed to have listened to, and memorized, the African American animal stories told by Uncle George Terrell, Old Harbert, and Aunt Crissy at the plantation; he wrote them down some years later. He acknowledged his debt to these storytellers in his fictionalized autobiography, 'On the Plantation' (1892). Many of the stories that he recorded have direct equivalents in the African oral tradition, and it's thanks to Harris that their African-American form is preserved.

Harris himself said, in the introduction to Uncle Remus, that he hoped his book would be considered:

...a sympathetic supplement to Mrs. Stowe's [author of Uncle Tom's Cabin] wonderful defense of slavery as it existed in the South. Mrs. Stowe, let me hasten to say, attacked the possibilities of slavery with all the eloquence of genius; but the same genius painted the portrait of the Southern slave-owner, and defended him.

Mark Twain read the Uncle Remus stories to his children, who were awed to meet Harris himself. In his Autobiography Twain describes him thus:

He was the bashfulest grown person I have ever met. When there were people about he stayed silent, and seemed to suffer until they were gone. But he was lovely, nevertheless; for the sweetness and benignity of the immortal Remus looked out from his eyes, and the graces and sincerities of his character shone in his face.

Twain wrote that "It may be that Jim Wolf was as bashful as Harris. It hardly seems possible...." Jim Wolf being a person from the first humorous story Twain ever told—the story recorded in "Jim Wolf and the Cats".

Film and Music Adaptations


Uncle Remus as portrayed by James Baskett in Song of the South

The stories have inspired at least three feature films. The first and best known is Walt Disney's Song of the South, released in 1946. The film was a combination of live action and animation. Disney hired vaudeville and radio actor James Baskett to portray Remus, claiming that he (Disney) purposely sought someone whose appearance was unknown to audiences: "We want [the audience] to see 'Uncle Remus' and not some actor whose personality is already known to them through other screen roles." Baskett's appearance, a large black man with a round face, contrasts with the appearance of Uncle Remus in earlier illustrations by Frederick S. Church, A. B. Frost, and E. W. Kemble in books by Joel Chandler Harris. Ralph Bakshi's 1975 film Coonskin is a satire of the Disney film that adapts the Uncle Remus stories to a contemporary Harlem setting. The Adventures of Brer Rabbit is a 2006 direct-to video production which has hip-hop influences.

Loudon Wainwright III wrote and recorded the song "Black Uncle Remus" in 1972. Frank Zappa also recorded a song called "Uncle Remus" which appears on the album Apostrophe (') (1974). The Zappa song was also recorded by band mate George Duke on his album "The Aura Will Prevail".

The Uncle Remus tales are also the basis for the 1984 Van Dyke Parks album Jump.

The Boondocks, a comic strip and animated show, adopted the likeness of Uncle Remus in creating the character Uncle Ruckus.

Don Williams refers to "Uncle Remus" putting him to bed in the song Good Ole Boys Like Me.

Source: Wikipedia