The Tales of Uncle Remus

Joel Chandler Harris (a white American from the South) wrote about slavery shortly after its abolition, preserving not only the slaves’ folk tales but also the language in which Black people told them, turning that dialect into an artistic form of expression. To do this, he created an old Black man, Remus, who described slavery indirectly through the mask of fables. In these stories, one can perceive the influence of folk tales that blended African cultures with those of the American continent. The stories that arrived from Africa on slave ships spoke of monkeys and lions; but Harris’s stories speak of foxes and rabbits. At their core, the story is the same. In all of them, the stronger one loses to the intelligence of the weaker. Do you want to get to know them?