African Diaspora at Internet Archive: Nights With Uncle Remus

Yesterday I wrote about Joel Chandler Harris's first book of Brer Rabbit stories, published in 1881. Today I want to write about the second volume of stories that he published, and it is the one that is both the longest and also the most important in terms of its contribution to 19th-century African American folklore: Nights With Uncle Remus: Myths and Legends of the Old Plantation, published in 1883 (and yes, you can see there that the woman Brer Rabbit courting is white; see yesterday's post for more about that).

As you can see, it's a big book, nearly 500 pages long as originally published, and it contains 70 stories, along with a length introduction by Harris, along with comparative notes on African parallels to the stories and also Brazilian parallels, as well as parallels to Creek and other Native folktales, although Harris argues strongly for the African origins of the stories, considering the African American stories to have passed to the Creek storytellers, rather than the reverse (and for more on that, see Monday's post on African American and Native American intertwined storytelling traditions: When Brer Rabbit Meets Coyote).

In addition, Harris includes some stories told in Gullah in this collection, introducing a new narrator, Daddy Jack, who visits the plantation where Uncle Remus lives; unlike Uncle Remus, Daddy Jack was born in Africa. Just as Harris was proud of his use of eye-dialect to convey the African American dialect spoken in Georgia, he aspired to write down the Gullah stories accurately, and as such these texts have some historical value in attempting to reconstruct the use of Gullah in the latter part of the 19th century. Here is the start of Daddy Jack's story of Brer Rabbit and Brer Gator:

As with Harris's first book, I have completed a version of these stories with the racist Uncle Remus frametale material removed, along with the excess of eye-dialect, and I also wrote brief summaries of each story; you can find all that here: Nights with Uncle Remus (de-Remus-ified).

The illustrations are by Frederick S. Church and William Holbrook Beard, and the ones by Beard are really well done (Church was one of the illustrators of Harris's first book). Here, for example, is Brer Rabbit with Sis Goose:

There is also a later edition of this book illustrated by Milo Winter; you can see those illustrations here. Some are in color; I really like this one of Possum and Weasel!

But of course none of the Brer Rabbit illustrators can come close to the work that Jerry Pinkney has done, so, as always, I would urge people to read Lester and Pinkney's version side by side with Joel Chandler Harris and his various illustrators. Here's Lester and Pinkney: Uncle Remus: The Complete Tales.

It all awaits you at the Internet Archive, thanks to Controlled Digital Lending.

Nights With Uncle Remus

by Joel Chandler Harris