MOST people are acquainted with Negro Folk Literature even if they do not recognize it as such. There are few children who have not read the Uncle Remus stories of Joel Chandler Harris, which were based upon the original folk tales of the African slaves. But the great storehouse from which they were gleaned, that treasury of folk lore which the American Negro inherited from his African forefathers, is little known. It rivals in amount as well as in quality that of any people on the face of the globe, and is not confined to stories of the Uncle Remus type, but includes a rich variety of story forms, legends, saga cycles, songs, proverbs and phantastic, almost mythical, material.

It simply happens that the one type of Negro story has struck the popular fancy, and becoming better known, blurred out the remaining types. For this result, we are indebted to Joel Chandler Harris, who saw the popular possibilities of the “B’rer Rabbit” tales, and with his own flair for literature, adapted them with such remarkable skill and individuality that to-day they rank with the best known and most highly appreciated works of American literature.

Familiar as he was with his material, and with an instinct for its value—even in his day these tales were fast disappearing among “modern” colored folk—his approach was nevertheless that of the journalist and literary man rather than the folk-lorist. “Written,” as has been said, “with no thought of the ethnological bearing which critics were so quick to discern in them, they established themselves at a bound as among the most winsome of folk tales.” There is some possibility of their having passed out unnoticed and thus being lost to posterity if he had not done the work which drew attention to them. Yet in spite of the happy providence that produced a Harris, and although his intentions were of the best, we are forced to recognize the harm as well as the good that these stories have done. This query may come as a shock to some, but on further analysis we shall see there is reason for wondering.

In the first place, the Uncle Remus stories, as the Harris tales have become known, are not folk tales, but adaptations. This fact alone is enough to warrant some hesitancy about placing them in the category of folk lore. To be sure, folk lore was their background, but this can be said of many literary works (Dracula, for example) which we would not think of classifying with folk literature.

The misrepresentation goes further than simply the name, however. The very dialect of the Uncle Remus Stories is questionable, statements to the contrary notwithstanding. Scholars have tried to show that Harris very faithfully recorded the dialect of his time, in its truly intimate expressions, mannerisms and colloquialisms, but it is doubtful whether Negroes generally ever used the language employed in the works of Joel Chandler Harris. Rather, in these works we observe the consciously devised, artistically wrought, patiently carved out expressions of a story writer who knew his art and employed it well. They have too much the flavor of the popular trend of contemporary writing of the Thomas Nelson Page tradition, and though they endeavored to give a faithful portrait of the Negro and did so more successfully than any other of these Southern writers, it cannot be denied that such portraits as they gave were highly romanticized, presenting an interpretation of the Negro seen neither objectively nor realistically.

These stories of Chandler Harris made and still make their most powerful impression and appeal through the character of Uncle Remus himself. But it is in just this projection into the picture of this amiable and winsome ante-bellum personality that contorts the Negro folk tale from its true plane. The American Negro folk tale, borrowed as it most certainly was from Africa, is an animal cycle, recounting the exploits of various members of the animal world of which “B’rer Rabbit” was arch-villain or hero, as you please. As in the case of all true folk tales, the story teller himself was inconsequential; he did not figure at all—a talking machine might serve the purpose just as well. As a result the stories take on an impersonal character, more or less lacking in artistic embellishments. The Uncle Remus stories break this tradition, however; instead the story teller plays an important, a too important, rôle. By that very fact, this type of story ceases to be a folk tale; and becomes in reality a product of the imagination of the author. Of course there is such a thing as an intermediate type; there is a place for Hans Andersen, and Brothers Grimm. But Harris, familiar with his material and genuinely loving it, could not be spiritually saturated with it under the circumstances. And this was more a matter of class than race; for human kinships are spiritual after all, but these stories cannot present Negro folk life and feeling seen and felt on its own level. Enough has been said, perhaps, to show, without in any way detracting from the true service and real charm of the Harris stories, that there are enough incongruous elements insinuated into the situation to make it impossible to accept them as a final rendering of American Negro folk lore.

We would not be so much concerned about a “distinction without a difference” if there were actually no difference. Unfortunately the treatment of these stories by Harris resulted in certain developments which are too noteworthy to pass by. The most striking consequence of the fact that Uncle Remus is written all over and interwoven into the stories which bear his name, is that the Harris variety of the Negro folk tale assumes to interpret Negro character instead of simply telling his stories. The result is a composite picture of the ante-bellum Negro that fits exactly into the conception of the type of Negro which so many white people would like to think once existed, or even now exists; whereas in the material in question there is reflected a quite different folk temperament—apart from the question of what is or what isn’t the Negro temperament. When we find one critic naïvely suggesting that Uncle Remus “makes clear to every thoughtful reader that the system of slavery pernicious as it may appear to us now, took the dusky savage from his haunts in the African jungle and made of him a Christian and a gentleman,” we can clearly see that any writing that can be taken as an apologia for a social system, or the idealization of the plantation régime, cannot be taken unsuspiciously as the chronicle of a primitive folk lore.

Nevertheless, Harris wrought well from the standpoint of art, and by so doing let the world know that Negroes possessed a rich folk lore. The unquestionable result of this was a keener interest in the Negro and his lore. Just the same, the intrusion of a dominant note of humor, not by any means as general in the material as one would suppose, fell in line with an arbitrary and unfortunately general procedure of regarding anything which bore the Negro trademark as inherently comic and only worth being laughed at. It is not necessary to draw upon sentiment in order to realize the masterful quality of some of the Negro tales: it is simply necessary to read them. Moralism, sober and almost grim, irony, shrewd and frequently subtle, are their fundamental tone and mood—as in the case of their African originals—and the quaint and sentimental humor so popularly prized is oftener than not an overtone merely. But the unfortunate thing about American thought is the habit of classifying first and investigating after. As a result this misrepresentation of the temper and spirit of Negro folk lore has become traditional, and for all we know, permanent.

There is strong need of a scientific collecting of Negro folk lore before the original sources of this material altogether lapse. Sentimental admiration and amateurish praise can never adequately preserve or interpret this precious material. It is precious in two respects—not only for its intrinsic, but for its comparative value. Some of the precious secrets of folk history are in danger of fading out in its gradual disappearance. American folk-lorists are now recognizing this, and systematic scientific investigation has begun under the influence and auspices of the Society for American Folk Lore and such competent ethnologists as Franz Boas, Elsie Clews Parsons, and others.

Simply because we are considering Negro folk lore, we do not say that it is superior to other folk material, nor even that it is as great as any other folk literature; but we do insist that all folk material, in order to be appraised justly, must be read and considered in the light of those values which go to make up great folk literature. Briefly stated, these values are:

1. Lack of the self-conscious element found in ordinary literature.

2. Nearness to nature.

3. Universal appeal.

Search the body of Negro folk literature and you will find these characteristics dominant. To the African, as one writer puts it, “All nature is alive, anthropomorphized as it were, replete with intelligences; the whispering, tinkling, hissing, booming, muttering, zooming around him are full of mysterious hints and suggestions.” Out of this primitive intimacy of the mind with nature come those naïve personifications of the rabbits, foxes and wolves, terrapins and turtles, buzzards and eagles which make the animal lore of the world. Many tales ascribed to lands far away find parallels in Negro stories bearing indubitable traces of African origin; opening out into the great question of common or separate origin. Fundamentally, as Lang points out, they prove the common ancestry of man, both with regard to his mental and cultural inheritance. Whichever way the question is solved, the physical contacts of common origins or the psychological similarities of common capacity and endowment, it is essentially the same fundamental point in the end—human kinship and universality. Yet there is much that is distinctively African in animal lore, and of a quality not usually conceded. The African proverb, in its terseness and pith, the shrewd moralisms of the fables, the peculiar whimsicality and turn to the imagination in many of the tales, are notably outstanding. Clive Bell to the contrary, it is by their intelligence, their profound and abstract underlying conceptions, that they possess a peculiar touch and originality that is distinctively African. Æsop, it is claimed was African, but any folk-lorist knows that the African folk fable of indigenous growth outmasters Æsop over and over. Africa in a sense is the home of the fable; the African tales are its classics.

It is interesting, in this connection, to consider the case of the rabbit, which figures so largely in Negro Folk Lore. It was the belief of Harris, and still is the belief of many, that the Negro chose the weak rabbit and glorified him in his stories because this animal was a prototype of himself during slavery times; according to this theory, the stronger, more rapacious animals such as wolves, foxes, etc., represented the white masters. But this cannot be so, for as Ambrose E. Gonzales aptly points out in his volume entitled, Æsop Along the Black Border, these stories, or their types at least, came with the Negro from Africa where they had existed for centuries. In the African tales, the hare is the notable figure. Surely, then, the rabbit is none other than the African hare. As a matter of fact, the “B’rer Rabbit” character simply confirms the opinion that Negro Folk Lore is a genuine part of world folk literature, for we find the hare one of the animals most frequently encountered in folk lore the world over. In Scottish and Irish Tales he is associated with witches. In the ancient Druidical mysteries the hare was employed in auguries to indicate the outcome of war. Chinese and East Indian stories feature the hare, and he is common even in the tales of the American Indian. The Easter “bunny” shows the hare cropping up in a Teutonic atmosphere. So that when all these instances are added to the African and American Negro we may be reasonably safe in assuming that “B’rer Rabbit” comes into American lore from the level of true primitive folk material.



The antiquity and authentic folk lore ancestry of the Negro tale make it the proper subject for the scientific folk-lorist rather than the literary amateur. It is the ethnologist, the philologist and the student of primitive psychology that are most needed for its present investigation. Of course no one will deny or begrudge the delightful literary by-products of this material. Negro writers themselves will shortly, no doubt, be developing them as arduously as Chandler Harris, and we hope as successfully, or even more so. But a literary treatment based on a scientific recording will have much fresh material to its hand, and cannot transgress so far from the true ways of the folk spirit and the true lines of our folk art.