A History of American Literature Since 1870

by Fred Lewis Pattee

About 1880, Sam Small of Atlanta, Georgia, on the local staff of the Constitution, began writing negro sketches, using "Old Si" or "Uncle Si" as his vehicle, and soon made the character famous. Small, however, was very dissipated, and frequently the Sunday morning Old Si contribution failed to appear. Joel Chandler Harris, the paragrapher for the Constitution as he had been for the Savannah News, was called on to supply something in place of the missing Si sketches and began with "Uncle Remus." His first contributions were not folk lore, but local. He soon drifted into the folk lore, however, and recognizing the beauty and perfection of his work, people generally who remembered the stories of their childhood, wrote out for him the main points and sent them. I, myself, contributed probably a dozen of the adventures of Brer Rabbit as I had heard them. This service he afterwards acknowledged in a graceful card of thanks. Uncle Remus became, soon, the mouthpiece of the generation, so far as animal legends are concerned.

The stories at once attracted attention in the North. The New York Evening Post and the Springfield Republican in particular made much of them. As a direct result, Uncle Remus: His Songs and Sayings; The Folk-lore of the old Plantation, appeared in 1880 and its author quickly found himself a national and indeed an international personage.

The really vital work of Harris lies in two fields: sketches of the old-time negro and sketches of the mountain cracker of the later period. It is upon the first that his permanence as a writer must depend. He worked in negro folk lore, in that vast field of animal stories which seems to be a part of the childhood of races, but it is not his folk lore, valuable as it may be, that gives him distinction. Ethnological and philological societies have done the work more scientifically. Many of the animal legends in common use among the slaves of the South were already in print before he began to write.[138] What he did was to paint a picture, minutely accurate, of the negro whom he had known intimately on the plantation of Mr. Turner at the transition moment when the old was passing into the new. With a thousand almost imperceptible touches he has made a picture that is complete and that is alive. The childish ignorance of the race and yet its subtle cunning, its quaint humor, its pathos, its philosophy, its conceit, its mendacity and yet its depth of character, its quickness at repartee—nothing has been omitted. The story teller is more valuable than his story: he is recording unconsciously to himself his own soul and the soul of his race. Brer Rabbit after all is but a negro in thinnest disguise, one does not have to see Frost's marvelous drawings to realize that. The rabbit's helplessness typifies the helplessness of the negro, and yet Brer Rabbit always wins. Suavity and duplicity and shifty tricks are the only defense the weak may have. His ruses are the ruses of a childlike mind. Clumsy in the extreme and founded on what seems like the absolute stupidity of Brer Fox and Brer Wolf and the others who are beguiled, these ruses always succeed. The helpless little creature is surrounded on all sides by brutality and superior force; they seemingly overcome him, but in the end they are defeated and always by force of superior cunning and skilful mendacity at the supreme moment. It is the very essence of the child story—the giant killed by Jack, the wolf powerless to overcome Little Red Riding Hood, and all the others—for the negro himself was but a child.

Page uses the negro as an accessory. The pathos of the black race adds pathos to the story of the destroyed white régime. Harris rose superior to Page in that he made the negro not the background for a white aristocracy, but a living creature valuable for himself alone; and he rose superior to Russell inasmuch as he embodied the result of his studies not in a type but in a single negro personality to which he gave the breath of life. Harris's negro is the type plus the personal equation of an individual—Uncle Remus, one of the few original characters which America has added to the world's gallery.

It is worthy of note too that he interpreted with the same patience and thoroughness the music and the poetry of the negro. Russell was a lyrist with the gift of intuition and improvisation; Harris was a deliberate recorder. The songs he wrote are not literary adaptations, nor are they framed after the conventional minstrel pattern. They are reproductions. In his first introduction to Uncle Remus, His Songs and His Sayings he wrote:

As to the songs, the reader is warned that it will be found difficult to make them conform to the ordinary rules of versification, nor is it intended that they should so conform. They are written, and are intended to be read, solely in reference to the regular invariable recurrence of the cæsura, as, for instance, the first stanza of the Revival Hymn:

Oh, whar | shill we go | w'en de great | day comes |
Wid de blow | in' er de trumpits | en de bang | in' er de drums |
Hoy man | y po' sin | ers 'll be kotch'd | out late |
En fine | no latch | ter de gold | en gate |

In other words, the songs depend for their melody and rhythm upon the musical quality of time, and not upon long or short, accented or unaccented, syllables. I am persuaded that this fact led Mr. Sidney Lanier, who is thoroughly familiar with the metrical peculiarities of negro songs, into the exhaustive investigation which has resulted in the publication of his scholarly treatise on The Science of English Verse.

Nowhere else does one come so completely into the feeling of negro music as in Harris. In "The Night Before Christmas," in Nights with Uncle Remus, a latter-day "Sir Roger de Coverley Paper," we feel the tone of it:

His voice was strong and powerful, and sweet, and its range was as astonishing as its volume. More than this, the melody to which he tuned it, and which was caught up by a hundred voices almost as sweet and as powerful as his own, was charged with a mysterious and pathetic tenderness. The fine company of men and women at the big house—men and women who had made the tour of all the capitals of Europe—listened with swelling hearts and with tears in their eyes as the song rose and fell upon the air—at one moment a tempest of melody, at another a heart-breaking strain breathed softly and sweetly to the gentle winds. The song that the little boy and the fine company heard was something like this—ridiculous enough when put in cold type, but powerful and thrilling when joined to the melody with which the negroes had invested it:

De big Owl holler en cry fer his mate,
My honey, my love!
Oh, don't stay long! oh, don't stay late!
My honey, my love!
Hit ain't so mighty fur ter de good-by gate,
My honey, my love!
Whar we all got ter go w'en we sing out de night,
My honey, my love!
My honey, my love, my heart's delight—
My honey, my love!

IV

With the success of the first Uncle Remus book there came the greatest flood of dialect literature that America has ever known. The years 1883 and 1884 mark the high tide of this peculiar outbreak, and to Georgia more than to any other locality may be traced the primal cause. In 1883 came what may be called the resurgence of the cracker, that Southeastern variety of the Pike which now came to the North as a new discovery. The leading characteristics of the type were thus set forth by Harris in his story of "Mingo":