Birthday: Joel Chandler Harris, caught in the whirlwinds of social change forever

Joel Chandler Harris (1845-1908)
Journalist, author, folklorist

The most Joel Harris knew of his father was that he didn’t marry his mother, and that he was Irish. Harris grew up slight of build and red of hair; his mother took in washing in a cottage granted her by the leading doctor of Eatonton, Georgia.

The doctor paid Harris’ school fees and gave him the run of his extensive library. The boy had a remarkably retentive mind and a way with words, and when he finished school at sixteen, Harris got a job as a typesetter for a plantation owner, Joseph Addison Turner, who fancied himself a Jeffersonian. Turnwold Plantation produced “cotton, corn and literature”, and the nation’s only newspaper for plantation owners, The Countryman.

Harris contributed lots of filler- poems, anecdotes, observations. Because of his slight build and the paper’s value to the Confederate government for communications and propaganda purposes, Harris won an exemption from military service, and continued his education in his employer’s personal library.

Sherman’s troops sacked the plantation in 1864; The Countryman limped along until 1866. Harris began a decade of steadily increasing responsibility at a series of Georgia newspapers. In 1876 he moved his family to Atlanta to avoid a yellow fever outbreak in Savannah, and in short order he signed on with Henry W. Grady, editor of The Atlanta Constitution. Harris shared Grady’s zeal to develop and promote a “New South,” of more progressive views and practices, and editorialized on the issues of the day through that lens.

The world was so different then: most big Southern papers had among their columnists what was known as “the dialect writer.” Filling in for The Constitution's for a while, Harris- casting about for material- recalled a story he’d read in Lippincott's’ Magazine, an African trickster tale from the slave community called “Buh Rabbit and the Tar Baby.” Harris turned one of his fictional characters- Uncle Remus, who stopped by the office to offer barbed comments on life in Reconstruction-era Atlanta- into a folklorist, recalling the tales of his childhood and recounting them to a small white boy.

Harris drew heavily upon the tales he heard told in the slave quarters at Turnwold, and saw his work- which caught on with readers- as an effort to "preserve in permanent shape those curious mementoes of a period that will no doubt be sadly misrepresented by historians of the future." He meticulously re-created the dialogue of the original black storytellers- going so far as to verify their accuracy with at least two independent sources- and by 1880 he had enough material to publish Uncle Remus: His Songs and His Sayings.

“Bre’r Rabbit and The Tar Baby,” which Harris made into one of the most popular folk tales in history- revolutionized the literature. Br'er Rabbit is a direct interpretation of Yoruba tales of Hare Br'er Rabbit was accompanied by friends and enemies, such as Br'er Fox, Br'er Bear, Br'er Terrapin, and Br'er Wolf. The stories represented a significant break from the 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.

During the 1880s and ‘90s Harris wrote like a man possessed: in addition to his editorial duties at the paper, he produced over 35 books, ranging from adult novels to history to children’s fiction. Mark Twain hailed Harris as a master of dialect tales, and invited him on the famous Twain-G.W. Cable “Twins of Genius” lecture tour of 1884-85. Afflicted by a lifelong stammer, Harris declined; Twain simply included his favorite Harris stories in his lecture. The two became fast friends, and were inducted as charter members of the American Folklore Society in 1888.

Harris’ Uncle Remus books- nine in all, published between 1880 and 1910, with a handful more published as late as 1948- introduced the American South to the world. Rudyard Kipling wrote Harris a fan letter, telling him how they had caught on in his British school. A.A. Milne’s father read him a bedtime story a night from “the sacred book.” James Weldon Johnson called the 185 stories the greatest body of folk literature America had yet produced.

At the newspaper, Harris tirelessly campaigned for reconciliation between North and South, and between the races. His views, considered liberal at the time, were a form of “progressive conservatism” that buttressed the fundamental assumptions of white superiority but sought to ameliorate its harsher edges.

He regularly denounced racism among southern whites, condemned lynching, and highlighted the importance of higher education for African Americans, frequently citing the work of W. E. B. Du Bois in his editorials.To modern eyes his work reads as astonishingly blinkered and paternalistic, as when he described Harriet Beecher Stowe's novel, Uncle Tom's Cabin, as a major influence on the characters of Uncle Remus and the Little Boy. When he read Stowe's novel in 1862, he said,  it "made a more vivid impression upon my mind than anything I have ever read since." Interpreting Uncle Tom's Cabin as a "wonderful defense of slavery," Harris argued that Stowe's "genius took possession of her and compelled her, in spite of her avowed purpose, to give a very fair picture of the institution she had intended to condemn." In Harris's view, the "real moral that Mrs. Stowe's book teaches is that the. . . realities [of slavery], under the best and happiest conditions, possess a romantic beauty and tenderness all their own."

Harris was torn between his editorial and authorial personas. Always sensitive about his illegitimacy, he strove to “prove” his worth all his life, striving to make ever- more money, and turning his modest suburban Atlanta farmhouse into a Victorian mansion. Yet he did most of his work at home, and longed for the relaxed life of a writer.

Worn out by these conflicting demands, Harris retired from the paper in 1900, but continued to contribute articles and editorials. He and one of his sons launched Uncle Remus’ Home Magazine, dedicated to "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.”

Booker T. Washington praised and quoted Harris in his lectures, and President Theodore Roosevelt honored him during a visit to Atlanta. The magazine’s audience reached over 100,000 in its first year, and was well over a quarter million when the Bobbs-Merrill Publishing Company bought it after Harris’ death. Uncle Remus’s character was licensed to commercial products of all sorts as well, in the manner of Aunt Jemima and Uncle Ben. The British Arts & Craft designer William Morris even produced a Bre’r Rabbit wallpaper in 1882.

Harris’ influence was significant through the first half of the 20th century. He was inducted into the American Academy of Arts & Letters before he died in 1908. His influence on British children's writers such as Kipling, Milne, Beatrix Potter, and Enid Blyton is substantial. His influence on modernism is less overt, but also evident in the works of Pound, Eliot, Joyce, and Faulkner. Ezra Pound and T.S. Eliot corresponded as Uncle Remus characters: Pound was Bre’r Rabbit; Eliot, Old Possum, which character led to the book Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats and, in more recent time, the unkillable musical, Cats. He was memorialized by the US Postal Service in 1948.

His scholarly repute oscillated wildly through the decades as racial attitudes changed and the civil rights movement in the United States advanced. In recent decades the stories’ roots in African trickster lore have gained new appreciation. British author Neil Gaiman has made much of them, notably in his books American Gods and Anansi Boys.

On the other hand,  author Alice Walker, also a native of Eatonton, Georgia, published a scathing 1981 essay accusing Harris of having appropriated her culture’s heritage and turning it into a stereotype-reinforcing commercial product for decades. Walker’s wrath incinerated what little good was left of Harris’ name in the popular American imagination after Walt Disney- who secured the rights to the Harris literary estate- produced a film called The Song of the South in 1946.

The film was commercially successful. It won two Academy Awards, including an honorary Oscar to James Baskett, who played Uncle Remus and voiced several of the film’s animated characters, but who was barred from attending the Atlanta premiere, in 1948. It quickly came to be seen as a cringingly patronizing portrayal of happy, infantilized blacks, and, while it has been released for home viewing internationally, Disney has never issued a home-viewing version in America. Harris’ work has been seen- and denounced- as that of the film’s writers ever since.

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