Uncle Remus

Homage once more to my Jane Mansfield lookalike junior high speech teacher, Miss Brumfield. Another of our many activities in her always fun classes was preparing a short story that had to be read aloud in front of the class. From this initial assignment a handful of students were chosen to attend a speech rally and read the well-practiced story in front of a large audience and a panel of judges. At the end of the day the judges awarded scores and those getting a top score received certificates of excellence.

Hard to say if the teacher assigned specific stories to specific students, or allowed them to choose their own, but in my case she handed over a Joel Chandler Harris story, saying, “That’s your story.” It was my introduction to Brer Rabbit and the tales of Uncle Remus. I loved the assigned story, and all the others in the book as well. The Uncle Remus collection on my bookshelf today is there because of that unforgettable and sultry speech teacher in seventh grade.

Joel Chandler Harris left home at thirteen and by the age of sixteen, with a love of books, a fair writing skill and mischievous sense of humor had become an apprentice to a Georgia newspaper publisher and plantation owner. Turnwold was a 1,000 acre plantation and was where Harris first heard the black folktales that were to become the Uncle Remus stories. Harris spent hundreds of hours in the slave quarters during his off hours, where his self-conscious stammer and illegitimate birth faded into the background and where he was able to foster a close relationship with the plantation slaves. During his four years at Turnwold he absorbed the stories, language, and inflections of the people in the slave quarters. Their African-American animal tales became the foundation and inspiration for the numerous volumes of his later work.

Between 1896 and 1918 Harris published eight volumes of black folktales told by an old man named Uncle Remus. The eight volumes included 263 tales in which Brer Rabbit is a central character. A major concern for Harris was language. From his many hours of listening to the tales told around the slave quarters at Turnwold, he developed a remarkable ear and realized that the tales could not be divorced from the language of the people telling them. Harris himself admitted that the character and voice of Uncle Remus was a composite of three slaves who had told him many of the tales. Reading the original Uncle Remus tales today, it is very easy for the contemporary reader to be offended by the dialect, providing he is even able to decipher it. Many are also uncomfortable with the figure of Uncle Remus, his attitudes, his sycophancy and his use of the word “nigger.” The uneasiness prompted by this character—in the minds of readers both black and white—has in some way tainted the Uncle Remus stories for many people.

In the 1999 retelling of Uncle Remus: The Complete Tales, Julius Lester has settled on what he calls a ‘mean point’ that gives the stories a comfortable easiness, whether read silently or aloud. In Lester’s retelling they are written in a modified contemporary southern black English, a combination of standard English and Black English. But for a storyteller—and above all the tales are meant to be told—voice, vocal inflections and gestures cannot be printed, but are as important ‘in the telling’ as the printed words themselves. If in no other ways, Lester’s adaptation of Chandler’s original and difficult tales is a paean to Harris and to the voice of those slaves who first told him the stories. This contemporary telling of nineteenth century African-American folktales from the slave quarters reinforces the power of voice and cadence in storytelling. Easy to discern in the Uncle Remus tales a glimpse of the origin of literature in all cultures, the gathering of the group around a fire to listen to stories of the elders.

A Lost Art

Letters arriving in the mailbox are always a welcome treat, especially those that display themselves as the real thing, or at least real in the sense of being handwritten in fountain pen and ink and with a stamp that isn’t merely faint red lines from a postal meter. No doubt many people lament the fact that these mailbox surprises are growing rarer by the year. Truth is, I’m surprised much of the time that my local post office is able to get anything delivered in semi-accurate fashion. Last week my houseguest sent five postcards to Tokyo. Not knowing that it wasn’t necessary, he included a return address (mine) on the cards. The following Monday all five cards were delivered—postmarked—to my mailbox.

Apart from receiving ‘real’ letters from time to time, I also enjoy reading the published letters of writers and other people with a special talent for interesting communication. In the letters of someone like E.B. White, Dorothy Parker or John F. Kennedy we can almost sense through the published typescript that their thoughts and comments were originally brewed and steeped in pen and paper. It’s not usual that we find letter collections that include the writing of a wide range of diverse names and personalities. Easy enough to find individual collections, but an ‘anthology’ of letters from a long list of familiar names is more uncommon.

America 1900-1999: Letters of the Century is just such a book. Naming only a few on the list, this book includes the correspondence of James Baldwin, Clyde Barrow, George Bush, Truman Capote, Albert Einstein, Cher, George Washington Carver and Janis Joplin. Editors Lisa Grunwald and Stephen Adler have done a good job of compiling an ecletic view of American thought during the decades of twentieth century America.

One of my favorite letters was written by the author of the Uncle Remus stories, tales that gave us the indelible characters of Brer Rabbit and Brer Fox. On Thursday, April 5, 1900 Joel Chandler Harris wrote to his twenty-two year-old son Evelyn…

Dear Evelyn: Your letter was waiting for me when I came home, but was not the less interesting because I had seen you in the meantime. We usually say more in a letter than we do in conversation, the reason being that in a letter, we feel that we are shielded from the indifference or enthusiasm which our remarks may meet with or arouse. We commit our thoughts as it were, to the winds. Whereas, in conversation we are constantly watching or noting the effect of what we are saying, and when the relations are intimate, we shrink from being taken too seriously on one hand, and on the other not seriously enough. —But people no longer write letters. Lacking the leisure, and for the most part the ability, they dictate dispatches and scribble messages. When you are in the humor you should take a peep at some of the letters written by people who lived long ago, especially the letters of women. There is a charm about them impossible to describe, the charm of unconsciousness and the sweetness of real sincerity. But in these days we have not the artlessness nor the freedom of our forbears. We know too much about ourselves. Constraint covers us like a curtain. Not being very sure of our own feelings, we are in a fog about the feelings of others…

Poet, Wallace Stevens (1879-1955) was an unusual man in that he pursued lifelong careers as both a businessman and as a poet. Until his death he was an executive of the Hartford Accident and Indemnity Company, and in the meantime winning one Pulitzer Prize and two National Book Awards for his poetry. On March 21, 1907 he wrote to his future wife…

Dear Elsie—

I am so full of misery to-night that I am ridiculous. Every Spring I have a month or two of semi-blackness and perhaps the mood is just returning. Perhaps, it is simply a revulsion against old things—habits, people, places—everything: the feeling the sun must have, nowadays, when it shines on nothing but mud and bare trees and the general world, rusty with winter. People do not look well in Spring. They seem grimy and puffy and it makes me misanthropic. Spring fills me so full of dreams that try one’s patience in coming time. One has a desire for the air full of spice and odors, and for days like junk of changing colors, and for warmth and ease, and all other things that you know so well. But they come so slowly. Earth and the body and the spirit seem to change together, and so I feel muddy and bare and rusty.

…………………

Unrelated to anything but spring bloom is a photograph of my pet geranium, a small clump of leaves planted in the white urn about three months ago, and now….