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Laugh and learn from Brer Rabbit and all the 'creeturs'
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Published: August 31, 2008
I would like to say a big thank-you to Flonnie Anderson, Annette Scippio and all the other good folks who put on Remus, the Musical recently at Wentz Memorial United Church of Christ in Winston-Salem. I did not make it to the production, which Mary Giunca wrote about in Monday's Journal, but if they stage it again (and my life gets a bit less complicated), I'd surely be interested.
Anderson, who wrote and directed the show, is black. She's been an actress and director as well as a teacher. Scippio, whom I got to know when she was the executive director of Leadership Winston-Salem, is black, too. She played two (separate) parts: a teacher and a wolf.
It was heartening to read their comments about why they mounted the production even though the Uncle Remus tales that inspired it have fallen out of favor because some critics disapprove of their depiction of plantation-era and Reconstruction-era race relations, and their use of heavy Southern black dialect. They told Giunca that they grew up reading the stories and still love them. They offer rich life lessons, they said, made enjoyable through humor.
Speaking of critics, Scippio said, "Sometimes people lose sight of what was the real purpose because they want to put other issues on top of it." And Anderson said that she thinks our culture has moved beyond taking offense at the old stories. In fact, the framing story of the musical is that of a teacher and students who are dealing with people who want to ban the Uncle Remus book, among others.
There could be no stronger antidote to political correctness run amok than such insightful rejection of it by those who might be expected to be among the offended.
I often worry that by trying to sanitize our history, we Americans are in danger of losing much of it, along with the lessons that we might learn from it. But that's not the main reason I'm delighted to see evidence that it's OK to love Joel Chandler Harris' Uncle Remus again.
White Southern children, too, for a few generations, grew up loving Uncle Remus stories.
They were especially important to me because my father was a master at telling them. I never thought to ask Daddy how he came to know the stories, but I figure that his parents, who loved books and who were born during those Reconstruction years, probably read them to him.
All I know is that some of my earliest memories are of sitting in my father's lap as he told those funny stories. Over the years, he committed many of them to memory, perfect dialect and all. Other times, I guess, he was reading from a book, although the stories themselves were all that mattered to us children.
Daddy probably would have enjoyed acting in Remus, the Musical if he were still with us. Certainly he relished hamming it up whenever he told the stories. That would be whenever he had at least one child willing to listen.
When I had just turned 8, my father, an Army officer, was ordered to Okinawa, and the whole family took a slow trip (except for when we got caught in the typhoon, but that's another story) on an Army transport ship across the Pacific. My father became a fixture in the lounge, where he would entertain the whole boatload of Army brats -- white and black, from all over the United States -- with Uncle Remus tales.
In his post-retirement career, when he became the principal of the elementary school in Mayodan, he had a built-in audience. The children loved the stories, and even after he retired again, the school would invite him back. Word got around, and invitations came in from other schools and groups.
When grandchildren came along, Daddy had a whole new audience. The years only increased his enthusiasm; his storytelling became more active, with more animated enactments of Brer Rabbit hollering "Mawnin'!" to the Tar-Baby, while "Tar-Baby, she ain't sayin' nothing" or of Sis Cow hitting "de simmon tree … a rap wid'er horns -- blam!"
Once he came to entertain the guests at my older son's birthday party, and when he reached the climax of a tale, several children took off shrieking in delighted terror, with him in mock pursuit.
Some children took to calling him Brer Rabbit, which he considered a compliment. It was Brer Rabbit, after all, the wily trickster, who almost always outsmarted Brer Wolf, Brer Fox and all the larger, more powerful animals.
Those who study such things say that that's a part of the importance of these tales, many of which slaves adapted from traditional African stories. Brer Rabbit represents the oppressed black man who used his wits to outsmart those who supposedly had power over him, they say. That's probably a part of it, but as with so much in life, the tradition and the appeal of the stories is a lot more complicated than that.
Maybe we shouldn't over-analyze these stories, just as we shouldn't ban them. Better to laugh together at the antics of "de anemils en de creeturs" and Miss Meadow "en de gals" and Uncle Remus and the little boy. If we gain a little of Uncle Remus' wisdom too, that's all to the good.
■ Linda Brinson is the Journal's editorial page editor. She can be reached at lbrinson@wsjournal.com.
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