Erik Visits an American Grave, Part 1,453

This is the grave of Joel Chandler Harris.

A deeply problematic figure, to say the least, Harris was born in Eastonton, Georgia in 1848. He did not grow up wealthy. His mother was an Irish immigrant and his father walked out before he was born and took no responsibility for the boy. His mother just named him after the doctor who helped her give birth. His mother worked as a seamstress and did odd jobs around the neighborhood. A local doctor took some pity upon them and paid for Harris’ tuition. He wasn’t much of a student though, known around his schools much for his practical jokes and getting in trouble than taking his studies seriously. Evidently, he was ashamed of being of Irish ancestry and the jokes were a way for him to overcome that.

In 1862, Harris left school and got a job. He got a job for a planter who owned a newspaper in the nearby town. Harris worked as a printer’s devil, that wonderful name for apprentices in the industry who did basically all the dirty work like mixing ink. Work made Harris take learning seriously and he devoured the planter’s personal library. Living at the plantation in exchange for his work, he spent a lot of time with the planters’ slaves. How they accepted or dealt with him, I don’t know, but he thought as an Irishman, he had something in common with the slaves. To say the least, he did not. But he picked up on their stories and the way they told them, which he would later steal for his Uncle Remus stories that made him famous.

But that’s awhile off still. The planter lost everything with the end of the Civil War. The newspaper closed and Harris had nothing but a pile of worthless Confederate notes. He eventually got a job with the Macon Telegraph, then worked in New Orleans for a paper and then came back to Georgia for another newspaper job. He started writing articles at the Monroe Advertiser, out of Forsyth, Georgia. These tended be the satirical political barbs that people liked at the time. This led a larger paper out of Savannah to hire him to do the same kind of job, as well as become the associate editor.

In 1876, Henry Grady, promoter of the New South, hired Harris to work at the Atlanta Constitution, the state’s premier paper. This would be his home for a quarter-century. He and Grady were close and both believed in the modernizing New South under white supremacist control. Now, by the late 1870s, the romantic vision of the plantation South was already taking hold. So there was space for whites to read stories of the ex-slaves, especially if they were completely unthreatening, made Black people look silly or dumb or scared, and overall reinforced the ideals of white supremacy. And this is where Harris would make his mark.

Since Harris already had a name writing humor columns. So he had a set market. Uncle Remus: His Songs and His Sayings was published in 1880. He went all-in on writing in dialect in these folk tales. The extent to which these are real stories Harris had heard over the years or whether he made a lot of them up has been debated over the years. But the short version of them is that they are widely considered to be at least somewhat faithful to Black folklore, but also with lots of heapings of Harris’ racism and open cultural appropriation in the best case scenario. The Br’er Rabbit character is clearly connected to Yoruba folk traditions of a rabbit character known as Hare. These were trickster tales, that also have roots in Native American culture and since there was no shortage of intermixing between African-Americans and Native Americans, that influence is probably real enough on what became of those Yoruba stories.

Over the years, Harris published 185 Uncle Remus tales, in various books. At the time, they were seen as genius. Mark Twain called him the only white person who ever really mastered Black dialect. In fact, Twain was a such a huge supporter that he started incorporating some of Harris’ work in his public talks. Theodore Roosevelt invited him to the White House. They were hugely popular in England and Rudyard Kipling was a huge Harris fan boy. He influenced William Faulkner for sure. Ezra Pound and T.S. Eliot then created their own Br’er Rabbit type characters to write each other in Black dialect that they thought was hilarious. Hoo boy.

The thing is that Black Americans thought they were useful stories too. James Weldon Johnson was a big fan. Charles Chestnutt was influenced by Harris. So was Ralph Ellison, decades later. Some more recent scholars have even suggested that Harris was satirizing plantation culture. Without being an expert on these stories or these issues, I can”t really say, but let’s just say that if this was true, then Harris was both a rare white man and someone who somehow managed to do this without actually threatening whites in any way.

Of course, over the years, with the rise of the language of cultural appropriation to describe how white stoles Black culture, this got applied to Harris. Alice Walker admitted the general accuracy of the stories in slave culture, but said that Harris stole her culture. Toni Morrison’s novel Tar Baby took its title from Harris’ work, but she said that she knew the original story from her own family and that Harris stole the story from whoever back in the day and she owed nothing to him. In 2017, when Henry Louis Gates and Maria Tatar published The Annotated African American Folktales, they had a debate about what to do with Harris. They ended up including some of his Uncle Remus stories, but with a critical introduction that explored his cultural appropriation and deeply problematic positionality in all this.

Harris’ stories have been influential in the movies too, and again, in complex and difficult ways. Disney’s 1946 film Song of the South was seen as problematic enough that it was never released officially in the U.S. When it won Best Original Song at the Oscars, NAACP head Walter White said it was a great film in many ways but created an idealized view of the master-slave relationship. Ralph Baskhi then adapted Harris’ stories into his controversial but also worthy Coonskin, the 1975 animation that transplants the character to Harlem as a gangster.

It might help a little bit to examine Harris’ later career. He became a pretty strong supporter of Black rights, at least for a white southerner working in the South. He talked about W.E.B. DuBois in his columns in a positive way. He denounced lynching. He used his column to attack racism in the north and south and promoted Black higher education, and not just the Booker T. Washington type either. He finally resigned from the Constitution after the paper promoted the horrifying lynching of Sam Hose. He just couldn’t take it any more. That said, at best he was a southern liberal of the period, which meant that he was way better than lots of other southern whites, but he could never get to real equality. He still maintained that Blacks needed whites like him and that he knew what was best for the them. Thus, a certain kind of anti-racism and a very strongly held paternalism could go very well together.

Harris wrote a bunch of other stuff too, but no one really cared about. H.L. Mencken completely savaged him, saying that his only good work was stolen from Black Georgians, otherwise he was a “fifth rank” white Georgian. Probably some truth to that.

Harris died in 1908. He was 59 years old. He drank himself to death after decades of extreme alcoholism.

Joel Chandler Harris is buried in Westview Cemetery, Atlanta, Georgia.

It’s hard to find people quite like Harris to visit, since he was a bit sui generis, but if you would like this series to visit other American folklorists, which is a category that I think has to include Harris, you can donate to cover the required expenses here. Bob Cahill is in Salem, Massachusetts and Juan Bautista Rael is in Los Altos, California, Previous posts in this series are archived here and here.