SOURCE: "Daddy Joel Harris and His Old-Time Darkies," in The Southern Literary Journal, Vol. I, No. 1, December, 1968, pp. 20-41.

[Turner is an American educator, poet, and critic specializing in African American and Southern literature. In the following essay, he proposes that Harris's depiction of African Americans is largely distorted, proceeding from an idealized notion of slavery and plantation life.]

Most readers identify Joel Chandler Harris with only one Negro—Uncle Remus, who blends wisdom and childishness in proportions which have endeared him to generations of white and black American readers. To presume that Uncle Remus is Harris's archetypal Negro, however, is to misunderstand Harris's use of Remus and to minimize the powers of observation of an author who recognized and reproduced physical, mental, and emotional differences in slaves and freedmen.

For example, Aaron, the Arab (The Story of Aaron, 1896, and Aaron in the Wildwoods, 1897), has a well-shaped head, sharp black eyes, thin lips, a prominent nose, and thick, wavy hair. Descended from a tribe of brown-skinned dwarfs, who "were always at war with the blacks," Tasma Tid [in Gabriel Tolliver: A Story of Reconstruction, 1902], who has straight, glossy black hair, is "far above the average negro in intelligence, in courage and in cunning, .. . as obstinate as a mule, . . . uncanny when she chose to be, outspoken, vicious, and tenderhearted." Blue Dave ("Blue Dave," Mingo and Other Sketches in Black and White, 1883) is blue-black whereas tall-gaunt Mom Bi ("Mom Bi: Her Friends and Enemies," Balaam and His Master and Other Sketches and Stories, 1891) is jet-black, but her lips are not thick and her nose is not flat. Small, wiry Qua (Qua, A Story of the Revolution), an African prince, is comical but brave. In contrast, Drusilla (The Story of Aaron, 1897), a child, is comical and timid. Whereas Blue Dave refused to obey his first master, Randall (The Bishop and the Boogerman, 1909), a freedman, is polite, even obsequious, although he distrusts white people. Uncle Remus approximates the dialect of Virginian slaves, but African Daddy Jack (Nights with Uncle Remus, 1883) speaks the Gullah of the Sea Island blacks.

To see clearly the Negro characters created by Joel Chandler Harris, one must probe through the haze of memory and desire which blurred Harris's vision of reality. A fatherless, impoverished youth from a small town in Georgia, thirteen-year-old Joel Chandler Harris moved to Turn-wold plantation in 1861 to set type for The Countryman, a periodical written and published by Joseph Addison Turner, who was recognized regionally for his love of literature, his defense of Southern ideals, and his humane treatment of slaves. In 1866, when Turner ceased publishing The Countryman, Harris left Turnwold, but he never forgot his life there. As passing years and nostalgia dimmed and distorted memory, Harris was haunted by the dream of a world in which "old-time" slaves, particularly African slaves, worshiped their aristocratic Anglo-Saxon masters.

Harris perceived that the dream could not become reality, for legalized slavery had been abolished and would not—should not—be restored. With Henry Grady, a fellow editor on the Atlanta Constitution, Harris encouraged and proclaimed a new, industrialized, urban South, rising like a Phoenix from Sherman's flames, renouncing its spurious and sentimental sectionalism, and speeding toward reunion with the North. Neither the mythic, "old-time" Negro nor his aristocratic master had a place in the new, postbellum society.

Nevertheless, reason and reality could not dispel Harris's dream. Abandoned by a father whom he had never known, Harris projected a utopia in which each deserving Anglo-Saxon American is satiated with love from childhood to death. As a child, he is entertained, comforted, and advised by a devoted black nurse or a slave playmate who is more faithful than a pet hound. As an adult, he is attended by servants who, like dutiful genies, live only for his pleasure while he, like an indulgent father, protects them and supervises their growth. Such a utopia had existed, or had been possible, Harris imagined, on plantations before the Civil War.

Unable to resist the hypnotic enticements of his dream of love and godly power, Harris, for more than thirty-five years as a professional writer, shaped reality to conform to his dream: While he introduced American readers to African myths about Brer Rabbit, Brer Wolf, and Brer Bear, simultaneously he developed and popularized an Anglo-Saxon myth about the "old-time" Negroes and their benevolent masters.

The difficulty of analyzing and appraising the Negro characters in Harris's work is intensified by the fact that Harris was neither a Negrophobe nor a conventional romancer of antebellum days.

Unlike Thomas Dixon, for example, Harris neither hated nor feared Negroes. To the contrary, he frequently praised them. Qua (Qua, A Story of the Revolution) proves his bravery as a soldier during the Revolution, and Whistling Jim (A Little Union Scout, 1904) earns grudging respect from General Forrest, who presumes cowardice to be inherent in Africans. The Reverend Randall (The Bishop and the Boogerman, 1909) is eloquent, intelligent, and industrious, "a pattern, a model, for the men of his race, and indeed, for the men of any race, for there was never a moment when he was idle." Harris did not restrict his praise to slaves. He commended the educability of Negroes and compared their progress favorably with the probable progress of the early Britons in the years immediately following their release from service to foreign conquerors. He even judged Negroes to be industrious and more temperate than whites.

Harris's defense of the actions of slaves frequently seems surprisingly tolerant and perceptive. He implied respect for Daddy Jake ("Daddy Jake the Runaway," Daddy Jake the Runaway and Short Stories Told After Dark, 1889), who runs away rather than perform a chore outside his accustomed duties. Harris ridiculed the terrifying rumors about escaped slaves. Although mere mention of his name frightens women and children, Blue Dave ("Blue Dave," Mingo, 1883) actually is kind and gentle. Harris justified the slaves' hatred of white men: "Hamp never got over the idea . . . that his old master had been judged to be crazy simply because he was unusually kind to his negroes, especially the little ones" [The Chronicles of Aunt Minervy Ann, 1899]. Harris even justified the restlessness of the newly freed blacks:

He [Gabriel Tolliver] thought that the restless and uneasy movements of the negroes were perfectly natural. They had suddenly come to the knowledge that they were free, and they were testing the nature and limits of their freedom. They desired to find out its length and its breadth. So much was clear to Gabriel, but it was not clear to his elders. And what a pity that it was not: How many mistakes would have been avoided! What a dreadful tangle and turmoil would have been prevented if these grown children could have been judged from Gabriel's point of view! For the boy's interpretation of the restlessness and uneasiness of the blacks was the correct one. Your historians will tell you that the situation was extraordinary and full of peril. Well, extraordinary, if you will, but not perilous. Gabriel could never be brought to believe that there was anything to be dreaded in the attitude of the blacks. [Gabriel Tolliver]

Harris exonerated the Freedmen from many evils attributed to them during Reconstruction; instead, he castigated the Radical Republicans, the carpetbaggers, and the scalawags, who abused the ignorant Freedmen and used their votes.

As he was not a Negrophobe, so Harris was not a conventional romancer of the antebellum myth. Repeatedly, he scolded Southern writers for clinging to romantic delusions about the perfection of Southern civilization. Repeatedly, he called for a Southern writer sufficiently bold to present and even to ridicule the actualities of Southern life, and he challenged Southern readers to accept such criticism.

In his own fiction, Harris revealed some destructive delusions of the masters. In "The Old Bascom Place" (Balaam and His Master, 1891), for instance, Judge Bascom loses his mind brooding over ways to regain his estate. Harris revealed even more frequently the cruelties of masters. Hamp, for example, "received small share of kindness, as well as scrimped rations, from the majority of those who hired him" [The Chronicles of Aunt Minervy Ann.] Free Joe ("Free Joe," Free Joe and Other Georgian Sketches, 1887), is denied permission to visit his slave wife. The daughter of Mom Bi was sold to a man living far from the plantation where Mom Bi worked. Crazy Sue (Daddy Jake the Runaway, 1889) lost her child because, sent to the fields to work, she could not nurse the baby. In "Where's Duncan?" (Balaam and His Master), a slave kills the master who sold their mulatto son to a slave speculator.

Despite his fondness for Negroes and his awareness of weaknesses of Southern life, despite his perception that the South must relinquish the past and move into the present, Harris, however, clung philosophically and emotionally to the dream of a Utopian plantation society. As early as 1877, three years before the first published collection of Remus tales, Harris extolled the system which he judged responsible for the civilization which had produced "the genius of such men as Washington, Jefferson, Patrick Henry, Taney, Marshall, Calhoun, Stephens, Toombs and all the greatest leaders of political thought and opinion from the days of the Revolution to the beginning of the Civil War . . . " ['The Old Plantation," The Constitution (Atlanta), December 9, 1877].

Harris concluded:

It [the old plantation] has passed away, but the hand of time . . . has woven about it the sweet suggestions of poetry and romance, memorials that neither death nor decay can destroy.

Twenty-five years later, writing for a national audience instead of the more limited and homogenous circulation of The Constitution, Harris continued to exalt the old plantation, "the brightest and pleasantest of all the dreams we have" ["The Negro as the South Sees Him," The Saturday Evening Post, January 2, 1904].

The romance of the plantation, Harris asserted, was first described by Harriet Beecher Stowe, whose artistic genius compelled her to show that "all the worthy and beautiful characters [of Uncle Tom's Cabin] .. . are products of the system the text of the book is all the time condemning . . . [whereas] the cruelest and most brutal character she depicts . . . is a Northerner, the product of a State from which slavery had long been banished." Harris continued,

The real moral that Mrs. Stowe's book teaches is that the possibilities of slavery anywhere and everywhere are shocking to the imagination, while the realities, under the best and happiest conditions, possess a romantic beauty all their own; and it has so happened in the course of time that this romantic feature . . . has become the essence, and almost the substance, of the old plantation as we remember it.

The "romantic feature" of the plantation is the tender relationship between kind masters and devoted "old-time darkies," who were tactful, conservative, practical, energetic, humble but not servile, unobtrusive, faithful, firm but goodnatured, discreet, hospitable, gentlemanly, proud of the family but not obsessed by pride in self, affable, and gently dignified.

One wishes to believe Harris was teasing his Northern readers in this eulogy to slavery and to the old-time Negro. One does not want to presume that a man as intelligent as Harris could seriously advance the bizarre notion that the idealized virtues of Tom and Eva and St. Clair existed because of slavery rather than despite it. Knowing Harris's talent for satire, one wants to credit him with awareness that the exhaustive catalogue of angelic virtues ascribed to the Negroes is sufficient proof that Harris expected his readers to discern his ironic chiding of Southerners who, by romantically clinging to a myth of what never was and never could have been, prescribed unattainable standards for twentieth-century Negroes.

Nevertheless, it is difficult to defend an ironic reading, for Harris supported his eulogy to old-time Negroes by reciting incidents proving their virtues. Moreover, despite their apparent variety in appearance and personality, Harris's memorable Negroes, in general, fit comfortably into the familiar stereotypes of the plantation myth: the wise, venerable old-time Negro, the devoted slave, the mammy, the comic darky, and the pathetic freedman.

The archetypal family retainer in Harris's works is, of course, Uncle Remus. But Remus transcends the sterotype. As Stella Brewer Brookes has written [in the introduction to Uncle Remus, 1965], "Among the immortal 'real folks' of literature Uncle Remus' place is secure . . . Uncle Remus is an individual—a distinctive personality ... " The individualizing, however, does not result from a single portrait in any work. It is, instead, a composite drawn from many works in which Harris used Remus variously—as a comic narrator, as the prototype of the old-time Negro, as a literary substitute for the father whom he never knew, and as a spokesman for his own ideas.

In the earliest stories [Uncle Remus: His Songs and Sayings, 1880], Remus, a kind, aged story-teller, is almost maternal in his relationship with the seven-year old son of Miss Sally. He dandles the boy on his knee, caresses his hair, scolds him gently, fusses with him, entertains him with stories, and offers the love which young "Joe" Harris never experienced from a man. Not yet having assumed a mythic stature, Remus is made realistic by small but significant details. He wears spectacles, suffers from rheumatism, eats yams, performs minor chores, and occasionally exhibits irritability.

Perceiving that Remus was as popular as the African tales themselves, Harris expanded Remus's character in the next stories [Nights with Uncle Remus: Myths and Legends of the Old Plantation, 1883]. In many, particularly in those in which he and the boy are the only human characters, Remus is merely a stereotyped old-time Negro: He praises Miss Sally, recalls the virtues of "ole Miss," worries about Miss Sally's attitude towards him, comforts the little boy, contrasts plantation owners' affection for Negroes with the hostility of whites who own no slaves, and warns the little boy against imitating his impoverished neighbors, the Favers:

Yo' pa, he got the idee dat some folks is good ez yuther folks; but Miss Sally, she know better. She know dat dey ain't no Favers 'pon de top side er de yeth w'at kin hol' der han' wid de Abercrombies in p'int er breedin' en raising. ["How Brother Fox Was Too Smart"]

In his relationships with other Negroes, however, Remus appears as an individual subject to human frailties. He is superstitious, petulant, hypocritical, vain, and jealous. Although he is hospitable to the Negro companions who enter his cabin to listen to his stories, he treats the house-girl 'Tildy superciliously, criticizes African Daddy Jack, expresses his contempt for the Negro fieldhands, and jealously but silently contests with Aunt Tempy for the position of supreme slave on the plantation.

In years immediately following, Harris developed Remus into the master portrait of the old-time Negro, whom he described explicitly in Daddy Jake the Runaway, and Short Stories Told After Dark, 1889:

Uncle Remus was not a "field hand"; that is to say, he was not required to plow and hoe and engage in the rough work on the plantation.

It was his business to keep matters and things straight about the house, and to drive the carriage when necessary. He was the confidential family servant, his attitude and his actions showing that he considered himself a partner in the various interests of the plantation. He did no great amount of work, but he was never wholly idle. He tanned leather, he made shoes, he manufactured horsecollars, fish-baskets, footmats, scouring-mops, and ax-handles for sale; he had his own watermelon and cotton-patches; he fed the hogs, looked after the cows and sheep, and, in short, was the busiest person on the plantation.

He was reasonably vain of his importance, and the other Negroes treated him with great consideration.

They found it to their advantage to do so, for Uncle Remus was not without influence with his master and mistress. It would be difficult to describe, to the satisfaction of those not familiar with some of the developments of slavery in the South, the peculiar relations existing between Uncle Remus and his mistress, whom he called "Miss Sally." He had taken care of her when she was a child, and he still regarded her as a child.

He was dictatorial, overbearing and quarrelsome. These words do not describe Uncle Remus's attitude, but no other words will do. Though he was dictatorial, overbearing and quarrelsome, he was not even grim. Beneath everything he said there was a current of respect and affection that was thoroughly understood and appreciated. All his quarrels with his mistress were about trifles, and his dictatorial bearing was inconsequential. The old man's disputes with his "Miss Sally" were thoroughly amusing to his master, and the latter, when appealed to, generally gave a decision favorable to Uncle Remus. ["How the Birds Talk"]

In later stories, Harris, with increasing frequency, projected his own ideas through Uncle Remus. Using the tales as exempla in his sermons, Remus, for instance, teaches Miss Sally's son that success does not depend upon physical size, that a confident man does not boast, that one should seek his fortune at home, and that the love of money is sinful. In the stories collected into Told by Uncle Remus, 1905, Remus voices the aging Harris's yearning for the past and his displeasure with the urbanized South. Above all else, Remus disapproves of the new standards for rearing children: the excessive emphasis upon discipline and cleanliness, the insistence upon early maturity and practicality, and the restriction or elimination of imagination and fantasizing.

More fully delineated than any other character in Harris's works, Uncle Remus transcends the stereotype of the "old-time darky." Negroes who appear less frequently more obviously conform to the stereotype. Despite their varied physiques and personalities, they are identical in their unquestioning, undeviating devotion to their masters.

For instance, Mingo is proud to belong to such aristocratic masters as the Bushrods. As a slave, he is happy, an essential consideration in the myth of the contented slave. As "his condition was no restraint on his spirits," so it did not diminish his self-respect: "when he bent his head, and dropped his eyes upon the ground, his dignity was strengthened and fortified rather than compromised" ["Mingo".] Emancipation provides the opportunity to leave the plantation and a new mistress who hates Negroes, but Mingo remains because he believes that his dead mistress, in a dream, has asked him to protect her child.

Reared together, Balaam ("Balaam and His Master," Balaam and His Master, 1891) and Berrien Cozart, his master, love each other. Berrien protects Balaam from punishment by the whites, and Balaam tries to guard Berrien against his own wildness. When Berrien is expelled from school and barred from his home, Balaam accompanies him. When Berrien, having lost everything gambling, proposes to sell Balaam, Balaam threatens to run away from the new master. Together, they devise a fraudulent scheme to raise money without disrupting the relationship. After being sold, Balaam will return to Berrien, who then will have the money and his slave. Balaam's devotion continues until death. After Berrien has been arrested for murder, Balaam breaks into prison, where he discovers his master's dead body.

The most incredibly devoted of all is Ananias ("Ananias," Balaam and His Ass, 1891). Repulsive in countenance and manner, Ananias never gains his master's trust. When Sherman's troops steal livestock from the plantation, Ananias, who has attempted to stop them, is accused of helping them. Unable to articulate a defense, he accompanies the soldiers, expecting to receive money which he can give to his master. When he learns that he will not be paid, he returns to his master. Ananias not only continues to work happily for a master who pays him nothing and who distrusts him, but he also supports the master with money which he earns by working for others. Unable to provide sufficiently for the master's family, however, Ananias steals food, is caught, and is imprisoned because his master refuses to stand his bond. After the trial reveals how Ananias helped the family, the master forgives him, the master's daughter praises him, and Ananias cries with happiness.

If any of Harris's readers presumed that that fairy tale might be the standard for a significant number of human beings, they must have been distressed when emancipated Negroes refused to emulate Ananias. Undoubtedly, many readers sympathized with and echoed Mrs. Haley: "Prince use to be a mighty good nigger before freedom come out, but now he ain't much better'n the balance of 'em. . . . Folks is got so they has to be mighty perlite to niggers sence the war" ["Azalia".] Nevertheless, Harris argued that old-time Negroes continued to exist even after Emancipation. Uncle Plato (Gabriel Tolliver, 1902) provokes his fellow freedmen because, rejecting the persuasions of carpetbaggers, he insists that Negroes should not become involved in government. After Emancipation, Jess adopts Briscoe Bascom as a master because he respects the aristocracy of the Bascom family. He even begs from his former master, Major Jim Bass, so that the Bascoms will not be forced to eat food "too common and cheap for the representatives of such a grand family" ["The Old Bascom Place".]

Equal in importance to the "old-time darky" is the "mammy," for whom Harris expressed special fondness:

But the old black mammy—she was never anything but herself from first to last; sharp-tongued, tempestuous in her wrath, violent her likes and dislikes, she was wholly and completely human. At a word she was ready to cry or quarrel, but those who knew and appreciated her worth knew that a good deal of her temper and all her shrewdness were merely assumed to conceal the tenderness that was ready to overflow with every beat of her pulse. ["The Negro as the South Sees Him"]

Like the "old-time darkies," the mammies are diversified in appearance but identical in character. In the Remus stories, the mammy is Aunt Tempy,

a fat, middle-aged woman, who always wore a headhandkerchief, and kept her sleeves rolled up . . . She never hesitated to exercise her authority, and the younger Negroes on the place regarded her as a tyrant; but in spite of her loud voice and brusque manners she was thoroughly good-natured, usually good-humored, and always trustworthy. ["Brother Wolf Says Grace"]

Because Remus himself assumes the role of maternal adviser and comforter, Tempy lacks opportunity to display the devotion characteristically identified with the mammy stereotype.

Such selfless devotion is illustrated, however, by Mom Bi. Tall and gaunt, rather than plump, the kerchief-capped Mom Bi rules the Waynecroft family aggressively and caustically. Unbroken in spirit despite slavery, she quarrels with her masters, prevents insolence from the other servants, terrifies visitors and strangers, and evokes respect and devotion from the family. Like Remus, she proudly presumes "her" family to be superior to the impoverished whites, the "sandhillers." When the Civil War begins, she protests bitterly against Gabriel Waynecroft's enlisting to fight beside sandhillers. After the youth has been killed, she becomes surly, irritable, and violent, and she leaves the plantation. She says that Gabriel's death has caused her to forgive her master's having sold her daughter but that nothing will cause her to forgive his sending his son into the army.

Less incredibly devoted is Lucindy (The Bishop and the Boogerman, 1909), who, despite a thoughtless master, finds happiness in caring for a child and the child's invisible playmate. When the child becomes ill, Lucindy, jealous of a potential rival, refuses to consent to the hiring of a Negro nurse; instead, she performs her own chores during the day and watches the sick child during the night.

Emancipation did not weaken a mammy's devotion. In Gabriel Tolliver, Harris described Rhody, Silas Tomlin's cook and housekeeper:

She was very willing for Silas Tomlin to be drawn through a hackle; she was willing to see murder done if the whites were to be victims; but Paul—well, according to her view, Paul was one of a thousand. She had given him suck; she had fretted and worried about him for twenty years; and she couldn't break off her old habits all at once. She had listened to and indorsed [sic] the incendiary doctrines of the radical emissary who pretended to be representing the government; she had wept and shouted over the strenuous pleadings of the Rev. Jeremiah; but all these things were wholly apart from Paul. And if she had had the remotest idea that they affected his interests or his future, she would have risen in the church and denounced the carpetbagger and his scalawag associates, and likewise the Reverend Jeremiah.

According to Harris, a mammy's devotion was equalled only by her aggressiveness. Although Wimberly Driscoll possesses the "worst temper ever seen in a white man," Mammy Kitty belittles and abuses him. The Southern narrator of the tale comments, "Ef one of your Northern fellows could 'a' hern 'er, you'd 'a' got a bran' new idea in regards to the oppressed colored people" [The Shadow between His Shoulder Blades, 1907]. Wimberly, however, ignores the abuse because he knows how much Mammy Kitty loves him.

The temper and the devotion are evident also in Aunt Minervy Ann, great-granddaughter of an African princess:

She had a bad temper, and was both fierce and fearless when it was aroused; but it was accompanied by a heart as tender and a devotion as unselfish as any mortal ever possessed or displayed. Her temper was more widely advertised than her tenderness, and her independence more clearly in evidence than her unselfish devotion, except to those who knew her well or intimately. [The Chronicles of Aunt Minervy Ann, 1899]

The requisite quality in both the old-time darky and the mammy was asexual devotion to a master. The mammies lack the normal maternal outlets. Lucindy and Mom Bi have offspring, but even these are adult. Lucindy's son, Randall, is a minister; Mom Bi's daughter has children of her own. Childless, the mammies lavish a mother's love upon the white children of the plantation. The old-time male darkies are sexless. Uncle Remus is ancient. After tending Miss Sally when she was a child, he is nurse and companion for Miss Sally's son and grandson. Uncle Plato and Hamp Perdue have wives, but romance and sensuality cannot be associated with their marriages. Among the Negro men, only aging Daddy Jack courts a woman, but his flirtation with teen-aged 'Tildy suggests comedy rather than romance. Whether young or old, Harris's Negro men give their love only to their masters.

By emphasizing the slaves' devotion, Harris may have hoped to excuse slavocracy. Appreciating literature's usefulness as propaganda, Harris implied that slavery, in its ideal state in the South, was no more brutal than a typical patriarchal family structure, for the slaves were chained only by love, which they gave only to deserving individuals. Although she resents her master, Mom Bi continues to serve the family because she loves the master's son.

Having run away from an unjust overseer, Daddy Jake returns at the bidding of the master's children.

Harris's most dramatic presentation of this amazing argument is "Blue Dave" (Mingo, 1891). Women and children in Georgia are terrified by the thought of Blue Dave, an unmanageable slave, who has run away. One night, however, Dave risks freedom to ask Kitty Kendrick to warn George Denham against rescues him from the creek, carries him bodily to the Kendrick estate from the Denham's. Denying that he is a "bad nigger," Dave reveals his desire to be Denham's slave. Later, after George fails to receive the message, Dave again risks freedom to warn him. When George ignores the warning, Dave follows him, rescues him from the creek, carries him bodily to the Kendrick home, and walks four miles to inform Denham's family. After the Denhams reward Dave by buying him, Dave works industriously and expresses his new-found happiness by singing and dancing frequently.

It is interesting to speculate whether Harris's emphasis upon the devoted slaves may have reflected his own emotional needs, his fantasying about the kind of world in which a Joel Chandler Harris might be happy. One who never has known his father's family might imagine aristocratic lineage to be essential to Utopia. Similarly, one deserted by his father might dream of a world centered on familial love.

In Harris's proposed Utopia, a slave's devotion was returned by a wise master, who understood the interdependence which Harris explained best in a letter from a mother to her son:

My Dear Son: I write this letter to commend the negro Shade to your special care and protection. He will need your protection most when it comes into your hand. I have told him that in the hour when you read these lines he may surely depend on you. No human being could be more devoted to my interests and yours than he has been. Whatever may have been his duty, he has gone far beyond it. But for him, the estate and even the homestead would have gone to the sheriff's block long ago. The fact that the mortgages have been paid is due to his devotion and his judgment. I am grateful to him, and I want my gratitude to protect him as long as he shall live. I have tried to make this plain in my will, but there may come a time when he will especially need your protection, as he has frequently needed mine. When that time comes I want you to do as I would do. I want you to stand by him as he has stood by us. To this hour he has never failed to do more than his duty where your interests and mine were concerned. It will never be necessary for him to give you this letter while I am alive; it will come to you as a message from the grave. God bless you and keep you in the wish of your Mother. ["The Colonel's 'Nigger Dog' "]

Harris, however, obviously was not proposing interdependence of equals. Instead, he presumed a society of interdependent masters and slaves or aristocrats and freedmen. Although he endorsed Negroes' rights to equal protection by the laws of America, he believed nineteenth-century Negroes to be intellectually and socially inferior to the nineteenth-century Anglo-Saxons. This idea, even more than the plantation dream, vitiated his capability of depicting Negroes authentically. Emotionally unable to accept them as equals despite his rational respect for such exceptional individuals as Booker T. Washington, Harris invariably saw his Negro characters as comical, pathetic, or humbly aware of their inferiority.

Most often he emphasized the comical appearances, personalities, and behavior, for he believed Negroes to be amusing and easily amused. As he explained in "Daddy Jack the Runaway," whenever Negroes have filled their stomachs, "dey bleege to holler."

At an extreme he stereotyped Comic Darkies—ignorant, easily frightened minor figures who are memorable only because they are ludicrous. These are such characters as Drusilla (The Story of Aaron, 1896, and Aaron in the Wildwoods, 1897) or ten-year-old William (Free Joe, 1887), who expects learning to run from his school book if he holds it upside down.

More irritating than his farcical use of comic stereotypes is his demeaning portraiture of many major characters, who appear well-intentioned but comical by nature. Even Remus suffers this patronizing treatment, particularly in Nights with Uncle Remus. As the master laughs at Remus's quarrels with "Miss Sally," so the reader laughs at Remus's vanity and childish petulance.

Aunt Minervy Ann, Harris's most colorful mammy, falters farcically at her noblest moments. Her boast to protect her husband dissipates into frightened stutters and flight when she learns that the "Kukluckers" have threatened him. When she defends her master, her courage is obscured by the vivid picture of her "frailing" the attackers. Blindly trusting her master, she promises to help him by persuading her husband to introduce a favorable legislative bill. During the incident, she comically retrieves Hamp from two female admirers and, from the gallery, farcically chastizes Hamp and disputes with the legislators. Heroic Qua looks comical. Mingo, Daddy Jake, and Blue Dave, like court jesters, enjoy entertaining the master and his family even if it necessitates making themselves the subject of the humor. All the mammies, except Mom Bi, elicit laughter rather than terror when they rage. Even Randall, the most idealized of Harris's Negroes, appears comical when he relates his determined but unsuccessful efforts to educate himself.

Feeling as he did, Harris could not fear Negroes. Consequently, it is neither surprising nor creditable that Harris defended Negroes against allegations that they were objects of terror. One does not hate or fear a child or a pet, even when he misbehaves.

Persuaded of the intellectual inferiority of Negroes, however, Harris harshly ridiculed freedmen who assumed the right to help govern the South. Disregarding the fact that many Negroes in Southern legislatures during Reconstruction had received formal education superior to that of their white fellow legislators, Harris pictured them as vain and stupid people. For instance, Hamp Perdue (The Chronicles of Aunt Minervy Ann), who gave himself the name "Perdue" because his wife thought it pretty, decides to run for the legislature even though he is ignorant and uneducated. When the "Kukluckers" threaten him, he cowers comically while his wife's former master protects him. Having become a member of the legislature, he moves into a new house, to appease his vanity; parades pompously before his female admirers in Atlanta; takes unauthorized vacations from legislative sessions; ignorantly attempts to discuss "principles" of the Republican Party; and behaves sensibly, according to Harris, only when Aunt Minervy Ann tells him what to do.

Assisted by a vain and ignorant wife, Jeremiah Tomlin is even more ludicrous:

In common with the great majority of his race—in common, perhaps with the men of all races—he was eaten up by a desire to become prominent, to make himself conspicuous. Generations of civilization (as it is called) have gone far to tone down this desire in the whites, and they manage to control it to some extent, though now and then we see it crop out in individuals. But there had been no toning down of the Rev. Jeremiah's egotism; on the contrary, it had been fed by the flattery of his congregation until it was gross and rank.

It was natural, therefore, under all the circumstances, that the Rev. Jeremiah should become the willing tool of the politicians and adventures who had accepted the implied invitation of the radical leaders of the Republican Party to assist in the spoliation of the South. The Rev. Jeremiah, once he had been patted on the back, and addressed as Mr. Tomlin by a white man, and that man a representative of the Government, was quite ready to believe anything he was told by his new friends, and quite as ready to aid them in carrying out any scheme that their hatred of the South and their natural rapacity could suggest or invent. [Gabriel Tolliver]

Harris did not presume that all Negroes are comical. Most of the others, however, appeared pathetic to him, especially when they lived outside the paternalistic system which he judged essential to their well being. Prior to emancipation and his "ridiculous" career as a legislator, Hamp Perdue was pathetic because, hired by many men, he never experienced the kind treatment he would have received from a single master. Formerly a proud and happy slave, Mingo is a melancholy free man. Mulatto Mary Ellen (The Chronicles of Aunt Minervy Ann) lives unhappily on the border of two worlds until, assisted by education, she identifies herself only with the white world. The most pathetic of all is Free Joe, who, protected by no master, becomes the slave of all white men. Being outside the normal social structure, he is alienated even from members of his own race, who despise him.

Between the comic and the pathetic, Harris envisaged only a few, whom he judged admirably humble. Harris's worthy Negroes acknowledge their inferiority. Ananias confesses to a white man that Negroes cannot articulate their ideas clearly to white men; ironically, Ananias has no difficulty explaining his inability to explain. Harris applauds the dignity of Mingo, who lowers his eyes whenever he talks with white people. The most humble of all is Randall, Harris's model for Negro freedmen. Although he is an intelligent, self-educated property owner, Randall distinguishes his dignity from that of a white man. After he polishes the shoes of his mother's former master, he says that he would do so even if he were a bishop, for such an act, possibly beneath the dignity of a white man in a comparable position, is not beneath the dignity of a Negro. Harris added the comment that Randall spoke sincerely. Harris thus assured his readers that, regardless of his accomplishments, a black man should consider it his responsibility to obey the whim of any member of Southern "aristocracy."

It is not easy to organize Harris's images of Negroes into a coherent pattern because Harris himself responded to divergent magnets. For instance, even though he extended pity for the emotional abuses in slavery, he ignored physical maltreatment. His slaves suffer only from unjust orders or food restrictions or separation from their families. Not once in Harris's works does a slave or freedman feel the sting of a whip.

Although he professed pleasure that slavery had ended, he contended that white masters, and especially their wives, had suffered more than the slaves. The masters had been responsible for feeding, clothing, protecting, and managing the slaves. In contrast, the slaves benefited from a system which "under providence, grew into a university in which millions of savages served an apprenticeship to religion and civilization, and out of which they graduated into American citizens" ["Observations from New England," Constitution (Atlanta), September, 1883]. It is ironic to use the term "university" to describe the practices of a system which legally prohibited the formal education of slaves. It is presumptuous to praise slavery for giving religion to the Africans, who observed a religious faith long before they became American slaves. Such praise seems especially reprehensible because the new religion, Christianity, was not used to help the slaves but to encourage them to submit to eternal bondage. It is irrational to praise slavery for graduating slaves into American citizens when slave holders, by every means in their power, attempted to deny citizenship to Negroes both before and after emancipation. Nonetheless, Harris believed these ideas, or at least persuaded his readers to accept them.

Harris wanted to place Negroes properly in the postbellum world; but, believing them ideally suited for domestic and farm labor, he could not determine satisfactory alternatives. Even though he affirmed their educability, he remained vague about the practical or immediate uses of that education. If it seemed absurd for a cobbler to learn Latin, Harris, nonetheless, defended a cobbler's right to study what he pleased. Harris did not propose to exclude Negroes from professions—except for ministry and law, but he reminded readers of the limited demand for the services of Negro professional men. Harris, however, urged Negroes to restrict the numbers entering the ministry and to forbid any to enter law. It seems irrational to argue the importance of Christianity to Negroes while suggesting that fewer Negroes should be Christian ministers. It seems contradictory to suppose that an Uncle Remus is sufficiently wise to advise Miss Sally's daughter-in-law about rearing children but is too ignorant to serve in a legislative body. Nevertheless, Harris did not attempt to modify the inconsistencies in his position.

The most obvious distortion of fact is Harris's presentation of political events during Reconstruction. For part of that period, Harris was a newspaper editor, who should have had access to accurate information about politics in Georgia. Repeatedly, however, Harris charged that emancipated Negroes were deluded by carpetbaggers' allegations that the South intended to re-establish slavery. Such intentions may very well have seemed credible, especially in Georgia, where the legislature in 1865 excluded Negroes from their proposal for public education, rejected the Fourteenth Amendment in 1866, expelled its Negro members in 1868, and rejected the Fifteenth Amendment in 1869.

In Gabriel Tolliver, Harris, repudiating the constitutional convention of 1867-1868, asserted that it was composed of political adventures from the Northern states and "boasted a majority composed of ignorant negroes and criminals," that the Governor of Georgia was discharged because he refused to pay the convention from state funds, and that fraudulent means were proposed for the adoption of the new constitution. According to Harris, these unwarranted conditions inspired a need satisfied by the Knights of the White Camellia.

Actually, however, in Georgia's constitutional convention of 1867-1868, only thirty-three delegates were Negroes. Nine were Northern whites, and 128, or 74%, were white Georgians. Rather than being controlled by Negroes, the convention struck from the constitution the statement guaranteeing every voter the right to hold office. In 1868, only three members of the Georgia Senate were Negro; thirty-three were white. Twenty-nine members in the House were Negro; 106 were white. This "Negro-dominated" body in 1868 forced the resignation of one Negro senator, and expelled the other two senators and twenty-five of the twenty-nine Negro members of the House. Historian John Hope Franklin insists [in Reconstruction after the Civil War, 1961] that the other four remained only "because their fair complexion made it impossible to prove that they were Negro."

Such a wanton disregard of facts irritates any reader who wishes to give Harris the benefit of the doubt, to suppose that clouded memory or compulsive fancy caused him to misconstrue the characters of Negroes. Nevertheless, in respect for Uncle Remus, the judgment about his creator should be favorable: A Caucasian, born in Georgia and reared during the Civil War and Reconstruction, Harris could not escape from the attitudes instilled by his culture. Believing in the black man and wanting to help him, Harris, like Kipling, felt superior to the black man.

He saw Negroes, especially when he collected stories from them. He observed their reticence in their relationship with whites, and inferred an innate shyness. He saw their humility in their relationship to whites; and, ignoring the fact that the humility had been enforced through three hundred years of custom and physical abuse, he attached dignity to it. The alternatives—that the Negro was servile or was merely feigning respect—did not conform to his ideal. Undoubtedly, Harris also knew hostile Negroes and educated, independent Negroes, but he preferred to write about those who fit into his myth of the devoted servant who, regardless of circumstance, instinctively dedicates his life to nursing, amusing, consoling, and worshiping his master.

As Africans modified real foxes and rabbits into Brer Fox and Brer Rabbit for Negro folk myths, so Joel Chandler Harris in his fiction molded actual Negroes into the old-time slaves essential to the romantic myth of a Utopian plantation, governed by a kingly and paternal master. All too soon, this Anglo-Saxon myth became more popular than the African tales. Harris's modified realities assumed the dimension of a new and false Reality, and the neverwas, the never-could-be was assumed to be the once-was. Thus, Joel Chandler Harris, the collector of tales became "Daddy Joe," the father of a myth.