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counseled to “imagine that the myth stories of Uncle Remus are told night after night to a little boy by an old negro who appears to be venerable enough to have lived during the period which he describes—who has nothing but pleasant memories of the discipline of slavery.”
    Then she goes on to say—this wife of the son of Joel Chandler Harris: “I have been asked many times if my husband, the eldest son of the family, was the little boy of the stories. He was not. And strangely enough, Father never told these stories to his own or any other children.”
    But the stories were wildly successful. They were in every household, practically, across America. And Mark Twain, in Life on the Mississippi, tells of an encounter between Harris and a group of children:
He deeply disappointed a number of children who had flocked eagerly to get a glimpse of the illustrious sage and oracle of the nation’s nurseries. They said, when they saw this man, “Why, he’s white!” They were grieved about it. So, to console them, the book was brought that they might hear Uncle Remus’ Tar-baby story from the lips of Uncle Remus himself, or what, in their outraged eyes, was left of him. But it turned out that he had never read aloud to people and was too shy to venture the attempt now.
    I think I know why he did not read or tell these stories to his own children. I think I know why he never said them aloud to an audience. I think he understood what he was taking when he took those stories and when he created a creature to tell those stories. There are very few people who were slaves who have “nothing but pleasant memories of the discipline” of that institution. And to base the personality of the storyteller on such a preposterous foundation constituted a deception beyond Harris’s attempt somehow to pass himself off as a black man. As a white man, when he opened his mouth to speak as “Uncle Remus,” perhaps he felt this.
    Both of my parents were excellent storytellers, and wherever we lived, no matter how poor the house, we had fireplaces and a front porch. It was around the fireplaces and on the porch that I first heard, from my parents’ lips—my mother filling in my father’s pauses and he filling in hers—the stories that I later learned were Uncle Remus stories.
    The most famous Brer Rabbit tale is also the most enigmatic, the story of the tar baby. In order to catch Brer Rabbit, whom he wishes to eat, Brer Fox makes a sort of doll out of tar. (In Africa, the doll is made out of rubber, hot rubber.) Brer Rabbit sees this tar baby beside the road and tries to get it to speak to him. And it can’t, of course. In his frustration, he hits it with his hands and feet and is soon stuck fast.
    Brer Fox comes out of hiding and says, “I’ve got you now.”
    Brer Rabbit says, “Yeah, that’s true.” But you know Brer Rabbit is thinking all the time. When Brer Fox says perhaps he’ll cook him for dinner in a big pot, Brer Rabbit breathes a sigh of relief. “That’s fine,” says he. “For a minute I thought you were gonna throw me in the briar patch.”
    Brer Fox had not thought of this. “Maybe I’ll roast you on a spit,” he says, thinking of dinner, but wanting it to be a dinner only he can enjoy.
    “Hey, that’s cool,” says Brer Rabbit. “That’s a lot better than being thrown in the briar patch.”
    What is this briar-patch business anyway? Brer Fox is thinking. “Maybe I’ll make rabbit dumplings,” he says, licking his chops.
    “Dumplings? Delightful,” says Brer Rabbit, “just please, please, whatever you do, don’t throw me in the briar patch.”
    Now we begin to suspect that Brer Fox’s hatred of Brer Rabbit is greater than his hunger. It is more important to him that Brer Rabbit suffer than that he himself be satisfied. Of course, he runs and finds the nearest briar patch and flings Brer Rabbit into it. Once unstuck from the tar baby and on the ground, Brer Rabbit laughs at Brer Fox and says, “I