[In the following essay, Hedin detects subversiveness not only in the tales related by Uncle Remus but also in Uncle Remus's narration and his interaction with the young boy to whom he tell the tales.]

In Joel Chandler Harris's collections of Uncle Remus tales, scholars have noticed an apparent contradiction between the tales themselves and the framework of teller and audience that Harris created as a setting for them. Folklorists and literary critics now tend to agree that Brer Rabbit and the other seemingly weak animals who inhabit the tales are ultimately subversive of the plantation myth of docile, contented slaves; for their surface politeness and respect mask an effective survival ethic of cunning, selfinterested manipulation, and even violence against the seemingly strong. Yet in contrast with the thrust of the tales, Uncle Remus and his listener—the unnamed seven year-old son of Remus's former masters—appear to confirm in their relationship everything that the tales serve to undercut. Remus comes across as a loyal retainer, affectionate toward the boy and happily subservient to his parents in his role of entertainer and surrogate educator.

Folklorists have not been particularly bothered by this seeming contradiction; they tend to see the tales as central and the rest as mere trappings, irrelevant to their reading of the tales. Literary critics, treating the setting and the tales as equal elements in a complete text, see the contradiction as important but vary in their attempts to account for it. Robert Bone, for instance, notes that "Uncle Remus and Miss Sally's little boy cling to one another in pastoral innocence and peace," whereas the tales "convey a world of unrelieved hostility and danger." Bone sees this split between framework and tale as a "tribute to the capacity of the human mind for self-deception. For if the one world is nostalgic and sentimental, the other is utterly subversive ... " [Down Home: A History of Afro-American Short Fiction from Its Beginnings to the End of the Harlem Renaissance, 1975]. Other critics attribute the split to Harris's ignorance of what the tales implied or to various contradictory impulses in Harris himself.

But a closer look at Harris's first collection, the 1880 Uncle Remus: His Songs and Sayings, will show that the discrepancy between framework and tale is more apparent than real, that both Remus and his tales are subversive of the myth of docile, selfless devotion. Moreover, the framework of teller and audience, far from being irrelevant to an understanding of the tales, is the specific means that Harris chose to convey the subversive impact of the tales. For the relationship between Remus and the boy shows that Remus, for all his affection toward the boy and his stated loyalty to his parents, uses the tales and his own power as storyteller to serve his own ends rather than anyone else, that he moves the boy closer to himself and to the ethic of the tales and away from the world of his parents.

Remus's innocence is more strategic than pastoral; he is never as guileless as he seems. Consider, for instance, his abiding obsession with the inviolability of the tales. In his many sessions with the boy, Remus rarely insists on a tale's particular meaning, but he repeatedly insists that the tales are, as it were, a sacred given that neither he nor the boy has any right to change in any way. When the boy asks who Miss Meadows is, Remus replies: "Don't ax me, honey. She wuz in de tale, Miss Meadows en de gals wuz, en de tale I give you like hi't wer' gun ter me." Remus makes it clear that he will not change the stories' pace nor add details simply to satisfy the boy's curiosity: "ef you keep shovin' me forrerd, I mout git some er de facks mix up 'mong deyse'f." "Dat's all de fur de tale goes," Remus replies to the boy's desire to know if the fox ate the rabbit; and where the tale stops, Remus stops.

The tales captivate the boy, but their intransigence unnerves him. He wants them to be plausible in his own terms: "'Tobacco, Uncle Remus?' asked the little boy, incredulously" at the suggestion that Brer Rabbit took a big "chaw." He wants them to be consistent with one another—"I thought you said the Rabbit scalded the Wolf to death a long time ago"—as well as with the moral code he is accustomed to. He protests Brer Possum's death by burning: "But Uncle Remus, Brother Possum didn't steal the butter after all." The boy is always looking for ways in which his own world and its common-sense, ethically conventional assumptions can be brought to bear on the world of the tales, but he gets no satisfaction from Remus, who tells him that "hit's des dat way," and that neither he nor the boy can do anything about it.

In fact, despite Remus's soothing manner, much of what he tells the boy is not meant to comfort him at all, but is, like the nonsense phrases Remus throws in from time to time, "calculated to puzzle the little boy," to keep him off balance. Remus knows that such puzzlement works to his own advantage. For when the boy is in "the anxious position of auditor," eager to hear the tales and to get things straight, Remus is at his most powerful through his ability to conjure the tales or withhold them, to explain them or not. And the tales themselves are all the more awesome and mysterious by being beyond the boy's control. Thus among the primary functions Harris gives the boy as audience is to be continually confronted with powerlessness and dependence. In the post-reconstruction era, when whites were doing everything they could to reassert their control over blacks, Harris reminds his readers that there is at least one area, the world of black folk tales, where whites have no control whatever.

Harris emphasized Remus's power as storyteller and clarified its nature by changing the title of the opening tale from "The Story of Mr. Rabbit and Mr. Fox," its title when first published in The Atlanta Constitution, to "Uncle Remus Initiates the Little Boy," by moving the setting for the storytelling from the piazza of the boy's home to the inside of Remus's cabin, and by changing the boy's age from six to seven, the conventional age of reason. On the boy's own turf, in his own world, the tales would be exotic amusement and Remus a mere entertainer. But in the sanctuary of Remus's cabin, Remus becomes a shaman, and the tales become instruments of initiation into a world the boy can learn from only to the extent that he leaves his own world behind.

The world that Remus tries to wean him from is specifically the world of his parents; that is hardly the act of a loyal retainer, given that what Remus would initiate him into is the amoral world of cunning that the tales represent. The opening scene of the book is superficially pastoral, but it also reveals the dynamics of power that operate throughout the book. Without her realizing it, the scene posits Miss Sally, the boy's mother, as the outsider; she looks through the window of Remus's cabin and finds her missing son there, "gazing with an expression of the most intense interest" at the old man. Our first view of Remus shows him holding the boy in his arms, beguiling him with a tale. That particular tale, in which Brer Rabbit outsmarts Brer Fox, is representative of the world that Remus lives in and that the boy is about to enter: it is a tale where the skillful use of words serves as an equalizer between two creatures differing in seeming advantage, where manners and sentiments are ultimately tools of self-interested manipulation.

It is precisely through his own power over words, as storyteller, that Remus makes inroads on the authority of the boy's parents; for as storyteller he has powers that Mars John and Miss Sally can't begin to touch. He has secret knowledge; he knows how the deluge came about and how the rabbit lost his tail. He can speak the language of animals, and he offers the lure of such knowledge in direct proportion to the boy's willingness to enter Remus's world as fully as possible, to follow Remus's path rather than his parents': "w'en you git ole ez me—w'en you see w'at I sees, en year w'at I years—de creeturs dat you can't talk wid'll be mighty skase—day will dat." Remus promises wisdom down paths he knows the boy's parents won't go: "En w'en you bin cas'n shadders long ez de old nigger, den you'll fine out who's w'ich, en w'ch's who."

I have already mentioned that Remus admits he cannot alter the tales in any way; they have been handed down to him, and all he can do is hand them on. But his seeming admissions of powerlessness in this regard are really assertions that he alone is final arbiter in all things pertaining to the tales, and that he, not the boy's parents, bears the authority of this privileged position. Miss Sally may have told the boy that Noah's flood involved an ark, but Remus invokes her authority only to dismiss its relevance to the tales: "But don't you bodder longer dat ark, 'ceppin' your mammy fetches it up. Dey mout er bin two deloojes, en den agin dey moutent. Ef dey wuz enny ark in dish yer w'at de Crawfishes brung on, I ain't heern tell un it, en w'en dey ain't no arks 'roun', I ain't got no time fer ter make um en put um in dar."

The boy's father fares no better, and again Remus uses the tales to make the point. One of the few times that Remus draws a direct analogy between the tales and the boy's world, he does so to remind him of his father's failure as a politician: before the deluge, the animals "spoke speeches, en hollered, en cusst, en flung der langwidge 'roun' des like w'en yo' daddy wuz gwineter run fer de legislater en got lef." When the boy resists one of the tales because "Papa says there ain't any witches," Remus makes it clear that Mars John's opinion doesn't count. The tales are part of Remus's world, and only his experiences can be used as touchstones for them: "Mars John ain't live long ez I is. . . . He ain't bin broozin' 'roun' all hours er de night en day."

Although Remus is no toady, he is a realist; he knows his limits. He wants to nudge the boy toward himself, but he knows that he can't sever him entirely from his own world. His thrusts at the boy's parents are always indirect, always kept within the context of Remus's guardianship over his tales. He makes no other claims to authority, and in all direct references to Mars John and Miss Sally, Remus, like Brer Rabbit, is full of loyalty and respect for his "superiors." And as a "good darky" should, he alludes to his own race in terms of amused condescension: Brer Fox came through the woods, he tells the boy, "singing like a nigger at a frolic." In such ways he keeps the boy comfortable enough in general not to be outraged by the particular discomfort Remus inflicts on him through the tales and through his oblique assaults on the authority of the boy's parents. He keeps the boy off balance without putting him on guard.

By keeping his goals modest and his strategies subtle, Remus succeeds in two important areas. The first can legitimately be called the boy's growth in cultural sensitivity. Remus neither pushes too far nor too fast. Even when he has the boy primed, "exceedingly anxious to know more about witches," for instance, Remus "prudently refrained from exciting the youngster's imagination any further in that direction." As a result of this gradual method, by the time he had heard almost all of the tales "the youngster had become so accustomed to the marvelous developments of Uncle Remus's stories, that the extraordinary statement made no unusual impression upon him." It is not that the tales had lost their force for him, but that he had finally come to respond to them on their own terms, without trying to impose his own assumptions on them.

In the area of his own self-interest, Remus is just as effective, again in ways that are limited but real. Remus knows how to serve his own purposes even when he is most overtly serving the boy's parents. He tells "A Story about the Little Rabbits," for instance, to show the little boy that "good chilluns allers gits tuck keer on. Dar wuz Brer Rabbit's chilluns; dey minded der daddy en mammy fum day's een' ter day's een'." Remus is indeed advising behavior compatible with a "proper" upbringing, but only insofar as the tales themselves, supreme and unquestionable, allow him to do so. The tales, not Mars John and Miss Sally, provide the ultimate standard for Remus, and he teaches the boy nothing that the tales will not countenance.

As a result, the code of the tales, through the medium of Remus's approval, becomes the boy's standard as well; this is clearest and most significant when that code prompts the boy to violate his parents' standards in order to keep Remus happy. Early in the book, the boy had offended Remus grievously: "Who dat chunkin' dem chickens dis mawnin'? Who dat knockin' out fokes's eyes wid dat Yallerbammer sling des 'fo' dinner? Who dat sickin' dat pinter puppy atter my pig? Who dat scatterin' my ingun sets? Who dat flingin' rocks on top er my house, w'ich a little mo' en one un em would er drap spang on my head?" Such offenses are the ultimate sins because they impinge on Remus and not just on the boy's parents; only when they involve Remus does he level the ultimate punishment: "no tales ter bad chilluns." Remus, relying on indirection, leaves it to the boy to intuit the best form of atonement. And the lad comes through; he had already heard enough tales of cunning from Remus to have assimilated their meaning: "Please, Uncle Remus, if you will tell me [more tales], I'll run to the house and bring you some tea-cakes." It isn't clear which aspect of this proposed theft Remus relishes more, the cakes themselves or his victory over Miss Sally: "'I lay yo' mammy 'll 'spishun dat de rats' stummucks is widenin' in dis neighborhood w'en she come fer ter count up 'er cakes,' said Uncle Remus, with a chuckle." If withholding the tales was the ultimate punishment for offending Remus, the old man's offering them again becomes the ultimate reward for serving him; and Remus plunges back into a tale, appropriately enough, of Brer Rabbit. Mars John and Miss Sally, who were originally offended along with Remus, enter this entire exchange not to be assuaged in any way, but only to be offended again. They have no tales to wield.

Later the boy shows that he is further along in internalizing Remus's standards when he appears, without any offences to make amends for, bearing a piece of stolen mince pie for Remus. The satisfied educator, "regarding the child with admiration," again blesses the theft with an amused comment. Remus knows that the boy has acted in a manner appropriate to the tales in order to hear more of them; and this time Remus, who has tacitly encouraged that system of rewards before, is willing, at least after the fact, to make the connection explicit: "Dish yer pie will gimme strenk fer ter persoo on atter Brer Fox en Brer Rabbit en de udder creeters w'at dey roped in 'long wid urn." It is no accident that eventually "Brer Rabbit . . . had come to be a sort of hero" to the boy, and that he also learned to be "in thorough sympathy with all the whims and humors of the old man." For Remus had acted in tandem with his rabbit to lure the boy, as it were, into a world where their charms had power. Harris knew plantation life first hand; he also knew what it was to feel disadvantaged. By showing how the boy was affected and how Remus was served by the cunning use of storytelling, Harris makes it clear that he knew quite well and respected the skills that the disadvantaged slaves had developed to get along.

If Remus's effect on his audience reveals Harris's respect for the power of teller and tale, it also reflects Harris's hopes at that stage of his career for his own effectiveness as storyteller. And in that light it is interesting to take a brief look at how Remus's power over the boy dwindled in succeeding volumes. In the 1883 Nights With Uncle Remus, Harris moved Remus and the boy back to a prewar setting, but left their relationship essentially unchanged: Remus still wields his powers to his own advantage. Nonetheless, Harris introduces a discordant note through the figure of Aunt Tempy, one of several new visitors to Remus's cabin. For she has little sympathy for Brer Rabbit; and although her criticisms of the rabbit's behavior have no noticeable effect on the boy, they show that Harris was already aware that not everyone was charmed by Remus's hero or swayed by Remus's abilities as a story-teller. That realization may have contributed to a shift of emphasis in Harris's next collection, Daddy Jake, the Runaway, and Short Stories Told After Dark (1889); there, six of the tales have human protagonists, and Brer Rabbit has a diminished role in the rest.

By the time of Uncle Remus and His Friends in 1892, the boy himself is showing greater signs of distance from the tales, perhaps reflecting Harris's sense that the South was growing—or at least changing—past the point of receptivity to things of the imagination. The boy is older, more skeptical, more insistent than before in his commonsense, realistic assaults on the world of the tales. Remus continues to refuse realism its assumptions, telling the boy that " . . . ef you gwine ter 'spute dat, you des ez well ter stan' up en face me down 'bout de whole tale." But Harris does back Remus down in one important way: he has Remus counsel the boy not to carry the morality of the tales over into his own life: "How de name er goodness kin folks go on en steal en tell fibs, like de creeturs done, en not git hurted? Dey des can't do it. Dead dog never dies, en cheatin' never th'ives—not when folks git at it." Correspondingly, Remus is more consistent than he had been earlier in using the tales to inculcate standard morality. It may be that by now Harris himself was thinking along more conventional lines; it may also be, however, that he simply felt less sure of the storyteller's ability to make genuine inroads into the minds and ways of his audience, less sure of his ability to do more than entertain or to reinforce conventional thinking.

He had announced in the preface to Uncle Remus and His Friends that "the old man will bother the public no more with his whimsical stories." But Harris's actual public was more receptive than the one he imagined, and their response called him back for more. After The Tar Baby and Other Rhymes of Uncle Remus in 1904, an experiment with rhymed tales, he came out in 1905 with his last important collection, Told by Uncle Remus. Here his fears took their most intense form. Miss Sally's son is now full-grown and lives in Atlanta; he sends his son back to the country for a vacation, and it is this city-raised youngster who confronts Remus as his final audience. Instead of the first boy's argumentative skepticism, which at least implies some level of engagement, Remus now faces apathy. The boy "thought and spoke like a grown person; and this the old Negro knew was not according to nature. The trouble with the boy was that he had had no childhood. . . . " Remus tries to revive the child in him, but to little avail. Frustrated, Remus acknowledges that "you can't tell no tale ter dem what don't believe it." Harris knew that as storyteller, he and Remus did indeed have access to extraordinary power; yet he also knew that they couldn't exercise it unless their audience was willing to submit to it. Initiation—and subversion—demanded at least partial assent. But although the boy becomes more mischievous, he never really opens himself to the tales; and Remus must be rescued by the boy's departure for Atlanta, for the urban, "realistic" South where, sadly enough, the boy belongs, but where Harris increasingly feared that his tales and his taste for the imaginary did not.