In search of Uncle Remus: Six decades after release of “Song of the South”

Thomas is chairman of the nonprofit group that owns the Wren's Nest, author Joel Chandler Harris' home in the West End neighborhood of Atlanta. The Queen Anne house with the wraparound porch is full of antiques and keepsakes, most of them proudly displayed. The life-size form of Uncle Remus clothed in flannel and denim is not one of them.

Sixty years ago this autumn, thousands of Atlantans passed the same figure in the lobby of the Fox Theatre, where "Song of the South," the Disney film based on Harris' work, had its world premiere.

Now Uncle Remus sits in the attic, gathering dust and startling the occasional cop.

The movie scares some people, too. Since its last theatrical release 20 years ago, Disney has kept the 1946 feature locked away in its vault. The company has never issued "Song of the South" on home video in the United States, presumably because its depiction of Remus as a servile shuffler with a grin on his face and a song in his heart would strike contemporary audiences as outdated and offensive --- a zip-a-dee-doo-don't.

They don't exactly celebrate the movie at the Wren's Nest, either.

"It's caused us problems," says director Lain Shakespeare. "Some people confuse it with Joel Chandler Harris."

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Credit: Joey Ivansco

Credit: Joey Ivansco

"Song of the South" might be the best and worst thing that ever happened to Harris' reputation.

When he died in 1908, the Atlantan was regarded as one of America's most beloved authors, right up there with his friend Mark Twain. His Uncle Remus tales --- in which a former slave entertains a white boy with African fables about conniving critters --- seemed to have earned Harris a permanent place in the canon of American literature.

"Presidents may come and presidents may go," wrote one of his biggest fans, Theodore Roosevelt, "but Uncle Remus stays put."

In a sense, TR was right. Uncle Remus has never gone out of print. In the 126 years since the first volume appeared, the stories have been translated into 27 languages and spawned dozens of children's books. Millions of people who have never stumbled over a line of Harris' carefully rendered black Southern dialect still know that Br'er Rabbit outwitted Br'er Fox.

In another sense, though, Harris has become entangled in America's prickliest briar patch: He has become racially problematic.

"He was a white man who became famous for telling black stories. It's a sticky legacy," says Harris scholar Bruce Bickley, an emeritus professor of English at Florida State University.

Once a staple in classrooms, Harris is rarely taught in public schools anymore. The Atlanta Board of Education no longer includes him in its curriculum. The city elementary school that bore his name closed in the 1990s. The West End library that was known for decades as the Uncle Remus branch was renamed in the 1980s.

Students still tour Harris' home, but they're almost always from private or home schools.

Whether it's lack of interest or lack of marketing, traffic has been dropping at the Wren's Nest (named for the birds who once made a home in the mailbox). Over the past decade, the number of visitors has declined by two-thirds to about 8,500 annually. The attraction's debt has climbed to $100,000.

"People have forgotten about us," says Shakespeare, who has more than a professional interest in changing that. He's Harris' great-great-great-grandson.

This past week, the Georgia Trust for Historic Preservation put the home --- the oldest house museum in Atlanta --- on its list of endangered landmarks.

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Credit: COPY

Credit: COPY

One of the first things visitors see in the orientation room at the Wren's Nest is a bust of Harris with the engraving "Uncle Remus."

Harris wasn't Remus, of course, but he so identified with his alter ego that his career could be regarded as one of the first examples of blue-eyed soul in American culture.

When a group of children in New Orleans saw Harris for the first time in 1882, Twain observed, they exclaimed, "Why, he's white!"

Harris discovered his inner Remus in the Middle Georgia cotton country around Eatonton. Born to a poor mother, he was an illegitimate child who never knew his father. In his teens, he became a printer's apprentice on nearby Turnwold Plantation, where he liked to hang out with the slaves and listen to them tell animal stories. He quickly understood that the rabbits and other creatures who survived by their wiles were surrogates for put-upon black folk.

Years later, after he became a newspaperman and was hired at The Atlanta Constitution, Harris started writing dialect tales based on what he had heard. He invented a narrator --- Uncle Remus --- using elements of all the storytellers he'd known, but especially one old gent named George Terrell.

The first Uncle Remus stories appeared in the Constitution in 1876 and were immediately popular. A best-selling collection --- "Uncle Remus: His Songs and His Sayings" --- was published in 1880. In all, Harris put 185 of the tales between hard covers.

"He reinvented children's literature," Bickley says. "There had been animals in children's stories since Aesop, but Harris made them talk and act more like people. You can see his influence in everything that came after, from Beatrix Potter to Bugs Bunny."

After Harris' death, admirers led by Roosevelt and steel magnate Andrew Carnegie raised money to buy his home from the family. It opened to the public as a house museum in 1913.

For a time, Harris' reputation seemed as securely enshrined as his home.

In the 1920s, a survey of English teachers ranked the Uncle Remus tales as one of the five greatest achievements of American literature, ahead of "Moby Dick." Many blacks embraced the stories, too. James Weldon Johnson, the Harlem Renaissance writer, called them "the greatest body of folklore that America has produced."

Before long, Uncle Remus would become even more renowned. It would be the beginning of his downfall.

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Credit: LOUIE FAVORITE

Credit: LOUIE FAVORITE

Among the many American children who grew up with Br'er Rabbit was a Missouri farm boy named Walt Disney.

After he became famous for animating another big-eared mammal, Disney approached the Harris family about making a film. In 1939, his studio bought the rights for $10,000.

Disney said the project, which would combine live action and animated sequences, would be "a monument to the Negro people."

A black actor and writer hired to consult on the script disagreed. Clarence Muse grew so disenchanted with the screenplay's treatment of black characters that he resigned in protest.

Disney's monument was unveiled in Atlanta on Nov. 12, 1946, in a premiere that approached the level of hoopla for "Gone With the Wind" seven years before. Celestine Sibley, who covered the event for the Constitution, called it "D Day" in honor of Disney.

The great man arrived with a contingent of his biggest stars: the voices of Snow White, Jiminy Cricket, Donald Duck. Almost all the actors in the movie came as well --- the white ones, that is. James Baskett, the vaudeville and radio performer who portrayed Remus, stayed away because Atlanta's hotels were segregated.

The city played the premiere up big. There was a parade down Peachtree and a luncheon at the Capital City Club and a tea at the Wren's Nest, where a crowd of autograph-seekers got out of hand and knocked Disney to his knees.

On the night of the gala, Disney took the stage at the Fox and welcomed the sellout audience of 5,000 in the pipsqueak voice of a Dixiefied Mickey Mouse: "How are you-all?" As soon as the film began, he ducked out of the theater and waited across the street at the Georgian Terrace Hotel, chain-smoking and biting his fingernails.

He needn't have fretted. "Song of the South" was a hit. Despite being removed from circulation for the past 20 years, the movie has grossed almost $300 million in inflation-adjusted dollars, according to boxofficereport.com, making it one of the top 100 earners of all time.

Still, the film took flak from the beginning. Critics attacked it for romanticizing the Old South. The NAACP considered boycotting the movie. Instead, Executive Secretary Walter White, an Atlanta native, issued a statement accusing Disney of using "the beautiful Uncle Remus folklore" to paint "a dangerously glorified picture of slavery."

Like White, Harris' defenders draw a distinction between the folklore and the film. In making a family entertainment, they maintain, Disney oversimplified the characters and lost the layers of irony that had made them more complicated in print.

It was the beginning of a slippery slope for Harris and his legacy.

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During the civil rights era and its aftermath, a growing number of people came to see Uncle Remus as an Uncle Tom.

Disney got nervous and yanked "Song of the South" from distribution in 1970 --- and then reversed itself. The most popular Br'er Rabbit tale, "The Wonderful Tar-Baby Story," became dangerous to even mention because many people mistakenly took it for a racial slur.

Some even charged Harris with cultural larceny. The writer Alice Walker, also from Eatonton, bared her resentment in a 1981 lecture at the Atlanta History Center that she later included in an essay collection. "As far as I'm concerned," she said of Harris, "he stole a good part of my heritage."

The Wren's Nest certainly didn't help matters.

The white ladies who ran the Joel Chandler Harris Association during the 1960s resisted integration even as the surrounding neighborhood was changing complexion. The issue reached a head in 1967 when a black minister sued the institution for not admitting his children. One of the association ladies said they were just honoring Mr. Harris' wishes that the home be open only to whites.

One of the author's grandchildren took offense. The Constitution published a letter from Mildred Harris Camp Wright saying that her grandfather left no will and wouldn't have approved of such a policy.

Through all the controversies, the stories lived on --- with a twist. Newer collections tended to focus on Br'er Rabbit and downplay or even eliminate Uncle Remus.

The old man, it seemed, was becoming too much trouble.

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Credit: Joey Ivansco

Credit: Joey Ivansco

In recent years, a belated critical reappraisal of Harris has begun.

"The most interesting part," FSU's Bickley says, "is that black scholars have been looking at him and finding him more complicated."

One of the latest re-examinations comes from a neighbor.

Shortly after she moved to Atlanta last year, Cheryl Renee Gooch, associate dean of communication arts at Clark Atlanta University, spotted the Wren's Nest on her lunch break and decided to take a tour. One detail intrigued her. In Harris' bedroom, she noticed four drawings of black children hanging over his fireplace. Two of the kids were reading books.

"They were rather endearing," Gooch says. "I realized that my interpretation of his legacy needed updating."

For an academic article, she started investigating an aspect of Harris' career that hasn't received as much attention: his journalism. She pored through his magazine work and the hundreds of editorials he wrote for the Constitution and found that he was surprisingly progressive on matters of race.

While Harris had a nostalgic regard for the Old South and never advocated integration, he condemned mob violence and supported education and voting rights for blacks. Those children on his wall? He believed they should read and improve themselves.

"He advocated racial justice at a time when most white editors didn't," Gooch concludes.

But while Harris may have been enlightened for his time, that doesn't make him a hero in the minds of many people today.

Marshall Thomas hears it all the time in his capacity as board chairman at the Wren's Nest.

"My son's friends ask me why I'm doing this," he says. "Why am I working to preserve the memory of a white man who stole the slaves' stories and got rich?"

Thomas, a fast-talking insurance man in his mid-50s, enjoyed the Uncle Remus stories as a boy growing up near the Wren's Nest --- even though he couldn't tour the home because of the color of his skin.

The house has long since changed its admission policies and welcomed African-Americans to its board. Thomas got involved 15 years ago and now finds himself working to save an institution that once forbid his kind.

"What I tell my son's friends," he says, "is that they need to get their facts straight. If Harris never collected those stories, we might not have them. He never said he created them. He always credited the people who told them.

"And the man didn't get rich," he adds, with a laugh. "Look at this house. He was middle class."

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Credit: Joey Ivansco

Credit: Joey Ivansco

If anyone has grown rich off Uncle Remus, it's a certain media conglomerate.

At Disney's annual meeting last March, a shareholder asked CEO Robert Iger if the company had any plans to spring "Song of the South" for its 60th anniversary. Iger said he had watched the movie again recently and decided it probably would be taken out of context today. The answer was no.

Despite its reservations, Disney still makes money from its Uncle Remus franchise. The company offers "Song of the South" souvenirs on its online store. It sells singalong videos of the movie music and has long capitalized on the characters at Splash Mountain, a popular ride at its theme parks.

When Thomas learned that Disney paid only $10,000 for rights to Harris' stories all those years ago, it started him thinking. The Wren's Nest needs repairs. It could use a new visitor's center and a new focus, perhaps as a center for folklore and literacy.

With Uncle Remus feeling a little poorly, Thomas wondered whether Disney might be willing to help out an old friend.

"I can already see it on our property," he says, sly as Br'er Rabbit: "The Disney Center for Learning and Literacy."

Credit: Joey Ivansco

Credit: Joey Ivansco