Sometimes a thin stamp contains layers of meaning. Today’s #stampoftheday, a 3-cent stamp issued on December 9. 1948 that pictures Joel Chandler Harris, is one of those stamps.
Before I started writing this post, I didn’t know who Harris was. But it turns out I am indirectly familiar with his work because Harris, who was born on December 9, 1847, was a prolific and popular late 19th century author best known for his many collections of “Uncle Remus” stories. In those stories, Uncle Remus, an older black man who speaks in a heavy dialect, tells stories and imparts lessons to a young white listener. I also knew his work via the “Song of the South,” a 1946 Disney film that won an Oscar for best song – for “Zip-a-Dee-Doo-Dah”, which was a staple of my childhood.
The stories were based on tales Harris had heard during the Civil War when he was a teenager working as a printer compositor and living on the plantation owned by the paper’s publisher (where the paper was published on an old hand press). Many of them feature Br’er Rabbit (“Brother Rabbit”), who used his wits against adversity and threats posed by larger, more dangerous animals, such as Br’er Fox and Br’er Bear.
Harris’s stories (and the Disney film) have a challenging legacy. On the one hand, the books were extraordinarily popular. Indeed, when Harris died in 1908, he and Mark Twain were the most widely read authors in America and Harris’ books have been translated into nearly 30 languages. Harris’ tales -which are the largest collection of African American folktales published in the nineteenth century-were based on stories originated in Africa, among the very people who later became slaves in the American South. Critics have also noted that unlike western fairy tales, Harris tends to focus on a singular event in a singular story, the animals on the plantation existed in an ongoing community saga.
Moreover, his work influenced a generation of other writers. Mark Twain , who often included Harris’ material in his stage-reading, drew on Harris’ work several of his books, most notably The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and The Mysterious Stranger. A.A. Milne, whose father read him one Uncle Remus story a night, not only called Harris’ work “the sacred book” but also borrowed diction, plot, and narrative structure from several B’rer Rabbit stories. Many scholars cite Harris’ influence on William Faulkner, most importantly in terms of dialect usage, depictions of African Americans, lower-class whites, and fictionalized landscape. And poets Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot corresponded in Uncle Remus-inspired dialect, referring to themselves as “Brer Rabbit” and “Old Possum,” respectively. And Ralph Ellison was a fan, contending: “Aesop and Uncle Remus had taught us that comedy is a disguised form of philosophical instruction; and especially when it allows us to glimpse the animal instincts lying beneath the surface of our civilized affectations.”
On the other, Harris has been criticized by a host of scholars and writers for being inaccurate and inappropriate recounting of African-American culture. Most notably, in 1981 Alice Walker published a searing essay called “Uncle Remus, No Friend of Mine” in which she accused Harris of “stealing a good part of my heritage.” That same year, Toni Morrison published a novel called “Tar Baby.” While a character with that name is featured in one of Harris’ best-known stories, Morrison said she learned the story from her family and owed no debt to him. (We might also take issue with the fact that Harris is indirectly responsible for “Cats,” which is based on Eliot’s “Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats,” which drew some inspiration from Old Possum, who was one of Harris’ characters.
Moreover, it’s hard to separate the legacy of his writing from the reactions to – and history of—”Song of the South,” which was a pet project for Walt Disney, who, in 1946, said “I was familiar with the Uncle Remus tales since boyhood. From the time I began making animated features, I have had them definitely in my production plans.” The film was commercially successful but has been criticized ever since its release for its benign portrayal of slavery in the South. One review in The New Yorker, for example, stated: “You begin to wonder if Disney doesn’t think Lincoln was wrong in signing the Emancipation Proclamation.” And at the film’s New York premiere in Times Square, dozens of Black and white picketers protested, chanting “We fought for Uncle Sam, not Uncle Tom.”
The film is so controversial that it hasn’t been shown commercially in the US since 1986 and Disney has never released it on any home video platform in the US. Moreover, in June 2020, when protests about racial inequities were widespread, Disney announced that Splash Mountain, a ride in Disneyland and other Disney parks that was based on sequences from “Song of the South” would be rebuilt and reworked so that it would be based on “The Princess and the Frog,” a 2009 Disney film with a Black protagonist.
The problem is that on one level Uncle Remus seems to be merely telling entertaining, harmless slapstick animal tales, drawn nostalgically from the pre-Civil War Old South plantation tradition. Yet one another level, Uncle Remus was telling listeners (and readers) that you had to use your “thinkin’ masheen,” when confronted with stronger and more powerful foes. Such lessons, Harris had Uncle Remus once explain “with unusual emphasis” were important because: “Ef deze yer tales wuz des fun, fun, fun, en giggle, giggle, giggle, I let you know I’d a-done drapt um long ago.”
Earlier today, my daughter Anna asked me about today’s #stampoftheday. After I told her about the complicated legacy of Joel Chandler Harris she asked, “do you have another stamp you could write about instead?” But as we talked more, we agreed that this stamp was, in fact, well worth exploring. And, having done so, I have to say, “my oh my, what a wonderful day….It’s the truth, it’s ‘actch’ll.’ Everything is ‘satisfactch’ll.'”
Be well, stay safe, work for justice, and fight for peace.