Have you ever been to Eatonton, Georgia--east of Atlanta? If not, give some thought to going there. For  that is where Joel Chandler Harris (1848-1908) was born. Harris created Uncle Remus and the Brer Rabbit stories. There is a little Uncle Remus museum in Eatonton and it is worth your time.

My wife Mary and I were there in October [1997]. We stocked up on some biographical materials on Harris, a CD-ROM with eleven of the Brer Rabbit tales and some printed collections of favorite stories. Armed with a child's  simplification of "Brer Rabbit and the Tar Baby" plus the CD-ROM I then spent a few days in Irving, Texas with a precocious 2 1/3 year old named Gavin Patrick Killough. After only two hearings of Tar Baby, Gavin was mastering the unfamiliar English dialect and pretending that he was Brer Rabbit's angry antagonist, Brer Fox. Gavin knew that when I paused every time Brer Rabbit had butted the tar baby with a different part of his anatomy, it was time for Gavin to add the refrain, "And Brer Fox, he lay low."

Theodore Roosevelt called journalist Joel Chandler Harris a national treasure. Harris's tales keep on being reissued and read. Disney gave us the film, "SONG OF THE SOUTH" and two generations of kids still sing its songs.

The setting of most of those stories is post Civil War Georgia. Tales are told of an evening in the cabin of an elderly black man, Uncle Remus, who is visited almost daily by a young white boy. The boy comes to hear tales of days when the animals could talk and carried on rather like people.  Harris assured his critics that he made none of these stories up. The tales were as told by black men and women of Georgia.

These tales hearken back to Africa. They remind me of the West African animal tales told in Surinam in South America: the "Anansi Tori" whose hero is  usually a spider. In our home near Asheville we have on two recent occasions entertained  a distinguished visitor from Senegal in West Africa. I played for him a recording of "The Tar Baby." He had  heard of neither Harris nor Remus but immediately knew he was hearing something familiar.  

First, our visitor said the rabbit is the totem of his own extended family. Second, the late President of Senegal, Leopold Senghor, creator of the concept of "negritude," had written a much loved book retelling West African lore of rabbits and other animals. Animal tales, our friend  said, were an African cultural staple and Harris's tales would be immediately intelligible and loved in  today's Africa.

There is  wisdom in Uncle Remus, usually indirect. Brer Rabbit reminds of the mischievous German prankster Till Eulenspiegel, content only when poking fun at others. Harris deliberately removes elements of human conscience from his animal characters to cause us to reflect.  As Uncle Remus explains to the boy:  
 

"De creeturs dunno nothin' tall about dat dat's good and dat dat aint good. Dey dunno right fum wrong. Dey see w'at dey want, en dey git it ef dey kin, by hook er by crook." ("SOME GOES UP AND SOME GOES DOWN") 

Some readers might look no farther than Washington, D.C., to find powerful humans indulging in charming self-seeking, mischief making and boasting better left to Uncle Remus's animals.

I have slowly come to appreciate good writing in dialect.  When I was a pre-teen reading Scottish dialect in the classic tale of a collie, BOB, SON OF BATTLE, I was put off by the difficult language. I could not just skim through it in a rush as with standard English. I later had trouble with the Welsh in Shakespeare's KING HENRY THE FIFTH. 

Only years later did I begin truly to like and get the point  of non-standard ways of putting things. It happened in the dialogs in Rudyard Kipling's narratives about three soldiers in India: a Cockney, a Welshman and an Irishman. Of course, I had to slow down my reading to do justice to the texts. But by then I had met real people speaking those same accents and the effort suddenly seemed worth it.  Today, as I renew and extend my acquaintance with Harris and Remus, I find myself reading every story aloud. The language of Uncle Remus, Brer Rabbit, Brer Tarrypin, Sis Cow. Miss Meadows and de gals and Judge Bar stays with me, much as some of the lowland Scots dialect writing of Robert Burns.

The language of Uncle Remus can be magical. Read the passages below aloud. How much richer we would be if our every day  speech were still peppered with expressions like

--"No sooner say, no sooner do." ("COUSIN! COUSIN!")

--"Brer Fox, he holler, he squall, he kick, he squeal" (i.e. after Brer Rabbit had nailed his tail to the roof) "Onnail me, Brer Rabbit, onnail me!"("BRER FOX SHINGLES HIS ROOF")

--"I'm mighty much mistaken" ("THE MONEY MINT")

--"'Bred and bawn in a briar-patch, Brer Fox--bred and bawn in a briar-patch' en wid dat he skip out des ez lively ez a cricket in de embers.  ("THE BRIAR PATCH")

--"...now'n den Brer Rabbit'd bust out in er laff, en ole Brer Fox, he'd git a spell er de dry grins." ("SOME GOES UP AND SOME GOES DOWN").

When crusading young white men go nowadays into black and minority schools and record what is being said, the magic of Brer Rabbit is just not there. Pain, yes. Vileness, yes. Truth, too. But too many obscenities are piled upon obscenities. I  think of the dialect recorded in Pat Conroy's THE RIVER IS WIDE or the more recent IN THE CLASSROOM by  Mark Gerson. Those men are fashionable writers and I suppose must be "politically correct." Moreover, taste is merely taste and is individual. But if you like a way of telling stories which is  courtly, humorous,  low-key   and something you can safely read to children, then Joel Chandler Harris is the man for you. 

So hop to it. Find a collection of his tales, sit back and fall to  reading Uncle Remus aloud. As Mr. Cricket told ole man Br'er Fox, when asked how come he traveled so fast: 
 

"I done foun' out long  'go dat de way ter git anywhar is ter go on whar you gwine." ("LITTLE MR. CRICKET")

 I wonder if Yogi Berra had read Joel Chandler Harris.

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