Living by the Word: Essays by Alice Walker

Author:Alice Walker
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Tags: Women Authors, Essays, Literary Collections, Black Studies (Global), Social Science
ISBN: 9781453224076
Publisher: Open Road Media
Published: 2011-11-21T18:30:00+00:00

THE DUMMY IN THE WINDOW:

JOEL CHANDLER HARRIS AND THE INVENTION OF UNCLE REMUS

[This was originally delivered as a talk at the Atlanta Historical Society in 1981.]

About three years ago I was asked to write an essay on folklore and what it had meant in my own writing and my own development. So I thought about it, and I became very depressed—depressed, because when you think of folklore in America, you have to think of Uncle Remus and you have to think of Joel Chandler Harris. Despite this, I went to the library to begin research on Harris, partly because he lived in Eatonton, Georgia, which is my hometown. I had deliberately repressed that connection; it was really too painful to think about. And as I read his letters, collected by the wife of his son, I realized that the subject was also too painful for me to write about in an essay. So the essay is still on the shelf, but I did take some notes, and I want to share those notes with you.

Joel Chandler Harris is billed as the creator of Uncle Remus. Uncle Remus told the stories of Brer Rabbit and Brer Fox, all the classic folk tales that came from Africa and that, even now in Africa, are still being told. We, too, my brothers and sisters and I, listened to those stories. But after we saw Song of the South, we no longer listened to them. They were killed for us. In fact, I do not remember any of my relatives ever telling any of those tales after they saw what had been done with them.

When Joel Chandler Harris was a young boy in the 1850s and 1860s, he went out to work as an apprentice for a newspaperman on the Turnwold Plantation. We knew this place when I was growing up as the Turner place. It now has a historical marker, and often, driving past it, I stop and look at the house—a nice, big, white Southern house—and at the marker, which tells how Joel Chandler Harris created Uncle Remus.

In Life and Letters of Joel Chandler Harris, published in 1918 by Houghton Mifflin, Harris’s daughter-in-law, Julia Collier Harris, told his story. She wrote:

When the work and play of the day were ended and the glow of the lightwood knot could be seen in the negro cabins, Joel and the Turner children would steal away from the house and visit their friends in the slave quarters. Old Harbert and Uncle George Terrell were Joel’s favorite companions, and from a nook in their chimney corners he listened to the legends handed down from their African ancestors— the lore of animals and birds so dear to every plantation negro. And sometimes, while the yellow yam baked in the ashes, or the hoecake browned in the shovel, the negroes would croon a camp-meeting hymn or a corn-shucking melody. The boy unconsciously absorbed their fables and their ballads, and the soft elisions of their dialect and the picturesque images of their speech left an indelible imprint upon the plastic tablets of his memory.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.