Bypaths in Dixie: Folk Tales of the South - Sarah Johnson Cocke

WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY
HARRY STILLWELL EDWARDS

NEW YORK
E·P·DUTTON & COMPANY
31 West Twenty-Third Street

TO MY HUSBAND

INTRODUCTION

When Thomas Nelson Page began his stories of the old South in the early “Eighties,” the reading people of America suddenly aroused to the realization that a vein of virgin gold had been uncovered. There was a rush to the new field and almost every Southerner who had a story to tell told it, many of them with astonishing dramatic force and power. As by magic a new department was added to American literature and a score of new writers won their way to fame. From a notably backward section, in point of expression, the South stepped easily, with the short story, into the front rank and has held her place ever since. The field once entered was explored faithfully, the eager minds of her sons and daughters running through the Ante-Bellum, Revolutionary and Colonial eras, and when Joel Chandler Harris developed the “Brer Rabbit” stories, “The Little Boy” and “Uncle Remus,” it seemed as though future work must lie in refining for the ore was all in sight.

But there was one lead almost entirely forgotten or undervalued in the scramble for literary wealth and this lead was into the Southern nursery where the real black Mammy reigned. With the better lights before us now we realize the astonishing fact that the very heart center of the Southern civilization had not been touched.