Ef de Lawd call me in de chu’ch I gwine, ef he no call I no gwine, enty? I no yerry him call dis long time....
Whoever crossed her—white or black, old or young—got a piece of her mind. She outspokenly scorns the South Carolina “sandhillers” or “tackies,” and laughs at them for going to war to “fight for rich folks’ niggers.” In the Civil War she is a grim prophet of Yankee victory, and therefore is considered a lunatic. Again, however, Harris cannot shake off the heavy hand of tradition. Mom Bi forgives the sale of her daughter Maria, but is grieved that her young master Gabriel was killed in battle, fighting alongside of poor white folks. Emancipated, she goes down to live with Maria, her daughter; when smallpox kills off Maria and her children, she returns (as do most of the Negroes whom Harris likes) to the old homeplace. “I done bin come back,” says she. “I bin come back fer stay, but I free, dough!”
Like “Mom Bi,” “Blue Dave” promises much more than it gives. Dave, an inky black powerfully built runaway, has become a legend before the story opens for fearlessness and terrorism. In the story proper, however, we merely get a Hercules devoted to a family because the young master resembles a former Virginian owner. Dave has said over and over again that slavery “ain’t no home for me,” but he is bought by the family he has served, and lives happily ever after as a model slave. “Where’s Duncan,” more than any other of Harris’s stories, touches upon the sinister and repellent. A swarthy dark-bearded vagabond fiddler tells mysteriously of a planter who sold his son to a trader. The last scene, recalling Poe’s effects, shows an old mansion afire; in the light of the flames, a mulatto woman cries out “Where’s Duncan?” and stabs the white father of her son with a carving knife. Crooked-leg Jake saw Duncan, the fiddler, sitting in a corner, seemingly enjoying the spectacle.
The last story shows that Harris saw in slavery something more than a perpetual Mardi Gras; he knew that there was hatred as well as mutual affection, the ugly as well as the pleasant. Harris promised “scenes such as have never been described in any of the books that profess to tell about life in the South before the war.” But with all of his value as a realist, Harris never came fully to grips with the reality of the South or of Negro experience. He was a kindly man, and wished the wounds of war bound up. He could give some praise to Negroes struggling to achieve property and education. But he was a southerner, living in vexatious times, and therefore his fiction almost always glorified the faithful self-denying slave of the old South, for whom the old ways of slavery were the best. He achieved a fine portrait in Uncle Remus, but Uncle Remus had brothers and children of a different stamp, whom Harris touched gingerly, if at all. Harris came a good distance down the road toward fairness if compared with Thomas Nelson Page. But compared with George Washington Cable and Mark Twain, he still lagged behind.
Harris recorded some of the folk-lore of the “saltwater” Negroes with success, but it remained for Charles C. Jones to do the fuller job in Negro Myths from the Georgia Coast (1888). These tales are worthy to stand by those of Uncle Remus and, lacking the editorializing, are closer to the originals. They are told in the unique lingo of the rice-field and sea-island Negroes. The first in the “untrodden field of the swamp region of Georgia and the Carolinas,” Jones discovered what later folk-lorists like Samuel Stoney, Gertrude Shelby and Ambrose Gonzales have found attractive.
Edwards. Harry Stillwell Edwards belongs to the long line of Georgians from Longstreet down to Erskine Caldwell who write of the Old South with more realism and less worship. His Major Crawford Worthington, for instance, is a portly, profane, self-willed sportsman who considers the Negro an unfailing source of amusement. Worthington’s slave Isam is an annual runaway, not because slavery is harsh, but because he likes vacations. “The Two Runaways” tells of a vacation on which master and slave, boon companions, live high on stolen corn and melons. They enjoy seeing each other in difficulties. When a buck deer and the fat major are wrestling, Isam, a safe, happy ringsider, cries out:
Stick ter ’im Mass Craffud, stick ter ’im! Hit’s better fer one ter die den bofe! Hole ’im Mass Craffud.... Wo’ deer! Stick ter ’im, Mass Craffud, steddy!
Tables are turned in “The Woodhaven Goat” when a goat, maddened by bees, butts and drags Isam all over the yard. From beneath the house, the Major
looked out through tears with a sudden delight at the negro’s predicament, sobbing and choking with emotion ... he frantically beat the dry soil about him with his fist for some moments. “Better for one to die than two.... Stick to him, Isam.... Whoa, goat!”
“Aeneas Africanus” (1920) humorously tells of a black Eneas, who confused by the duplication of town-names, covered 3350 miles through seven states, over a period of eight years, trying to get back to his quality whitefolks. Like his Major, Edwards seemed to have studied the Negro only on his amusing side. But he was willing to poke fun at some of the absurdities of the Old South, and his robust horseplay is a relief from sentimentality.