Dem wuz good ole times, marster—de bes’ Sam ever see! Dey wuz, in fac’! Niggers didn’t hed nothing ’tall to do.... Dyar warn’ no trouble nor nothin’.

Uncle Edinburg seconds the emotion:

Oh! nuttin’ warn’ too good for niggers dem times; an’ de little niggers wuz runnin’ roun’ right ’stracted.... Dis nigger ain’ nuver gwine forgit it.”

And Uncle Billy:

I wuz settin’ in de do’ wid meh pipe, an heah ’em settin’ dyah on de front steps, dee voices soun’in low like bees, an’ de moon sort o’ mellow over de yard, an’ I sort o’ got to studyin’ an’ hit pear like de plantation live once mo’, an’ de ain’ no mo’ scufflin’, an de ol times done come back agin....

“No Haid Pawn,” a ghost story in the same volume, has a Negro character who differed from other slaves in that he was without amiability or docility, superstition or reverence. Page adds significantly, “He was the most brutal negro I ever knew.” The Negro: The Southerner’s Problem states Page’s lavish praise for the “old time darky” and his virulent disgust at the “new issue,” ruined by emancipation; Red Rock (1898) embodies this hatred in fiction. The docile mastiffs have become mad dogs; the carriers of the rabies are Yankee soldiers and schoolmarms, carpet-baggers, and scalawags. Mammy Krenda, Waverly, Tarquin, and Jerry are sympathetically treated because they despise the northern interlopers, and stand hand-in-hand before quality. Less servile Negroes are called insolent swaggerers. Moses, a mulatto trick doctor, is the worst of these. He orates: “I’m just as good as any white man.... I’m goin’ to marry a white ’ooman and meck white folks wait on me.” Within a few pages he is likened to “a hyena in a cage,” “a reptile,” “a species of worm,” “a wild beast.” He attempts to assault one of the heroines, the daughter of an abolitionist mother; this Page considers a fit harvest for interference with the most chivalrous of civilizations. Page thus anticipates such authors as Thomas Dixon whose stock in trade is the brute Negro, and whose pat response to any assertion of Negro rights is the cry of intermarriage or rape.

Such a volume as Pastime Stories (1894) deals less with the good times than with Page’s own days. The Negro characters are petty thieves and drunkards, but are dealt with jocularly. There is ridicule in Uncle Jack’s “Views on Geography”:

You knows de way to de spring and de wood-pile, an’ de mill, an’ when you gits a little bigger I’s gwine to show you de way to de hoe-handle, an’ de cawn-furrer, an’ dat’s all de geog-aphy a nigger’s got to know.

One story shows approvingly how a mulatto office-seeker is thwarted by a faithful Negro for the sake of his master’s political advantage. Bred in the Bone (1904) adds nothing to Page’s usual characterizations, dealing largely with the antics of comic menials.

Harris. It was from the slave quarters that Joel Chandler Harris started his trip to literary immortality. As a lonely boy, shy with people of his own race, he turned for companionship to the cabins on a Georgia plantation. There he met Uncle George Terrell, the original of Uncle Remus; there he started his long study of Negro lore, and there he learned something of the story-telling art and something of his wisdom. For years the slaves had been telling fables of Brer Rabbit, Brer Fox and Brer Terrapin, some of the stories having come from Africa. But no one had dug in this mine before Harris. A true artist, he recognized the value of what he found. He is more than a reteller, however; he altered, adapted, polished and sharpened until the products differ from folk tales. For all of the fascination of Brer Rabbit and company, the fabler is stressed more than the characters. Instead of being by the folk for the folk, Uncle Remus tells the stories to entertain a white child. Harris lost something authentic when he adopted this framework, but he gained Uncle Remus. And Uncle Remus is worth gaining. By no means the typical product of slavery, as Harris implies, he is still finely conceived: a venerable, pampered Negro with a gift for quaint philosophizing and for poetic speech, having (or allowed to have) only pleasant memories, fortunate above his brothers—one of the best characters in American literature.