I love these stories! As I've read on a lot of other people's blogs, I really enjoy reading stories based off of movies and TV shows I used to watch. These classic cartoons are popping into my head as I read them and it is a wonderful bit of nostalgia for me. I think my favorite story so far, from the first section, has to either be The Wonderful Tar-Baby Story or The Awful Fate of Mr. Wolf. I love both of them almost equally. I'm quite a big fan of these stories, even though they are quite formulaic, because I love to watch the dumb bad guy (who thinks he's rather smart and cunning) be outwitted by the good guy, whose nonchalance makes me find it even funnier.
The language is a bit difficult to pick up, and I kept trying to read it aloud to help it make more sense. I hate to say it, but reading the stories aloud made me feel almost racist. I know these stories have a place and everything, but the culture I've grown up in has made it seem like this isn't okay. I don't know if that makes any sense, but I may try to do my essay on it later in the week and expand on what I'm really trying to say. Because, like most things, it makes sense in my head...just not when I read it back.
One things, I can't believe I forgot to mention yesterday is the fact that most every animal is "Mr. So-and-so". I find that really interesting, and I'm not entirely sure why, but it makes the story that much more entertaining. Not just because of the personification of the animals, but more so because of the attitude, respect and reverence given to them by these titles. I think it's really cool to read about Mr. Fox or Mr. Wolf or Mr. Rabbit. I kind of like almost as much as I like the "Brer" titles. I think the term "Brer", here, has a ton of cultural significance to it, and it helps give the characters life.
I think my favorite story from the second half is Mr. Rabbit and Mr. Bear, just because I love the classic formula that I mentioned before. I actually had a colleague in my Feature Screenwriting class with Dr. Andy Horton read a Disney-fied Brer Rabbit and Brer Fox and Brer Bear story for a script assignment that we had to do involving a children's book. Hearing him describe his story came flooding back to me as I reading this as well as the other stories in this collection. I think having a collection of Uncle Remus stories is a fantastic thing to possess.
Chase, just a quick note to say that I am SO GLAD you liked these stories; I absolutely love them - and they are the single most important source of African-American folklore we have from the 19th-century, told in what is absolutely authentic dialect of the time (Harris prided himself on being able to recognize all the local dialects from the area of Georgia where he collected the stories). The racist danger is in denying that there are LOTS of varieties of English, pretending that there is only one kind of English (a particular type of white English)... but here we have this beautiful 19th-century testimony to the presence of very distinctive, very expressive African-American English in all its richness. By way of contrast, there were blackface performance traditions at the same time, with very different motivations (racist and cruel), not at all the same as Harris's efforts to document the stories of the communities around him. If you are interested in the history of blackface performance, Wikipedia has a good article about that: Wikipedia: Blackface. Joel Chandler Harris was not part of that tradition, and in a sense he stands for its opposite. That sense of autonomy and respect, the way Brer Rabbit and the other animals interact with each other, calling each other Brer and Mister and so on, is very much a part of that, showing the respect that Harris had for the world of stories he was recording. And I say: thank goodness he did record them. There are a couple hundred of these stories, thanks to Harris's good efforts. Without his efforts, so many of those stories would have been lost, as so many other stories (esp. Native American stories of the southeast) were indeed lost. One of the great questions people would like to better understand is the complex and rich interaction between Native American and African-American storytelling, but so many stories have been lost that it is hard for us to find the answers to those questions... we can see connections, but without more stories, it's hard to sort it all out. I wish we had a time machine to go back and collect ALL the stories! :-)
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