entranced me when I was little (in 1940s Northern Ireland)
and made me (ever since) want (futilely) to have a sweet black skin.
I have just read that many Americans consider the stories
(told by Uncle Remus to a little 'white' boy)
about Brer Rabbit, Brer Fox and others to be Racist.
But it is obvious to any child that Brer Rabbit is a trickster figure
(one amongst many in all continents) and, to an older person,
that the Uncle Remus stories were subtly seditious - and should not
have been removed from Public Library shelves
by totalitarian 'Liberals' - despite such advertisements as this:
2 comments:
Joel Chandler Harris, the author of Uncle Remus, had a son who proposed to my grandmother in the early years of the twentieth century in Macon, Georgia. Part of the banning of the tales from libraries in the US comes from their unreadability of Black English dialect in which they are written. It takes an old-time Southerner, like my mother was, to be able to read them out loud with fluency, joy, humor, and rapscallion delight in language and metaphor and fooling and outwitting, something very profound and amazing and essential to slave survival in the South for over 250 years. But given the rise again of white supremacy in the US and Germany, and all over, it is time now to celebrate everything that is human and Other than White, especially African. Historians and sociologists and readers will rediscover Uncle Remus in the future. Here again, Auban, when you are not strident and are positive, you are very wise and prescient. It is truly amazing that you have read Uncle Remus.
I am an amazing chap, and not at all strident in the (pale) flesh. Indeed, I am sotto voce.
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