Admirer or Critic of the Old South?

By Carole E. Scott

Joel Chandler Harris (1848-1908), West End, Georgia’s most famous former resident, was an accomplished folklorist, editor, biographer, and author of romantic novels. He is most known for his Uncle Remus stories, the most well known of which is about Brer (Brother) Rabbit and the Tar Baby. A native of Putnam County, Harris’ home in West End, called the Wren’s Nest, is on what was back then named Gordon Street. West End became a part of Atlanta in 1894.

For many years his newspaper jobs were what put food on his family’s table. Other writing was part time, but his success with it eventually allowed him to retire from his assistant editorship of the Atlanta Constitution and spend all day at the Wren’s Nest.

Harris was one of the nation’s more liberal voices in his day. He regularly denounced southern whites’ racism and called lynching barbaric. He stressed the importance of higher education for blacks. He told industrialist and philanthropist Andrew Carnegie that the purpose of a magazine he and his son founded was to further “the obliteration of prejudice against the blacks, the demand for a square deal, and the uplifting of both races so that they can look justice in the face without blushing.” A circulation reaching 240,000 within one year made it one of the largest magazines in the country.

His son, Julian LaRose Harris, and his wife, Julia Collier Harris, daughter of an Atlanta mayor, won the Pulitzer Prize in 1926 for their criticism in their Columbus, Georgia newspaper, the Enquirer-Sun, of the blocking of the teaching of evolution in Georgia and the activities of the Ku Klux Klan. This was only the second time a Pulitzer for public service was awarded to a southern newspaper.

Harris’ 1882 story in Harper’s, Mingo, led a New York Tribune writer to assert that “in the poor whites of Georgia, Harris has found material as fresh and picturesque as anything in the delightful experiences of Uncle Remus, and he has handled it with the ease, mastery, and grace of a natural artist.”

By the mid-20^th century, Uncle Remus was being said by some to be a kind of slave that never existed, but whites wanted to believe did. People offended by the content, enslaved Uncle Remus character in Walt Disney’s Song of the South movie caused this movie not to periodically be reshown like Gone With The Wind was.

Yet, as early as 1884, Walter Hines Page pointed out that Harris “hardly conceals his scorn for the old aristocracy” and makes “a sly thrust at the pompous life of the Old South”. Black folklorist and university professor Julius Lester says “There are no inaccuracies in Harris’s characterization of Uncle Remus. Even the most cursory reading of the slave narratives collected by the Federal Writer’s Project of the 1930s reveals that there were many slaves who fit the Uncle Remus mold.” Critic Robert Cochran says “Harris went to the world as the trickster Brer Rabbit, and in the trickster Uncle Remus he projected both his sharpest critique of things as they were and the deepest image of his heart’s desire.”

Harris’ Uncle Remus character was a composite of blacks he had known. The first of his books and his best known, Uncle Remus: His Songs and His Sayings, sold 7,000 copies in its first month in 1880. Harris began collecting the black folk stories that would make him famous from slaves on a Georgia plantation near Eatonton where as a teenager he learned to set type for a newspaper printed there. When the Civil War ended, so did the newspaper, and Harris was left penniless.

Joseph Addison Turner, the plantation’s owner and the publisher of the newspaper, helped Harris learn to write articles he was willing to publish. That Harris was an unusually mature teenager is indicated by a piece he published which began: “What is death, that we so much fear it? Is it the end of man? Is it an end to all his troubles? Is it a long, eternal sleep—and this is why we all dread it?” After discussing atheists and deists, he compared a dying man with a caterpillar entering a chrysalis as a loathsome worm that issues forth from it as a beautiful creature.

The origin of Joel Chandler Harris’ widely loved black folk stories was in Africa. President Theodore Roosevelt’s mother, who married a wealthy New Yorker, was from Roswell. Roosevelt wrote in his autobiography that his mother and her sister “used to entertain us by the hour with tales of life on the Georgia plantations; of hunting fox, deer, and wildcat; of the long-tailed driving horses, Boone and Crockett, and of the riding horses, one of which was named Buena Vista in a fit of patriotic exaltation during the Mexican War; and of the queer goings-on in the Negro quarters.” One of Rooevelt’s uncles, Robert Roosevelt, “was much struck with them, and took them down from her dictation, publishing them in Harper's [a magazine], where they fell flat. This was a good many years before a genius arose who in ‘Uncle Remus’ made the stories immortal.”

Roosevelt said Harris had written “what exalts the South in the mind of every man who reads it, and yet what has not even a flavor of bitterness toward any other part of the Union.” I suspect Harris benefitted from the movement which began late in the 19^th century to reconcile the North and the South which included joint reunions of Union and Confederate veterans. Photos of members of a United Confederate Veterans camp sometimes included blacks, likely men who accompanied their owners to war.

Alexander Stephens, a Georgian who had been the Confederacy’s vice president, wrote Harris that he had often sat up late in the house of an old family servant “and heard nearly every one of those stories about Brer Rabbit, Brer Fox, and Brer Terrapin as you have reproduced them. In reading them, I have been living my young life over again.”

In Louisiana a man heard in French some of the stories Harris heard in Georgia. Like Robert Roosevelt, his publication of these stories did not receive much attention. Harris added to the stories he heard on Turner’s plantation with stories from coastal Georgia by seeking and finding people like Helen S. Barclay of Darien, who had gathered stories from elderly, former body servants on the Pierce Butler estates. These people were looked down on by Darien blacks as benighted heathen. Charles C. Jones, Jr. provided Harris with stories he had gathered in Liberty County. The dialect of coastal blacks, Gullah, differed from the up country dialect Harris grew up with.

While at the railroad station in Norcross one day, Harris noticed some black railroad workers cracking jokes and laughing. He approached them after hearing one of them refer to “Ol’ Molly Har,” Brer Rabbit’s wife. He caught their attention by beginning to narrate the Tar Baby Story. “Gentermens,” one exclaimed, “git out de way, an’ gin ‘im room!” For about two hours these railroad workers told him stories.

By publishing these folk stories, Harris preserved them. By writing them in dialect, he preserved it too. Mark Twain in 1883 said Harris is the only master in writing the African-American dialect. In addition to Twain, Harris had a profound influence on many other prominent writers both at home and abroad. Perhaps he even played a role in shaping Bugs Bunny.

Harris declared that the inherent qualities of life which characterized the people of his native county had been a force sufficiently strong to regulate men’s lives. “I know,” he confessed, “it was so in my own case.  I have never attempted or accomplished anything that I did not ask myself, What will the people of Putnam think of this?”

“By-the-by,” Harris wrote in an 1895 letter, “if you will take a map of Georgia, pick out Putnam County, and then put your finger on the counties surrounding it - Morgan, Greene, Hancock, Baldwin, Jones, and Jasper - you will have under your thumb the seat of Southern humor. Every settlement had its peculiarities, and every neighborhood boasted of its humorists - its clowns, whose pranks and jests were limited by no license. Out of this has grown a literature which, in some of its characteristics, is not matched elsewhere on the globe.”

Harris’ mother, a seamstress, was unmarried when he was born and did not marry later. Andrew Reid, a wealthy resident of Eatonton, provided her with a cottage located near his mansion to live in. Reid financed Joel Harris’ education, which generated some suspicion, but according to the Harris family, Joel’s father was an immigrant Irish laborer.

When it was time for the Reids to take delivery of a piano specially made in Boston for a child, a house slave named Robert (Bob) Saddler, clothed in a leather suit with $500 in gold coins concealed in the lining, was sent to get it. When he returned home most everybody in Eatonton gathered to welcome him. When asked what he would like as a reward, he said a watch like his owner’s. Reid took his gold watch from his pocket and gave it to Saddler. Although in order to keep them from reading abolitionist literature it was illegal to teach slaves to read, like the Reid’s other house slaves, Saddler could read. After he gained his freedom, he continued working for the Reids.

Harris worked for several newspapers in Georgia and one in New Orleans. He obtained a position with the Atlanta Constitution after quitting his job with the Savannah Morning News in 1876 and fleeing with his wife and children to Atlanta in the high country in order to escape yellow fever in Savannah. At the Constitution, a morning paper, he worked with fellow new South advocate, Henry Grady.

West End was an outgrowth of a small community established around the Whitehall Inn, whose name was due to it being a then very rare, painted building. Under its first name, Terminus, Atlanta was established later.

Harris settled in West End where back then many of Atlanta’s prominent citizens resided. A streetcar line made it convenient to commute from West End to jobs downtown. Like everything else in Atlanta and throughout the South, the streetcars were segregated. Whites seated themselves from the front towards the back, and blacks, then called Negroes, seated themselves from the back toward the front. When Harris didn’t walk to work, he rode one of Atlanta’s early streetcar lines.

In his later years Harris could seldom be lured out of the Wren’s Nest, but the shy and lime-light-avoiding Harris did accept an invitation from Theodore Roosevelt to have dinner at the White House. He turned down a chance to join Mark Twain on a likely profitable lecture tour. Harris had a severe stammer and never read his works in public.