The Tales of Uncle Remus: The Adventures of Brer Rabbit as told by Julius Lester

Middle School and up

I remember reading “The Tar Baby” from a collection of classic children’s stories my grandmother had when I was just a little girl. I think what stayed with me was not the story itself, but the strange illustration of a rabbit with all four paws stuck to this sticky, shiny effigy wearing a straw hat. Of course, I’ve heard that story often since that first time, but I had never experienced any of the other Brer Rabbit tales – now I know why. I would never expose a child to the story of Brer Rabbit beheading Brer Fox and tricking Miz Fox into boiling the head for her children’s supper. I would never tell an elementary class how Brer Rabbit poured boiling water over Brer Wolf, or burned Brer Wolf alive, or tricked him into boiling one of his own children. When all is said and done, Brer Rabbit is, in the vernacular, just plain rotten.

This horror at Brer Rabbit is not to say I don’t get a good laugh out of his descendant, Bugs Bunny, who can pull some fast ones on Yosemite Sam or Wiley Coyote that would make Brer Rabbit proud. I’m not one of those people who think children cannot handle anything stronger than Barney the Dinosaur. But the difference between their brands of mischief comes from their motives – Bugs almost invariably acts in self-defense, or at least out of righteous indignation, whereas Brer Rabbit inflicts misery because he is greedy, unfeeling, or worse, bored.

Of course, I realize that the Brer Rabbit tales come not from Lester’s imagination, but rather from the trickster tales that came to America with African slaves and became part of their oral heritage. For his part, Lester effectively translates the tales out of the heavy dialect of Joel Chandler Harris’s version and honors the tales’ oral tradition by writing in a way modern readers can understand. The prose reads much like a monologue – I could almost hear a storyteller’s inflections on the words and how he or she might dramatize a scene with a whisper and a shout. This aspect of the book made the biggest impression on me, despite my shock at the heartless violence of the tales themselves. As I read the tales in Lester’s words, I feel in my very bones the need to speak them, if only to myself, for with the exception of the tamer tales where the only part bruised is one’s pride, I won’t be speaking them to young children.