Write up on JOEL CHANDLER HARRIS ‘s BRER RABBIT

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Background of the Study

Introduction:

JOEL CHANDLER HARRIS was born in utter poverty in Putnam County in 1848. Although being poor presented the youngster with many hardships, it imbued him with a tender shyness -a shyness so extreme that it actually became an attractive asset and followed him all his life.

Putnam County was a land of cotton, large plantations, slave-holders, wealth and plenty. Private schooling was the fashion of the day and Joel Chandler Harris was able to attend school through the generosity of his neighbors who recognized his potentialities.

One of the young boy’s favorite spots was the old Eatonton Post Office, because the postmaster would give him discarded papers and magazines to help satisfy his active and hungry mind. On one of his visits to the Post Office, Joel read an advertisement for a printer’s devil in the first issue of The Countryman, a newspaper published at Turnwold, a local plantation. He immediately made application and was hired at the age of thirteen.

The publisher of The Countryman, Joseph Addison Turner, was a lawyer, scholar and planter. His newspaper was the only weekly ever published on a Southern plantation.

Turner was quick to recognize the ambition and talent of his young apprentice. In time, some of Joel’s works began appearing in the newspaper. Turner was a stern taskmaster and he demanded a clear literary style, which was a tremendous asset to the gifted boy.

At Turnwold, Harris began his lifelong friendship with animals and with the plantation Negroes, whose folklore would later fill his writings. Fortunately, the youngster was associated with such aged and colorful slaves as “Uncle” George Terrell and “Uncle” Bob Capers. They had a gift for story-telling which Harris was later able to capture.

Harris’ apprenticeship ended abruptly in 1864 when awing of Sherman’s army invaded Putnam County. War had suddenly brought poverty to all, including Turnwold, forcing the ambitious youth to move on and seek his place in the world.

He worked for newspapers in New Orleans, Macon, Forsyth, Savannah and finally The Atlanta Constitution. It was under the guidance of Captain Evan P. Howell, of The Atlanta Constitution, that he began to publish the famous stories of Uncle Remus. Northern newspapers began to print the fascinating tales and almost overnight his fame was established.

In Atlanta, he worked with the energetic and farsighted men who rebuilt the city and the South during reconstruction days following the Civil War. His associates included Clark Howell, editor of The Atlanta Constitution; Frank Stanton, famous Georgia poet; and Henry W. Grady, the great Southern orator. Joel Chandler Harris died at the Wrens Nest, his home in Atlanta in 1908. Today, the Wrens Nest is a shrine devoted to his memory.

The works of Joel Chandler Harris are not limited to the tales of Uncle Remus. Stories of the old South and Reconstruction Days take their place among his masterpieces. However, the folk stories, with their inimitable characterizations of Br’er Rabbit, Br’er Fox and “all de critters”, have never been equaled.

Significance of the Study:

BRER RABBIT

Brer Rabbit (also spelled Bre’r Rabbit or Br’er Rabbit) is the trickster hero of an oral tradition passed down by African slave workers of the Southern United States. Dozens of stories tell of the exploits of this trickster bunny, who, though small and weak, constantly outwits bigger and fiercer creatures such as Brer Fox, Brer Wolf and Brer Bear.

The origins of Brer Rabbit can be traced to the folk stories of western, central and southern Africa, where similar tales of trickster heroes continue to be part of the folk tradition. Amongst the Akan traditions of southern Ghana and the Ivory Coast, the trickster is usually the spider, Anansi; his stories are very similar in plot to the Brer Rabbit tales.

Joel Chandler Harris and the Uncle Remus Stories

Br’er Rabbit was first popularised by the American journalist Joel Chandler Harris (1848-1908). During his work for a plantation newspaper-owner, Harris became familiar with many of the folktales of the black African plantation workers. He began to write the ‘Uncle Remus’ stories, which began to appear in the Atlanta Constitution in 1879, and in 1880, were published in book form by D. Appleton of New York as Uncle Remus: his songs and his sayings; the folklore of the old plantation. The first section of the book, ‘Legends of the Old Plantation’ consists of tales told by Uncle Remus, an old black man, to the small son of the plantation owner. The hero of most of these tales is the mischievous, troublesome and clever Brer Rabbit. Perhaps the most beloved of these tales is How Brer Rabbit Met Brer Tar Baby. Though Harris insisted that he was not the author, only the reteller of these tales, he retold these tales with great skill and charm, adding depth and detail to the characters and events. He used the dialect of the Georgia plantation worker, which he had studied closely, in his retellings. Later versions of the tales have been in standard English, which makes the tales easier to read but lessens their charm considerably. The other two sections of the book are ‘His Songs’, a collection of African-American hymns and work-songs, and ‘His Sayings’, a collection of humorous anecdotes which Harris attaches to the character of Uncle Remus.

The book was met with great acclaim in America, and, hailed by critics and readers alike, English editions began to appear almost at once. In 1883, Harris published Nights With Uncle Remus, a sequel to his first collection of Uncle Remus stories, compiled partly from folktales sent to him by readers of the first book, and he including other narrators such as African Jack, Aunt Tempy and Tildy. This book was aimed more at folklorists than the first book. However, Harris published several more books in the series; these were meant explicitly for children and include Uncle Remus and His Friends (1892), and The Tar-Baby and Other Rhymes of Uncle Remus (1904).

Harris also wrote several other, equally charming, books for children. These include: Little Mr. Thimblefinger and His Queer Country (1894), Wally Wanderoon and His Story-telling Machine (1903), and The Bishop and the Boogerman (1909). 

A Literary Awakening: Uncle Remus Collections

Harris’s Constitution editorials expanded on the social, political, and literary themes he had begun exploring in Forsyth and Savannah—themes he would also treat both directly and indirectly in his folktales and fiction to come. When he was asked to fill in for absent dialect-writer Sam Small, he invented an engaging Black character named Uncle Remus, who liked dropping by the Constitution offices to share humorous anecdotes and sardonic insights about life on the streets of bustling postwar Atlanta. But an article Harris read on African American folklore in Lippincott’s, which included a transcribed story of “Buh Rabbit and the Tar Baby,” reminded him of the Brer Rabbit trickster stories he had heard from the enslaved people at Turnwold Plantation. His Uncle Remus character now began to tell old plantation folktales, back-home aphorisms, and African American folk songs, and newspapers around the country eagerly reprinted his rural legends and sayings. Before long, Harris had composed enough material for a book. Uncle Remus: His Songs and His Sayings—The Folklore of the Old Plantation was published by Appleton in November 1880. Within four months it had sold 10,000 copies and was quickly reprinted. Harris eventually wrote 185 of the tales.

For the next quarter-century, Harris lived a double life professionally. He was one of two associate editors of the premier newspaper in the Southeast, helping readers interpret the complex New South movement. He was also the creative writer, the “other fellow,” as he termed himself: a prolific, committed, and ambitious re-creator of folk stories, a literary comedian, fiction writer, and author of children’s books. Harris published thirty-five books in his lifetime, in addition to writing thousands of articles for the Constitution over a twenty-four-year period. Along with his first book, Uncle Remus: His Songs and His Sayings, the most ambitious of the Uncle Remus volumes is Nights with Uncle Remus: Myths and Legends of the Old Plantation (1883). This book comprises seventy-one tales that feature stories told by four different Black narrators, including Uncle Remus.

Harris published five other collections of Uncle Remus tales in his lifetime, the most accomplished of which is Told by Uncle Remus: New Stories of the Old Plantation (1905). In this volume, a seemingly ageless Uncle Remus tells his complex allegorical tales to the son of the little boy from the first stories. This frail, citified, and “unduly repressed” child is sent by Miss Sally, his grandmother, to Remus’s knee to learn how to be a real boy in a complex, competitive, and even predatory world. Three shorter volumes of previously uncollected Uncle Remus stories appeared after Harris’s death.

The Uncle Remus volumes assured Harris’s reputation, which became international almost overnight. Professional folklorists praised his work in popularizing Black storytelling traditions. In 1888 Harris was named a charter member, with Mark Twain, of the American Folklore Society. Before long, in fact, publishing local dialect tales became an international phenomenon: Harris helped spawn a whole industry. Twain had been so impressed by Harris’s dialect-writing skills that he had invited Harris in 1882 to meet him and George Washington Cable in New Orleans, Louisiana, to plan an ambitious series of platform readings around the country. Because of his persistent stammer, however, Harris turned down the lucrative offer. The future author of Huckleberry Finn took some of Harris’s material on the road with him, and Twain reported later that the tar baby story was always one of his most popular stage-readings.

Harris also left his impact on major literary figures to come. Rudyard Kipling, Zora Neale Hurston, William Faulkner, Flannery O’Connor, Ralph Ellison, and Toni Morrison all responded to the legacy of Brer Rabbit and the tar baby that Harris had helped popularize. Fellow Eatonton writer Alice Walker protested, however, that Harris had stolen her African American folklore heritage and had made it a white man’s publishing commodity.

The Brer Rabbit Dialogue embedded deeply inside the  Gullah Geechee dialect

The First English Creole Language in the U.S.

The nearly 400,000 enslaved Africans who were brought to the United States America as had something that gave them identity and from which they could not be parted despite the violence of capture, the horrors of the middle passage, and the despoilment of slavery—their native languages. They arrived in America speaking Bambara, Ewe, Fon, Fante, Fulani, Hausa, Kongo, Kimbundu, Vai, and Mende, among other tongues. Under slavery they had to acquire the rudiments of English and they eventually lost the fluent use of their native languages, but they did not forget them all together. They had to find a way to communicate with each other so they created a common tongue called Gullah. Learn more from this Smithsonian exhibit on Lorenzo Dow Turner, PhD, the father of Gullah studies an African-American academic and linguist who did seminal research on the Gullah language spoken in coastal North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia, and Florida.

The Gullah Language The Gullah language is what linguists call an English-based creole language. Creoles arise in the context of trade, colonialism, and slavery when people of diverse backgrounds are thrown together and must forge a common means of communication. According to one view, creole languages are essentially hybrids that blend linguistic influences from a variety of different sources. In the case of Gullah, the vocabulary is largely from the English “target language,” the speech of the socially and economically dominant group; but the African “substrate languages” have altered the pronunciation of almost all the English words, influenced the grammar and sentence structure, and provided a sizable minority of the vocabulary. Many early scholars made the mistake of viewing the Gullah language as “broken English,” because they failed to recognize the strong underlying influence of African languages. But linguists today view Gullah, and other creoles, as full and complete languages with their own systematic grammatical structures.

Key Characteristics of the Gullah Language

Gullah is distinguished by its unique syntax, phonology, and vocabulary. Key features include:

  • Reduplication: The repetition of words or sounds to indicate intensity or plurality (e.g., “big big” for “very big”).
  • Serial Verb Construction: Using a sequence of verbs to express a single action (e.g., “He go take fetch water”).
  • Simplified Verb Tenses: A more straightforward approach to verb conjugation compared to standard English.

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