Week 6, Reading Diary A: Brer Rabbit I

The Brer Rabbit I readings for this week were great! I grew up in Macon Georgia, which is about an hour away from Eatonton Georgia, where the author Joel Chandler Harris is from. When I was younger, about once a year me and my grandma would stop by the Uncle Remus Museum in Eatonton on our way to see her family in South Carolina. I had never read the stories before, so it was nice to read them. I had no trouble reading them since I grew up around white and black people who talked like this. My grandmother still says "chilluns". Although there have been many people who say that the writings were racist, Harris was a big supporter of the African-American community, which was very rare in the south. He retold the stories straight from southern African-American oral stories traditions and wrote them the way they came straight from the source. I honestly think he did that to keep it true to form and although it could go either way on how it is taken, nevertheless, we do have a written copy of the stories that could have otherwise been lost.

On to the stories:

The Wonderful Tar-Baby Story and How Mr. Rabbit Was Too Sharp for Mr. Fox
This story is probably the most famous of the Brer Rabbit stories. Even though I had not read the stories before, I knew the gist of the story. In this story Brer Fox is trying to catch Brer Rabbit because he wants to eat him. B Fox makes a person out of tar and sits it by the road. B Rabbit comes by and thinks that the Tar-Baby is being rude, so he starts touching him, and trying to hit him. Unfortunately he gets stuck. B Fox is sitting near by and is ready to grab B Rabbit and take him to his house to eat him. B Rabbit tricks the fox into throwing him into the briar patch, which B Rabbit was "bred an bawn" in. After B Rabbit was in the briar patch, he worked himself loose from the tar and got away. I thought having the tar-baby actually turn into a real person might be a good story :)

Br'er Rabbit and the Tar-Baby. Drawing by E.W. Kimble. Source: Wikimedia Commons.

Mr. Wolf Makes a Failure

In this story, Brer Fox has an accomplice named Brer Wolf. B Wolf tells B Fox that he has a plan to catch Brer Rabbit for him. B Wolf tells B Fox to lay down on his bed and pretend that he is dead. Then B Wolf will go tell B Rabbit that B Fox has died and then B Rabbit will want to go see for himself and, when B Rabbit comes to see him, B Fox can grab him.

The plan goes well until B Rabbit gets to B Fox's house. He figures out it is a trap and pretends to talk to himself out loud about how when dead men have visitors, they will lift their leg up and yell wahoo. When B Fox did just that B Rabbit took off fast!