The theme for this week is public domain books, and today's book follows Joel Chandler Harris's formula for the Uncle Remus books, but this time the storyteller is a former slave named "Jason," and the stories are set in Louisiana: Plantation Stories of Old Louisiana by Andrews Wilkinson.
The illustrations are by Charles Bull, a well -known wildlife illustrator of the time (more at Wikipedia; you can see his illustrated Aesop's fables here). This is Bull's illustration for the story of Mink and Wildcat going fishing:
Wilkinson is also the author of another book of Louisiana stories which is a mix of folktales and anecdotes: Boy Holidays in the Louisiana Wilds, published in 1917.
The illustrations for this book are by Harold James Cue. Here's his illustration for the story of Fox and Owl.
This use of eye-dialect and the racist plantation sentimentalism of the frametale makes these stories pretty repugnant to read, but the stories are a better read I think with the eye-dialect and the frame removed; here's one of the stories from Plantation Stories edited in that way, a classic trickster tale of food frustrations: Mr. Fox and Mrs. Possum Dine Together. That will be a good story to include in the public domain anthology for the Reader's Guide I'm working on now, which is why I'm focusing on the public domain books this week. These published stories are indirect evidence for African American storytelling traditions, although it takes some work to try to disentangle them, at least partly, from the racist context that made their publication possible. So, read the books with that spirit in mind, looking for traces that the true stories have left behind:
by Andrews Wilkinson
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