Nights With Uncle Remus: Myths and Legends of the Old Plantation [Hardcover]

Joel Chandler Harris (Author)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 0810338661 | ISBN-13: 978-0810338661 | Publication Date: June 1971

For more than a hundred years, the tales of Joel Chandler Harris have entertained and influenced both readers and writers. Nights with Uncle Remus gathers seventy-one of Harris's most popular narratives, featuring African American trickster tales, etiological myths, Sea Island legends, and chilling ghost stories. Told through the distinct voices of four slave storytellers, indispensable tales like "The Moon in the Mill-Pond" and other Brer Rabbit stories have inspired writers from Mark Twain to William Faulkner, Zora Neale Hurston to Toni Morrison, and helped revolutionize modern children's literature and folktale collecting.

--This text refers to the Paperback edition.

Editorial Reviews

About the Author

Joel Chandler Harris (1845-1908) authored 185 Uncle Remus tales, as well as other short fiction, novels, and children's stories. Bruce Bickley is professor of English at Florida State University and the author of six books on Joel Chandler Harris. John Bickley is a fiction editor, essayist, and Ph.D. candidate in medieval English literature at Florida State University. --This text refers to the Paperback edition.

Product Details

• Hardcover
• Publisher: Gale Group (June 1971)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0810338661
• ISBN-13: 978-0810338661
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #7,685,511 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Simply delightful!, January 11, 2011

By 

Andre M. "brnn64" (Mt. Pleasant, SC United States) - See all my reviews

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This review is from: Nights with Uncle Remus (Penguin Classics) (Paperback)

Most people today (sadly) think of Joel Chandler Harris' Uncle Remus/Br'er Rabbit tales as racist apologetics for slavery. A good read of this seldom-read book shows that this was far from the case.

This volume came on the heels of the better-known "Uncle Remus-His Songs and Sayings" which consisted of tales of the black sage Uncle Remus (based on a real slave storyteller named "Uncle" George Terrell) telling trickster tales of Br'er Rabbit. In this book, the concept is expanded. Uncle Remus is joined by Aunt Tempy, a gullah-speaking African slave named Daddy Jack, and a teenage-twentysomething black girl named Tildy, in relating the stories to the little white boy. Their personalities are expanded here, including a love story between the elderly Daddy Jack and the young Tildy. Uncle Remus even candidly discusses the racism of poor whites against blacks in one scene (note to "Song of the South" fans, he was referring to the Favors family, who were the villians in that film).

Although the nineteenth-century "Negro dialect" (once again) makes rough reading for modern readers, the results are well worth the effort. The stories are real knee-slappers, especially the tales of Brer Babbit tricking Brer Fox with a sleeping horse and the heroic hare's attempt to bamboozle a yooung girl into letting him feat from her father's garden. However, this book also shows that Harris far more than a white man who "stole" black folklore (as his detractors accuse). The character of Daddy Jack is among the most complex in the series and, having grown up around the Gullah culture near Charleston, SC myself, Harris very accurately records Daddy Jack's gullah stories and speech in these pages, which is a difficult task as this dialect does not easily lend itself to the written page. Those unfamiliar with gullah will find this a chore, but Harris includes a gullah glossary to help.

The tale-telling sessions with the above four characters and the little white boy as a witness is also an accurate testimony to a storytelling session among Black southern adults, perahps the best description of its kind until Zora Neale Hurston's insider look at this phenomenon MULES & MEN in 1935 (I say this having witnessed such scenes myself as a child). Harris himself was privy to such sessions during slavery, and it shows. One delightful moment occurs when Uncle Remus tells the gathering about a chicken hawk flying downward toward a chiken in a barnyard and Tildy excitedly interjects, "LOOK OUT, PULLETS!"

With all this to recommend it, the only reason I give it 4 stars is because this Penguin edition is minus the wonderful illustrations of Arthur B. Frost (of the aminals in the stories wearing overalls, smoking pipes, etc.). No volume of Uncle Remus lore is complete without these highly amusing drawings adding to the fun. This will also whet your appetite for Harris' other Remus collections (Told by Uncle Remus, Uncle Remus & The Little Boy, Uncle Remus & Br'er Rabbit, etc.). However, the other Harris books are VERY hard to find today. Fortunately, a complete anthology of "Remusology" exists in "The Complete Uncle Remus," which also includes the original delightful drawings from each book. I would highly recommend this after reading "Nights With Uncle Remus."