¹ Stampp, Kenneth M., ‘Rebels and Sambos: The Search for the Negro's Personality in Slavery’, Journal of Southern History, 37 (1971), 367–9CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

² Elkins, Stanley M., Slavery (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1959)Google Scholar; Lane, Ann J. (ed.), The Debate Over Slavery: Stanley Elkins and His Critics (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1971)Google Scholar. See Stampp, ‘Rebels and Sambos’, pp. 367–92; Mullin, Gerald, Flight and Rebellion, Slave Resistance in Eighteenth-Century Virginia (New York: Oxford University Press, 1972)Google Scholar; Blassingame, John W., The Slave Community, Plantation Life in the Antebellum South (New York: Oxford University Press, 1972)Google Scholar; Feldstein, Stanley, Once a Slave: The Slaves' View of Slavery (New York: William Morrow and Company, 1971)Google Scholar; Caulfield, Mina Davis, ‘Slavery and the Origins of Black Culture’, in Rose, Peter I. (ed.), Slavery and Its Aftermath, vol. I of Americans from Africa (New York: Atherton Press, Inc., 1970)Google Scholar. A suggestive study of slavery in Jamaica is Patterson, H. Orlando, The Sociology of Slavery (London: McGibbon & Kee, Ltd., 1967)Google Scholar.

³ For some of the more fruitful recent studies, see Levine, Lawrence W., ‘Slave Songs and Slave Consciousness’, in Anonymous Americans: Explorations in Nineteenth-Century Social History, ed. by Hareven, Tamara K. (Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall, Inc., 1971), pp. 99–130Google Scholar; and Stuckey, Sterling, ‘Through the Prism of Folklore: The Black Ethos in Slavery’, Massachusetts Review, 9 (1968), 417–37Google Scholar.

⁴ The folktales recorded by Joel Chandler Harris have been collected in Harris, Joel Chandler, The Complete Tales of Uncle Remus, comp. Chase, Richard (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1955)Google Scholar. For a sample of the diversity of Negro folktales, see Dorson, Richard M., American Negro Folktales (Greenwich, Conn.: Fawcett Publications, Inc., 1958)Google Scholar and Botkin, B. A. (ed.), Lay My Burden Down (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1945)Google Scholar. In these collections, as in all others, the problem remains of arriving at the tales as they were actually told before the Civil War.

⁵ Stuckey, ‘Prism of Folklore’, pp. 418–19. See Ellison, Ralph, ‘At Very Stern Discipline’, Harper's Magazine, 234 (1967), pp. 79–80Google Scholar. Negro folklore, Ellison writes, ‘took what it needed to express its sense of life and rejected what it couldn't use … In the folklore we tell what Negro experience really is. We back away from the chaos of experience and from ourselves, and we depict the humor as well as the horror of our living.’ See also Bascom, William, ‘Folklore and Literature’, in Lystad, Robert A. (ed.), The African World (New York: Frederick A. Praeger, Publishers, 1965), p. 469Google Scholar; and Smith, Robert Jerome, ‘The Structure of Esthetic Response’, Journal of American Folklore, 74 (1971), 68–79CrossRefGoogle Scholar. McCall, Daniel F., Africa in Time-Perspective, A Discussion of Historical Reconstruction from Unwritten Sources (Boston: Boston University Press, 1964), ch. 3Google Scholar, ‘The Heritage of the Ears’.

⁶ Chase, p. xxi. Twain wrote to Harris: ‘You can argue yourself into the delusion that the principle of life is in the stories themselves & not in their setting … In reality the stories are only alligator pears – one merely eats them for the sake of the salad-dressing.’ Twain to Harris, 10 August 1881, in Emory University Publications, Sources & Reprints, Series VII, No. 3, p. 10.

⁷ Brookes, Stella Brewer, Joel Chandler Harris: Folklorist (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1950)Google Scholar presents a useful classification of the tales, but little analysis.

⁸ The question of the origin and transmission of the stories must be distinguished from the question of the appeal of the stories that could account for their persistence among a large group of people over an indefinite period. See Levi-Strauss, Claude, Structural Anthropology (Garden City: Doubleday and Company, Inc., Anchor Books, 1967)Google Scholar, ‘Split Representation in the Art of Asia and America’, pp. 238–63, esp. pp. 242, 252. Maranda, Pierre and Maranda, Elli Kongas, Structural Analysis of Oral Tradition (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1971)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. See especially ‘Introduction’, pp. ix–xxxiv; and Alan Lomax and Joan Halifax, ‘Folk Song Texts as Cultural Indicators’, pp. 235–67. Vansina, Jan, ‘The Use of Ethnographic Data as Sources for History’, in Ranger, T. O. (ed.), Emerging Themes of African History (Nairobi: East African Publishing House; Boston: Northwestern University Press, 1968)Google Scholar; Vansina, Jan, ‘Once Upon a Time: Oral Tradition as History in Africa’, Daedalus (Spring, 1971), pp. 442–68Google Scholar, Patterson, Orlando, ‘Rethinking Black History’, Harvard Educational Review, 41 (1971), 311–14CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Berelson, Bernard, Content Analysis as a Tool of Communications Research (New York: The Free Press, 1952)Google Scholar.

⁹ Kemble, Frances Anne, Journal of a Residence on a Georgian Plantation in 1838–1839, ed. Scott, John A. (orig. publ. 1863; New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1961), pp. 260–1Google Scholar.

¹⁰ Lee Rose, Willie, Rehearsal for Reconstruction: The Fort Royal Experiment (New York: The Bobbs-Merrill Company, 1964)Google Scholar.

¹¹ Allen, William Francis, Ware, Charles Pickard, and Garrison, Lucy McKim, Slave Songs of the United States (New York: A. Simpson & Company, 1867), pp. x, xvi, xxGoogle Scholar. Similar observations and collections of songs appear in McKim, J. [McKim, James Miller]. ‘Negro Songs’, Dwight's Journal of Music, 19 (9 08 1862), 148–9Google Scholar; McKim, Lucy, ‘Songs of the Port Royal Contrabands’, Dwight's Journal of Music, 21 (8 11 1862), 254–5Google Scholar; Spaulding, H. G., ‘Under the Palmetto’, Continental Monthly, 4 (1863), 188–203Google Scholar; and Higginson, Thomas Wentworth, ‘Negro Spirituals’, Atlantic Monthly, 19 (1867), 685–94Google Scholar.

¹² Concerning the prejudice in favour of the spirituals, see Epstein, Dena J., ‘Slave Music in the United States Before 1860: A Survey of Sources’, Music Library Association Notes, 20 (Spring 1963), 207Google Scholar; Katz, Bernard (ed.), The Social Implications of Early Negro Music in the United States (New York: Arno Press, 1969), pp. xi–xiiiGoogle Scholar; Southern, Eileen, The Music of Black Americans: A History (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, Inc., 1971), pp. 173–6, 183Google Scholar; White, Newman I., American Negro Folk-Songs (orig. publ. 1928; Hatboro, Pa.: Folklore Associates Inc., 1965), pp. 11, 13–14Google Scholar. The variety of slave music is noted in Cable, George W., ‘The Dance in Place Congo’ and ‘Creole Slave Songs’, Century, 30 (02 1886), 517–32 and (04 1886), 807–28Google Scholar; and Brown, John Mason, ‘Songs of the Slave’, Lippincott's Magazine, 2 (12 1868), pp. 617–23Google Scholar. See especially Brown, Sterling, ‘Negro Folk Expression: Spirituals, Seculars, Ballads, and Work Songs’, Phylon, 14 (1953), 45–61CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Courlander, Harold, Negro Folk Music, U.S.A. (New York: Columbia University Press, 1963)Google Scholar.

¹³ Franklin, John Hope, From Slavery to Freedom (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., 1967), pp. 387–9Google Scholar.

¹⁴ Higginson, ‘Negro Spirituals’, p. 693.

¹⁵ Parsons, Elsie Clews, Folk-Lore of the Sea Islands, South Carolina, vol. XVI, Memoirs of the American Folk-Lore Society (Cambridge: American Folk-Lore Society, 1923), pp. xix–xx, 102, 200Google Scholar; Fortier, Alcée, Louisiana Folk-Tales, vol. II, Memoirs of the American Folk-Lore Society (Boston: Houghton, Mifflin and Company, 1895), p. ixGoogle Scholar.

¹⁶ Hurston, Zora Neale, Mules and Men (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott Company, 1935), p. 18Google Scholar. See Leach, Mac Edward, ‘Problems of Collecting Oral Literature’, in Kenneth, and Clarke, Mary (eds.), A Folklore Reader (New York: A. S. Barnes and Co., 1965), pp. 48–61Google Scholar.

¹⁷ Mrs Christensen admitted this to Elsie Clews Parsons: Parsons, , Sea Islands, p. xxGoogle Scholar.

¹⁸ Dundes, Alan, ‘African Tales Among the North American Indians’, Southern Folklore Quarterly, 29 (1965), 207–19Google Scholar, summarizes the dispute over American, European, or African origin of the animal tales and concludes that Africa will ultimately be proven the original source of the tales. See Krappe, Alexander Haggerty, The Science of Folklore (London: Methuen & Co., Ltd., 1930), pp. 60–9Google Scholar; Crowley, Daniel J., ‘Negro Folklore: An Africanist's View’, Texas Quarterly, 5 (1962), 65–71Google Scholar.

¹⁹ According to Stella Brewer Brookes's count, of the approximately 185 tales told by Uncle Remus, 114 were trickster tales; of the rest, 27 were myths and fables. For examples of early analyses of the tales, see McBryde, John M. Jr, ‘Brer Rabbit in the Folk-Tales of Other Races’, Sewanee Review, 19 (04 1911), 185–206Google Scholar. Owens, William, ‘Folklore of the Southern Negroes’, Lippincott's Magazine, 20 (12 1877), 748–55Google Scholar; Crane, T. F., ‘Plantation Folk-Lore’, Popular Science Monthly, 18 (1881), 824–33Google Scholar; Gerber, A., ‘Uncle Remus Traced to the Old World’, Journal of American Folklore, 6 (1893), 245–57CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Folk tales among the American Indians are analyzed in Thompson, Stith, Tales of the North American Indians (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1929)Google Scholar.

²⁰ See Radin, Paul, The Trickster (New York: Philosophical Library, 1956)Google Scholar; Greenway, John, Literature Among the Primitives (Hatboro: Folklore Associates, 1964), pp. 71–105Google Scholar; Greenway, John, The Primitive Reader (Hatboro: Folklore Associates, 1965), pp. 57–88Google Scholar.

²¹ Greenway, , Literature, pp. 76, 89–90Google Scholar.

²² Albert G. Brown of Mississippi, for example, expressed his fears of emancipation of slaves: ‘The Negro will … insist on being treated as an equal … he shall go to the white man's bed, and the white man his … his son shall marry the white man's daughter, and the white man's daughter his son. In short, … they shall live on terms of perfect social equality.’ Quoted in Craven, Avery, An Historian and the Civil War (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1967), p. 44Google Scholar. See Jordan, Winthrop D., White Over Black, American Attitudes Toward the Negro, 1550–1812 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1968)Google Scholar; Degler, Carl N., Neither Black Nor White (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1971)Google Scholar; Dollard, John, Caste and Class in a Southern Town (orig. publ. 1937; 3rd ed.; New York: Anchor Books, 1957)Google Scholar; and Hernton, Calvin C., Sex and Racism in America (New York: Grove Press, 1966)Google Scholar.

²³ For discussions of the spirituals, see Stuckey, ‘Prism of Folklore’, 417–37; Lovell, John Jr, Black Song: The Forge and the Flame; The Story of How the Afro-American Spiritual Was Hammered Out (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1972)Google Scholar; Fisher, Miles Mark, Negro Slave Songs in the United States (orig. publ. 1953; New York: Russell & Russell, 1968)Google Scholar, Thurman, Howard, Deep River: Reflections on the Religious Insight of Certain of the Negro Spirituals (orig. publ. 1945; New York: Kennikat Press, Inc., 1969)Google Scholar; Simms, David McD., ‘The Negro Spiritual: Origin and Themes’, Journal of Negro Education, 35 (Winter, 1966), 35–41CrossRefGoogle Scholar; McLaughlin, Wayman B., ‘Symbolism and Mysticism in the Spirituals’, Phylon, 24 (1963), 69–77CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Moore, LeRoy Jr, ‘The Spiritual: Soul of Black Religion’, American Quarterly, 23 (1971), 658–76CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

²⁴ George W. Cable noted the ‘mingled humor and outrage … in satirical songs of double meaning’. ‘Creole Slave Songs’, p. 808. See also Ellison, ‘A Very Stern Discipline’, pp. 79–80; and Stuckey, ‘Prism of Folklore’, pp. 423–4. Many travellers' accounts, recently cited by John W. Blassingame, indicated that the slaves' dances were often ‘openly lascivious’ and ‘unrestrained exhibitions’. Blassingame, pp. 44–5.

²³ Harris, Joel Chandler, Uncle Remus, His Songs and His Sayings, The Folk-lore of the Old Plantation (New York: D. Appleton and Company, 1881 [1880]), p. 3Google Scholar. Chase, p. xxi. Harris to G. Laurence Gomme, 9 June 1883, in Harris, Julia Collier, The Life and Letters of Joel Chandler Harris (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1931), pp. 147–58Google Scholar.

²⁶ See my article, ‘The Tragic Muse of Joel Chandler Harris’, Mississippi Quarterly, forthcoming.

²⁷ Subsequent collections of folktales reflected Harris's concentration on the animal stories. Crane, ‘Plantation Folk-Lore’; Jones, Charles C., Negro Myths from the Georgia Coast (Boston: Houghton, Mifflin and Company, 1888)Google Scholar; Christensen, A. M. H., Afro-American Folk-Lore, Told Round Cabin Fires on the Sea Islands of South Carolina (Boston: J. G. Cupples Co., 1892)Google Scholar; and Culbertson, Anne Virginia, At the Big House (Indianapolis: The Bobbs-Merrill Company, 1904)Google Scholar.

²⁸ Harris to Frederick S. Church, 17 05 1880, in Harris, Julia, Life and Letters, p. 148Google Scholar. Other interpretations appear in Dauner, Louise, ‘Myth and Humor in the Uncle Remus Fables’, American Literature, 20 (05 1948), 129–43CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Stafford, John, ‘Patterns of Meaning in Nights with Uncle Remus’, American Literature, 18 (05 1946), 89–108CrossRefGoogle Scholar. The most suggestive article, to which I am heavily indebted, is Wolfe, Bernard, ‘Uncle Remus and the Malevolent Rabbit’, Commentary, 8 (07 1949), 31–41Google Scholar.

²⁹ Harris to R. W. Grubb, 3 02 1883, in Harris, Julia, Life and Letters, pp. 192–3Google Scholar. Also, Harris to C. C. Jones, 22 March 1883, Georgia Portfolio, II, 149–b, Duke University Manuscript Collection. In his columns in the Constitution, Harris from time to time acknowledged an outline sent him by a reader. For example, see 3 February and 25 March 1880.

³⁰ Walton, David A., ‘Joel Chandler Harris as Folklorist: A Reassessment’, Keystone Folklore Quarterly, 11 (Spring, 1966), 23–4Google Scholar. Walton has concluded, on the basis of a comparison with other collections of Negro folklore, that ‘in the light of a complete lack of conflicting evidence, it seems fairly certain that the tales in the Harris collections are the actual antebellum stories’. Also, Weldon, Fred O. Jr, ‘Negro Folktale Heroes’, in Boatright, Mody C. (ed.), and horns on the toads, Publications of the Texas Folklore Society, 29 (Dallas: Southern Methodist University Press, 1959), p. 181Google Scholar; and Parsons, Elsie C., ‘Joel Chandler Harris, and Negro Folklore’, Dial, 66 (17 05 1919), 491–3Google Scholar.

³¹ Chase, p. 15.

³² Espinosa, Aurelio, ‘Notes on the Origin and History of the Tar-Baby Story’, Journal of American Folk-Lore, 43 (1930), 129–209CrossRefGoogle Scholar; ‘More Notes on the Origin and History of the Tar-Baby Story’, Folk-Lore, 49 (1938), 168–82CrossRefGoogle Scholar; ‘A New Classification of the Fundamental Elements of the Tar-Baby Story on the Basis of Two Hundred and Sixty-seven Versions’, Journal of American Folk-Lore, 56 (1943), 31–7CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

³³ Chase, pp. 6–8, 12–14.

³⁴ Ibid., pp. 3–6.

³⁵ Ibid., pp. 83–87.

³⁶ For two provocative essays on violence in American fiction, see Davis, David Brion, ‘Violence in American Literature’, The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, 364, Patterns of Violence (1966), 28–36CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Lynn, Kenneth, ‘Violence in American Literature and Folklore’, in Graham, Hugh Davis and Gurr, Ted Robert (eds.), Violence in America, A Report Submitted to the National Commission on the Causes and Prevention of Violence (New York: Bantam Books, 1969), pp. 226–45Google Scholar.

³⁷ Further examples of extreme violence in the first two volumes of the tales may be found in Chase, pp. 42–5, 53–7, 93–4, 111–15, 170–3, 185–9, 268–72, 289–92, 297–302, 302–6, 311–15, 335–8, 343–7, 365–9.

³⁸ This aspect of the stories seems to reflect the paradox of the Southern heritage, which – as Sheldon Hackney has observed – is ‘at the same time one of grace and violence’. ‘Southern Violence’, American Historical Review, 74 (1969), 925Google Scholar. This article has been reprinted in Graham and Gurr (eds.), Violence in America, pp. 505–27. Perhaps the stories also reflect another aspect of Southern violence. Hackney discusses the relatively high homicide rate and the low suicide rate of the South compared to the rest of the nation. In the South, personal violence is directed more against other persons and less against self than in the rest of the nation.

³⁹ Chase, pp. 145–8.

⁴⁰ Ibid., pp. 93–4.

⁴¹ Ibid., p. 45.

⁴² Ibid., pp. 198, 28, 268.

⁴³ Ibid., pp. 57–60. Wolfe, ‘Uncle Remus and the Malevolent Rabbit’, pp. 32–5.

⁴⁴ Christensen, pp. 2–3.

⁴⁵ Fortier, pp. 29, 19.

⁴⁶ Klapp, Orrin E., ‘The Folk Hero’, Journal of American Folklore, 62 (1949), 17–25CrossRefGoogle Scholar. See Weldon, , ‘Negro Folktale Heroes’, in Boatright, (ed.), and horns on the toads, pp. 170–89Google Scholar; Lomax, and Halifax, , ‘Folk Song Texts’, in Maranda, and Maranda, , Structural Analysis, pp. 259–60Google Scholar; Levine, , ‘Slave Songs’, in Hareven, , Anonymous Americans, p. 114Google Scholar; Hampton, Bill R., ‘On Identification and Negro Tricksters’, Southern Folklore Quarterly, 31 (1967), 55–65Google Scholar; Abrahams, Roger, ‘The Changing Concept of the Negro Hero’, in Boatright, Mody C. et al. (ed.), The Golden Log, Publications of the Texas Folklore Society, No. 31 (Dallas: Southern Methodist University Press, 1962)Google Scholar; Abrahams, Roger D., Deep Down in the Jungle, Negro Narrative Folklore from the Streets of Philadelphia (Hatboro: Folklore Associates, 1964)Google Scholar, ch. III, ‘The Heroes’, pp. 65–86; Fishwick, Marshall, ‘Uncle Remus vs. John Henry: Folk Tension’, Western Folklore, 20 (1961), pp. 77–85CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Baker, Houston A. Jr, Long Black Song: Essays in Black American Literature and Culture (Charlottesville: The University Press of Virginia, 1972), pp. 12–13, 27Google Scholar.

⁴⁷ ‘We submit that it is necessary for a black man in America to develop a profound distrust of his white fellow citizens and of the nation. He must be on guard to protect himself against physical hurt. He must cushion himself against cheating, slander, humiliation, and outright mistreatment by the official representatives of society. If he does not so protect himself, he will live a life of such pain and shock as to find life itself unbearable. For his own survival, then, he must develop a cultural paranoia in which every white man is a potential enemy unless proved otherwise and every social system is set against him unless he personally finds out differently.’ Grier, William H. and Cobbs, Price M., Black Rage (New York: Bantam Books, 1969), p. 149Google Scholar. See also pp. 134–41. Thomas, Alexander and Sillen, Samuel, in Racism and Psychiatry (New York: Brunner/Mazel, Publishers, 1972), chs. 3 and 4Google Scholar, warn against over-simplification and excessive generalization in these matters. Here, I am concerned only with tendencies or common reactions, and do not suggest an absolute determinism at work. See Comer, James P., Beyond Black and White (New York: Quadrangle Books, 1972), pp. 140–91Google Scholar.

⁴⁸ In Frantz Fanon's revolutionary tract and analysis of the effects of a colonial régime on the oppressed, the author noted the tendency of natives to direct violence against their fellows: ‘the native comes to see his neighbor as a restless enemy’. The Wretched of the Earth, trans. Farrington, Constance (New York: Grove Press, 1966), p. 249Google Scholar. See also, Poussaint, Alvin F., Why Blacks Kill Blacks (New York: Emerson Hall Publishers, Inc., 1972), esp. pp. 69–80Google Scholar.

⁴⁹ Comer, , Beyond Black and White, pp. 175–7Google Scholar. Many of the essays in Dundes, Alan (ed.), Mother Wit from the Laughing Barrel, Readings in the Interpretation of Afro-American Folklore (Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hill, Inc., 1973)Google Scholar are very helpful in this matter.

⁵⁰ See Goffman, Erving, Asylums (Chicago: Aldine Publishing Company, 1962), pp. 60–66Google Scholar; Sykes, Gresham M., The Society of Captives: A Study of a Maximum Security Prison (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1958), pp. 42–58Google Scholar; Clemmer, Donald, The Prison Community (New York: Rinehart, 1958), pp. 297–8Google Scholar. An admirable application of these findings is presented in Frederickson, George M. and Lasch, Christopher, ‘Resistance to Slavery’, Civil War History, 13 (1967), 315–29CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

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⁵² Frederickson and Lasch, ‘Resistance to Slavery’, pp. 316–18, 322–7. See also the suggestive article by Genovese, Eugene, ‘The Legacy of Slavery and the Roots of Black Nationalism’, Studies on the Left, 6 (1966), 6–11Google Scholar. A revised version appears in Genovese, Eugene D., In Red and Black (New York: Pantheon Books, 1971), pp. 129–57Google Scholar. On this point, Mullin, Flight and Rebellion is useful.

⁵³ The works of several anthropologists present models that are suggestive: Hoebel, E. Adamson, The Cheyennes, Indians of the Great Plains (New York: Henry Holt & Company, 1960)Google Scholar; Kluckholn, Clyde and Leighton, Dorothea, The Navaho (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1946)Google Scholar; Barnouw, Victor, ‘A Psychological Interpretation of a Chippewa Origin Legend’, Journal of American Folklore (1955), 73–85, 211–23, 341–55CrossRefGoogle Scholar.