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after they saw what had been done with them.
    When Joel Chandler Harris was a young boy in the 1850s and 1860s, he went out to work as an apprentice for a newspaperman on the Turnwold Plantation. We knew this place when I was growing up as the Turner place. It now has a historical marker, and often, driving past it, I stop and look at the house—a nice, big, white Southern house—and at the marker, which tells how Joel Chandler Harris created Uncle Remus.
    In Life and Letters of Joel Chandler Harris, published in 1918 by Houghton Mifflin, Harris’s daughter-in-law, Julia Collier Harris, told his story. She wrote:
When the work and play of the day were ended and the glow of the lightwood knot could be seen in the negro cabins, Joel and the Turner children would steal away from the house and visit their friends in the slave quarters. Old Harbert and Uncle George Terrell were Joel’s favorite companions, and from a nook in their chimney corners he listened to the legends handed down from their African ancestors— the lore of animals and birds so dear to every plantation negro. And sometimes, while the yellow yam baked in the ashes, or the hoecake browned in the shovel, the negroes would croon a camp-meeting hymn or a corn-shucking melody. The boy unconsciously absorbed their fables and their ballads, and the soft elisions of their dialect and the picturesque images of their speech left an indelible imprint upon the plastic tablets of his memory.
    Here, too, he heard stories of runaway slaves and “patterollers.” But Joel noticed that the patrol never visited the Turner Plantation and when, during the war, vague rumors of a negro uprising began to circulate, Mr. Turner only laughed, for he claimed that “the people who treat their negroes right have nothing to fear from them.”
    Thus passed the months and years at Turnwold and it was during these colorful days that the creator of “Uncle Remus,” of “Mingo,” and “Free Joe” received those vivid and varying impressions of the old regime and of the customs of its mansions and its cabins, —pictures of a period that passed away long before he became known as the creator of types rich in humor and poetry, and redolent of the soil to which they were bound by a thousand ties of love and sorrow, of bounty and privation.
    She goes on to say:
The great popular success of the legends was a matter of strange surprise to their author. [This was around 1887, after Harris had published these books, these tales, of Uncle Remus.] He said, “It was just an accident. All I did was write out and put into print the stories I had heard all my life.” When asked by an interviewer if any particular negroes suggested the “quaint and philosophic character” whom he had built up into one of the monuments of modern literature, he replied, “He was not an invention of my own, but a human syndicate, I might say, of three or four old darkies whom I knew. I just walloped them together into one person and called him ‘Uncle Remus.’ ”
    The daughter-in-law also writes:
Before leaving the subject of the first volume of Uncle Remus stories, I cannot refrain from quoting a paragraph of the introduction in which Father touches on the prowess of the hero Brer Rabbit, proceeding to link up his salient characteristics with the psychology of the negro. It is in reference to the almost invariable conquest of the fox by the rabbit that the author says, “It needs no scientific investigation to show why he, the negro, selects as his hero the weakest and most harmless of all animals and brings him out victorious in contests with the bear, the wolf, and the fox. It is not virtue that triumphs, but helplessness. It is not malice but mischievousness. Indeed, the parallel between the case of all animals who must, perforce, triumph through his shrewdness and the humble condition of the slave raconteur is not without its pathos and poetry.” Finally, the reader not familiar with plantation life is