On the racist
caricature and myth that’s also something more.
There are few ways in which I
would claim to have had any opportunities that my boys don’t have—the opposite
is far more frequently the case, which of course is precisely as it should
be—but one complex and interesting such opportunity is that I had the chance to
see the Walt Disney film Song of the South (1946) as a kid. I confess to not
knowing the details of where or when I saw it with my Dad, but I’m sure it was
in a theatrical re-release, as the film has to my knowledge never been released
on home video in any format. I don’t think that’s any great loss to America’s
youth or film cultures, but on the other hand as you would expect I’m not a big
fan of suppressing or censoring any American text; certainly I would hope that
if and when any kids do get to see it, they have the benefit (as I did, and as
my boys would) of a parent who’s able to frame some of the contexts (of race,
region, and slavery) into which the film fits, but it does also contain some
funny and impressive (and I believe largely non-controversial) animated versions of Brer
Rabbit stories, and a few (perhaps more controversial, but not any worse
than Peter Pan’s “What Makes the RedMan Red?”) catchy tunes.
Song was based pretty closely on Uncle Remus, His Songs and Sayings
(1881), the first in the series of books that late 19th-century
Southern journalist and folklorist Joel Chandler Harris wrote about that title
character and his “legends of the old plantation.” I’ve only read the first two
books in that series, Uncle and its
1883 sequel Nights with Uncle Remus—I wrote
about them, in an extended version of what I’ll say in this post, as part of
the “race question” question in my
dissertation/first book—and certainly in some key ways found them as
objectionable as the worst elements of Song
of the South and as (I believe) the images conjured up by the name Uncle
Remus in our collective consciousness. Uncle’s
version of that title character embodies in multiple ways some of the most
ideologically and socially disgusting characteristics of the plantation
tradition: a former slave who wishes only to return to and recapture the world
of slavery, who (in the Reconstruction-focused “Sayings” portion of the book in
particular) full-throatedly rejects the potential advancements of the
Reconstruction era (freedom, education, opportunities outside of the plantation
world, etc.), and who seeks to influence his young post-bellum white audience
through these beliefs. And through one particularly unhappy choice Nights extends and amplifies those
qualities, moving the setting and characters back to the antebellum era, and
thus making clear the mythologized reasons for Remus’s preference for the world
of slavery and all of its benefits for himself, his wife, and his fellow
slaves.
I don’t want to
elide any of those aspects of Harris’s books, but I would nonetheless also note
some of the much more complex and even progressive qualities of Harris’s work
in these texts. In my book’s analyses I linked those qualities to the
interconnected concepts of “voice” and “dialogue” on at least three levels: the
ways in which Uncle Remus’s “Brer Rabbit” stories themselves create a set of
voices that seem, at least times, quite clearly allegorical for some of the
less happy and idyllic sides to the world of slavery; the ways in which both
books, and especially Nights, create
an evolving and at times quite powerful and inspiring dialogue between Remus
and the young white boy who is his audience and (I would argue) student; and
the presence in Nights of three other
slave voices in Remus’s cabin, each with his or her own identity and
perspective (including on slavery itself), creating an exemplary, powerfully
African American dialogic space from which the boy likewise can and does learn.
Obviously those are interpretative points, and it’s possible to read Harris’s
books quite differently—but at the least that’d mean reading them for yourself
and figuring out where you come down on these questions.
Next uncle/aunt
tomorrow,
Ben
PS.
Thoughts on this uncle? Other uncle/aunt connections you’d highlight?
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