The story was taken from African slaves, without credit or compensation.
Origins and Influences
Two-thirds of Harris's celebrated trickster tales—which constitute the largest gathering of African American folktales published in the nineteenth century—derive their deep structures and primary motifs from African folktales that were brought to the New World and then retold and elaborated upon by African American
slaves living in the southeastern United States. The remaining stories have their roots in European and Native American folklore.
Eatonton's other famous literary personality, however,
Alice Walker, only begrudgingly acknowledges Harris's influence, arguing that he in effect stole a major part of the black folk legacy from its authentic African American creators.
The Brer Rabbit Stories
Harris's fictionalized storyteller, Uncle Remus, was a "human syndicate" whom he had admittedly "walloped together" from several black storytellers he had met while working from 1862 to 1866 as a printing compositor on
Joseph Addison Turner's Turnwold Plantation, outside Eatonton, in
Putnam County. Although Uncle Remus's name has its ultimate origins in Rome's Romulus and Remus legend, its more immediate antecedent was an elderly black gardener Harris met in Forsyth, Georgia, where Harris had served from 1867 to 1870 as an editor for the
Monroe Advertiser.
The Uncle Remus tales are African American trickster stories about the exploits of Brer Rabbit, Brer Fox, and other “creeturs” that were recreated in Black regional dialect by Joel Chandler Harris. Harris, a native of Eatonton, was a literary comedian, New South journalist, amateur folklorist...
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