Sitting Up With the Dead: A Storied Journey Through the American South

At thirteen, Joel Chandler Harris had been packed off to learn the newspaper trade at Turnwold, the only antebellum plantation in the South to publish its own newspaper. He had spent Saturday evenings there with the owner’s children, listening to two elderly slaves tell stories about cunning animals who lived by their wits, sometimes comically, often violently, usually successfully. These were ‘trickster’ tales that had come from Africa with the slaves, and had adapted over generations into a grand, elastic body of oral literature. Later in life, working for the Atlanta Constitution, Harris hit on the conceit of having a fictional former slave named Uncle Remus recount these stories in a newspaper column, which Harris would write in ‘darky dialect.’ Remus became such a hit that Harris collected his stories in 1880 in Uncle Remus: His Songs and Sayings, making both their names – as well as that of the trickster hero Brer Rabbit – famous worldwide.

Harris died in 1908. In 1946 Walt Disney Pictures released Song of the South – the animated musical based on the Uncle Remus tales that brought the world the Oscar-winning song ‘Zip-a-dee-doo-dah, zip-a-dee-ay, my oh my, what a wonderful day’ – which struck many as paternalistic, at best. For the first time Remus began to look like what he had been all along: a white man’s projection of the grandfatherly, accommodating, unthreatening, forgiving jester he wanted all black men to be. Though he never fell out of print, Harris fell out of favor with a thud. In the late Sixties Disney withdrew the film from circulation. Then slowly, a decade later, the tide started to turn. Harris’ ‘darky’ speech was pronounced authentic African-American dialect; had he not chosen the vessel of Uncle Remus, it was declared he would have been the father of American folklore. As it was Harris saved a body of oral tales that otherwise might have been lost. Disney released the film again in 1980 and 1986, and has made an estimated $300 million from it to date.

Akbar had arrived, damp with the same summer sweat that had turned my cornflower blue shirt cobalt under the arms. Solid, strong and rounded all at once: he was a comfortable man to look at, with close-cropped, graying hair and a goatee to match. He swept into Harris’ ‘good’ parlor (reserved for company) followed by an unruly wake of black and white children, who settled into a kind of bobbing pool at his feet. I joined them cross-legged on the floor. In his pink and black African-print shirt, flanked by a pair of drums, Akbar seized the Victorian room by its own good taste, setting off a chain reaction tremble in the drapery tassels, lace curtains, dried-flower arrangements, even a marble-top table, with his seated gyrations. A tall carving of Brer Rabbit and Brer Fox, arm in arm, watched from a corner.

Listening to the slide show in the dark, empty room I had been aware of a white voice condensing and interpreting Harris’ life. Now, here in his parlor, where Harris had been too pathologically shy to tell stories even to his own children, a black voice was conjuring new life from the briar patch for the children of strangers.

TAR BABY

One time, old Brer Fox and Brer Bear was out sittin’ around in the woods, and they was talkin’ about all of the things the rabbit had done to ’em, to make ’em look saaad. Old Fox, he looked at Brer Bear, he said, ‘You know what, bear? That rabbit, he always was a little bit too sassy for me. You hear me?’

Bear said, ‘Yay-yuh, I hears you Brer Fox. What we gonna do about it, huh?’

Fox says, ‘Bear, I don’t know about you, but if I ever get my hands on that cotton-pickin’ rabbit, I’m gonna take his little whiskers, and nick ’em out one by one.’

The bear says, ‘When you get through with that, hee, hee, hee, you give him to me, so I can just nookie him – Bam! Boom! – clean out cold. Let’s go get him now.’

‘No. You wait here till I get back. I gots myself an idea.’

As Akbar spoke my knees ached to stretch out, but I was penned in by cookie-scented children on all sides, effectively stuck in a kind of perceptual briar patch of my own making: a white man’s house built with money wrung from the stories of slaves, now administered by a black foundation – which, word had it, faced an uphill financial battle because of the see-sawing of Harris’ reputation – principally visited by white tourists who made their way to an off-the-beaten-track black neighborhood, where, if they were lucky, they could hear a black storyteller spin ancestral tales preserved by the intercession of a white man.

Well, old Fox, he left Bear sittin’ there. He went down the road to his house, and he got him a bucket. He got that old bucket and he went on down in the woods and he filled it up with some of that old sticky, yucky, mucky, ooey, gooey tar. And he come back out there to where the bear was waitin’ on him. When he got back he showed it to old Bear. Then he went and got some turpentine and he poured that over it, kind of softened it up a little bit. Then he went ahead and stirred it. And when he got it good and stirred up, he started scoopin’ it up and shapin’ it up, and after a while he shaped up a little old head. He worked up some shoulders, and chest, some arms and some legs, and when he got through with it, it looked just like a little bitty person. Some folks say, a little bitty baby. Y’all got any idea what he might a called it?

Kids: ‘TAR BABY.’

Well, after he got this tar baby thing all shaped up, he knew that he had to catch that old smart rabbit. And he didn’t know if this old tar-shaped thing was gonna do it. See, one thing that fox knows about, he knew that little rabbit ain’t nobody’s fool. So he figured, he gotta dress this thing up to get that old rabbit to stop and be friendly with it.

So he looked around to see what in the world he could dress it up with, and he noticed the buttons on old Bear’s jacket. He called old Bear a little closer. The old Bear got close to him and he just, Pluck! Pluck! He snatched off a couple of buttons and he stuck them on the tar baby for eyes. He got him a piece a coal and he stuck that on for a nose. Hee, hee, hee, hee! He went on and shaped up a little old mouth. And, aaah, he squeezed some ears on the side of the head. Hee hee, hee, hee, hee! Hooo-EY! He looked at all the hair on Brer Bear’s neck, and he just … aaaah!!! … stuck that on top of the tar baby’s head. Then he took his jacket off and he wrapped that around it. And to top it off, he got old bear’s straw hat, and he stuck it – eek! – right on top of the head.

Now. He knew that if that Rabbit saw this little dressed-up tar baby thing, he was gonna stop and try to be friendly. Then he and old Bear would see what would happen when the tar baby didn’t say nothin’. Now, to set the trap, they got that old dressed-up tar baby thing, and they took him out to the big road. And when they got out there, they set it up right by the side of the road, then they went out into the bushes to hide. Now, what I want y’all to know, is that right over there (Akbar points; children all look) on the left corner of the imagination, was a thing called a briar patch …

Now, that tar baby thing was just sittin’ up there just as quiet as could be. Old Fox and Bear, they out in the bushes tryin’ to hide.

Harris’ shyness prevented him from reading from his own collections in public (the public, in 1900, meant the middle-class, white public). The curious thing is that he lost his inhibitions in front of black people. There is a story about him hiding from crowds behind a railroad station while he waited for a train. There he met a group of black railway workers on their break, with whom he immediately fell into an easy-going, storytelling swap until his train came. Caution tells me this is a psychological quagmire I should leave well alone. But the fact is that Harris exclusively communicated with white audiences in print, as Uncle Remus, and with black audiences in his own voice, as himself. Did he simply take the Remus character to heart, and only feel comfortable with ‘kin,’ or did Harris have an inkling that Brer Rabbit – ‘Brer,’ by the way, means ‘Brother’ – was really a guerilla?

‘Brer Rabbit,’ wrote Robert Hemenway introducing a recent Uncle Remus collection, ‘is black from the tip of his ears to the fuzz of his tail, and he defeats his enemies with a superior intelligence growing from a total understanding of his hostile environment.’ Brer Rabbit – the incorrigible trickster – was born prey rather than predator, yet he triumphs through his wits again and again. Passed on within the confines of slavery from one African-American to another, these stories held a kernel of revolution: they conveyed strategies, allowed for vicarious victories, and promised that organized systems could be overcome by cunning. Brer Rabbit doesn’t always win – or when he does, it is often at great cost, through the sacrifice of allies or the unnecessarily cruel torture of enemies. Intelligence allows him to choose freedom by whatever means available, if he wants it badly enough: a message of hope, heartbreaking in its moral ambiguity.

Now look! Who’s comin’ down the road just as happy and sassy as can be? Was our friend Brer Rabbit. Old Rabbit, he skipped along there, and when he saw that tar baby thing he stopped. Screech! And he tried to be friendly. First thing old Rabbit said was, ‘HEY THERE!’ But what did that tar baby say? Children: ‘Nothing.’ Old Brer Fox and Brer Bear, they just laaaay loooow.

Now, Rabbit say, ‘I see you!’ What’d that old tar baby say that time? Children: ‘Nothing.’ Old Brer Fox and Brer Bear, they just laaay loooow.

Rabbit say, ‘Can you hear me? No, looks like you cain’t!’ Did he say anything then? No, didn’t say nothin’. Old Brer Fox and Brer Bear, they just laaaay looow.

Rabbit say, ‘Wait. Now don’t you know how to SPEAK? Round here we all speaks to one another.’ Did the tar baby say anythin’? No, didn’t say NOTHIN! Old Brer Fox and Brer Bear, they just laaaaay loooow.

Rabbit says, ‘Wait. Now, if you don’t take that hat off and tell me ‘Hi!’ by the time I count THREE, I’m gonna blip you on the nose!’ Was the tar baby scared? Children: ‘Noooo.’ Did he say anything? No, he didn’t say nothin’. Old Brer Fox and Brer Bear, they just laaaay loooow.

Brer Rabbit was serious. Rabbit say, ‘One. Two. Two and a half. Three! Eeeeeeh … Blip!’ (Rabbit tries to free himself) ‘Unh! Unh! Unh!’ Right there’s where things got sticky, didn’t it? Cause his fist stuck. He says, ‘Hey! Let go! Let go! Let go right now, before I hit you with this one, and … Blip! Unh! Unh! Unh!.’ That one stuck. He says, ‘Hey! Let go! Let go! Let go before I kick the natural stuffin’ outta you! And, Unh! Unh! Unh!’ Did any stuffin’ come outta that tar baby? Children (sounding superior): ‘Nooo.’ ‘Let go! Let go! Let go! Let go right now, before I butt you with my head. And … Blip! Ah, ah, ah, ah, ah!’ I think we know what happened to the head, now don’t we?

Well, old Rabbit looked up and he was stuck completely to the tar baby. Old Fox and Bear, they peek out of the bushes and see that old Rabbit was stuck. They eased up behind him and old Brer Fox, he say, Mornin’, Brer Rabbit, don’t you look kinda stuck up this mornin’? Ha, ha, ha! We’ve been lyin’ here for a mighty long time, but we got ya now. This is gonna be the last day that you see!

Bear looked at him and said, Huh, huh, huh, huh, huh, I’m gonna nuggie yo’ head clean off.

Fox say, Nah, nah, nah, nah, nah, nah. Quick! We gotta make him suffer. Let’s start us up a FIRE. Let it get good and hot, drop old Rabbit in it and let him BAR-BEEE-CUE for a while.

Well now, Brer Rabbit, you know he was stuck. But two things about this Brer Rabbit I want us to never forget. Number one, even though he was stuck, he didn’t lose his head. And number two, he never ever, never ever, never ever gave up. And out of the corner of his eye he saw that old thorny briar patch, and … Bing bing bing bing! BING! What’ja think happened? Children: ‘He had an idea!’ He had an idea. He knew what to say to old Fox and Bear, didn’t he? He say, Brer Fox, I don’t care what you do to me. Just don’t fling me into that, ah, briar patch. Go ahead, BAR-beee-cue me, just don’t fling me in that, uh, briar patch …

Bear say, Wait a minute, wait a minute. If we start a fire, we gotta make sure it don’t get outta hand. Ain’t that true? Won’t you let me knock that here rabbit head off now?

Nah, nah, nah, nah, nah, nah. I want to hear him holler! I’m gonna haaaang you rabbit. Brer Rabbit say, Oh hang me, Brer Fox, hang me, please hang me, ooh please, don’t fling me in the, briar patch!

Hanging you a bit too nice a thing to do. Ought to just drag you down to the creek and drown you, Brer Rabbit. Old Rabbit say, drown me, Brer Fox. Won’t you just drown me? Oh please, please, just don’t fling me in the briar patch!

Think about it now. Think. What’s the worst thing I could do to a rabbit? Uh! I know. I’m gonna get my knife, then I’m just gonna peeeeeel you hide off right here. Old Rabbit say, Skin me, Brer Fox, pull mah eyes out, pull mah ears out by the roots, cut mah legs off! Boo hoo hoo hoo! Oh please, don’t fling me in the BRIAR PATCH!!

Well, after old Rabbit went on and on and on and on about not flinging him in the briar patch, old Fox looked over there to see what in the world he was talkin’ about. Ah ha! He saw him some thorns stickin’ up and twistin’ round every which-a-way, and he figured the worst thing he could do to that rabbit would be to fling him where he didn’t want to go. Do y’all think that was a good idea? Most of children: ‘Yes!’ The rest of them, ‘No!’

OK, that’s about seventy-five – twenty-five here. Let’s see what we got?

Fox grabbed him, and he gave him a great big old swing, and he just fling him, Woooooooooooooooeeeee! Ow!! Oooo! Ow! Well, when old Rabbit fell into the briars, he did so much screamin’ and hollerin’ and carryin’ on, that old Fox and Bear thought he was just about dead. And they all commenced to celebrating. But they couldn’t celebrate long. Um un, um un, um un.

After a while, way up on the hill, up popped old Rabbit. And when Rabbit come up out of the briars, he had a little piece of one of em, that he was using to comb the rest of the tar outta his hair. And he had to look back. He saw old Fox and Bear back there, shakin’ their fists and stompin’ and carryin’ on. Old Rabbit hollered back like this, Brer Fox! Hee, hee, hee, hee, hee! Didn’t I tell you not to fling me in the briar patch? Hee, hee, hee hee, hee! I was bred and born in the BRIAR PATCH! Didn’t you know I was born and bred in the BRIAR PATCH? And that old Rabbit skipped off to live almost happily ever after.

Akbar, the heat and I sat together in an improvised little amphitheater behind the Wren’s Nest. Beneath an canopy of mature trees, the late morning still smelled new as the vegetable scent of condensation evaporated slowly and sweetly. He told me that he’d got his start as a storyteller, by working as a travelling puppeteer. He used to set up a special suitcase as a stage from which he would manipulate his puppets. One day in the middle of a performance the legs he had rigged on the case had fallen off, and he wound up having to tell the story he’d intended to perform. And that was that.

I asked him if Atlanta ever played a role in his tales. ‘Not really,’ said Akbar, ‘but it keeps me from telling some.’ He explained that he was in the process of learning a new story called The Man Who Knew Too Much. I thought he meant the Hitchcock movie, but he was referring to an African tale that had been adapted into a short story by Julius Lester. Akbar condensed it for me. A woman works daily in the field, stopping now and then to nurse her baby. One day as she’s nursing an eagle appears, watching her closely. The next day after she’s finished nursing she leaves the baby in the shade of a large tree; the eagle reappears and to her horror heads straight for the child. But instead of killing him, the eagle strokes the boy gently with his wing. The woman is amazed, and tells her husband. He refuses to believe in the kindness of eagles, claiming he knows their ways, but agrees to accompany the woman the following day. When the eagle comes and begins stroking the baby, the man shoots an arrow at the bird, who quickly moves away. The arrow kills his son instead, and the eagle tells the man, ‘You are responsible. Now all men on earth will mistrust each other and fight because of you. Because you knew too much.’

How nice to know that in other cultures Eve was a man. I secretly felt sorry for the husband.

‘I told that story to a men’s group, and man, they hated it. Their reaction was, “Well, the husband did probably know more about eagles than the wife.” Can you believe that? They refused to put any blame on the guy. It got to be real sexist.’ Akbar went on to explain that there had lately been a rash of baby killings in Atlanta, which was why he felt uncomfortable telling the tale right now. ‘A story’s only half the equation,’ he said. ‘The context you tell it in makes all the difference, twists the meaning. Ignore the context and you’re being irresponsible. Look, if I were to tell that story in this city right now, who knows what message people would hear. I don’t even know what it means. The context,’ reiterated Akbar Imhotep, in Joel Chandler Harris’ garden, ‘is everything.’

When a billboard on the way to Cyclorama, just south of downtown Atlanta, told me ‘Jesus Was A Vegetarian’, I immediately resolved to keep a record of interesting highway signage.

During the morning I had become infatuated with circuitousness: everything I had encountered at the Wren’s Nest seemed to wind back up on itself. So I decided to conclude the day with a visit to Cyclorama. It seemed fitting to visit a narrative where the end literally merged with the beginning.

Cyclorama is billed as the world’s largest painting. It is fifty feet wide by nine hundred feet long, stretched on a circular canvas in the middle of which is a small, rotating auditorium. All of this is housed in a rather grand building in Grant Park, a leafy spot in Southeast Atlanta where everyone else seemed intent on going to the zoo. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries cycloramas were authentic marvels. When they came to town with a circus – which is how this one wound up in Atlanta – people would come out in droves and spin around while the painting stood still: motion pictures with the onus of motion on the viewer. Once there were three hundred cycloramas cluttering the earth, now there are only twenty. This one, which was inexplicably painted by a troupe of Polish and German immigrants in the 1880s, depicts a bloody day (22 July 1864) in the Battle of Atlanta.

I crawled up into the rotating auditorium and immediately felt seasick. I fixed my eyes on a railing at the bottom and watched it move against the stationary backdrop of what looked like paint-by-numbers carnage. It was like being on board ship, except that Sherman’s army was standing in for the sea, the men’s blue jackets far outnumbering the Rebels’ nobly tattered gray.

‘Now, the blue is the Union, the gray is the Confederacy,’ explained a mother to her two little boys – my only cyclomates, but a welcome step up from stuffed animals. ‘Oh good,’ said one child, ‘we’re the gray.’

I guess I over-extended my metaphor. Cyclorama was pretty corny. The foreground was strewn with bushes and mannequins to lull us into seeing three-dimensionality (it didn’t work). When we stopped spinning I jumped out of my seat to leave, only to find we had completed just one of two revolutions. A voice on the loudspeaker told me to sit down. This time around – only because a guide pointed it out – I noticed something. Amongst the mayhem of bayonets and dying soldiers (one of whom had been touched up to look like Clark Gable) and dead horses and smoking ruins – imagine sixteen thousand feet of this – was one woman and one African-American man.

Now I happen to know that amid the six hundred and twenty-five soldiers and five hundred and five animals in the Bayeux Tapestry there are only two women, one of whom has a name: an embroidered nun named Aelthgyva, who appears to have done something untoward with a monk. Aelthgyva is far more interesting than the red blur in a dress depicted in Cyclorama. But having just learned that two hundred thousand black soldiers fought for the Union in the Civil War in 1864 and ‘65, the inclusion of one token black man seemed grudging, to say the least.

The problem with Cyclorama, and with circular orbits in general, is that they confuse the eye, and the eye confuses the mind. Is the painting spinning around us, or are we turning while the painting stands still? This afternoon we were the ones in motion, but it didn’t seem so; we – the two little blond boys, their mother, and I – were nestled securely in the center of our universe, just as the Polish and German artists had been. What we thought we saw revolving around us was just a reflection of our story, not history.

I left Cyclorama still awaiting its Copernicus.

Colonel Rod’s Tale

I HAD ALL DAY TO GET FROM CENTRAL GEORGIA, where I had stayed at a Budget Inn after breaking out of Atlanta’s endless spaghetti junctions, to Hernando, Florida: a more or less straight journey of about four hundred miles. The air conditioner at the motel had tirelessly pumped a bad smell into the room (decaying rodent? dead body? sewage?), so after what would become my standard breakfast of bad coffee with non-dairy cream and a Krispy Kreme donut, I thankfully took to the road.

There wasn’t much difference between the Interstate and the secondary highways. The latter threaded through cultivated fields, watermelon patches, a few pecan orchards, pine groves baked to the scent of turpentine, and towns so small that only the change in speed limit – from 55 mph to 35 – affirmed their existence. Carwashes did a big business here in this dusty, rural world. I noticed that most of the large, formerly fine houses were in ruins; the smaller ones, without exception, brokered with the street through either open or screened-in front porches. (The architectural record in southern Georgia, and, as I was later to discover, much of the South, tells a tale of uneven wealth. The older housing stock – pre 1930, at a guess – consists on one hand of large, multistory homes and mansions, and, on the other, of small, one-level shacks and bungalows. Most middle-size, middle-income homes are post Second World War) When I stopped by the roadside to drink a Coke, the metal on my sunglasses holder got so hot in the sun it actually burned my skin.

Interstate 75, by way of contrast, offered cultivated fields, watermelon patches, a few pecan orchards, pine groves – and lots of signs. ‘Shelled Pecans!’ ‘We Bare All! Couples Welcome!’ (that from an ‘adult’ bar that seemed to have spent a fortune on advertising). ‘Jesus is Lord at the World Famous Catfish House. All You Can Eat!’ And, from a mysterious series of black billboards with white lettering, ‘You Think It’s Hot Here? – God.’

I tried to fill in the blanks between signs – together they held the makings of a spanking tale of sin and redemption – but my attention was ultimately claimed by the road itself. The Southern sun nearly beat the blackness out of the blacktop. It shone so hard on the macadam that every fleck of quartz or mica in the road surface glinted white, tinting the Interstate the glittering, grainy silver-gray of an old-fashioned movie screen. My parents had a screen like that when I was a child, on which they had shown slides for family entertainment on Sunday evenings. Now, from my mind’s eye, I projected the same images I’d once seen in our living-room onto Route 75: my grandmother wearing a visor hat, cotton dress blowing in the wind, squinting against the sun; my brother looking uncomfortable in a pair of tight Hawaiian shorts; me posing like Marilyn Monroe with a tiny fish I’d caught. All of us silent and still on a distant Northern beach.

Or maybe not so still. In my memory the family is gathered watching slides when – inevitably – one of the screen images waves to us. My mother nudges me and says, ‘There! Did you see? Wave back to yourself!’ And we all laugh and wait for the next small miracle to occur. It’s like a household secret, these ghosts of our living selves left behind to carry on being young and warm and on holiday, not just in memory but in the photographic record. My parents tell me this never happened. ‘You must have been dreaming,’ said my father. I don’t know. If it were a dream, wouldn’t the slides have spoken as well? In my memory bank of images, we are always silent.