Mark Twain and the Rivers of America

The Mississippi River is one of the great rivers of the world. Counting in its entire drainage basin, the Mississippi and its tributaries drain 31 states and the southernmost part of two Canadian provinces. It straddles the Rocky Mountains to the West and Appalachian Mountains to the East. It is the fourth longest and ninth largest river in the world. The Mississippi is the central artery of American industry, controlling it meant victory for the Union and defeat for the Confederates, it demarcates Country music from Western music, and the settlements along its ever advancing delta gave birth to Jazz. Sooner rather than later, the living river might bypass New Orleans and Baton Rouge altogether, rerouting its primary outflow to the Atchafalaya River. It already would be, if not for the engineering marvels placed by the US government attempting to bend nature to its will. Great industrial barges ply the urbanized riverscape today, but in Disneyland, Magic Kingdom, and wherever Imagineers have transplanted the American frontier, the romance of the river's old steamboat days are perpetually rekindled.    

In Disneyland, the riverboat is named for the Mississippi's favourite son: Mark Twain. Born and raised in Hannibal, Missouri, Twain grew up to the whistle of the paddlewheeler. He served as a pilot aboard one before he stopped working and became a writer. Never quite prepared to leave that life behind, he penned a nostalgic tome entitled Life on the Mississippi, capturing the spirit of those halcyon days.

Brer Rabbit and Brer Bear

Disney's maligned classic Song of the South features three animated sequences pulled from various writings of Joel Chandler Harris. The story of Brer Rabbit's Laughin' Place is derived from one of his last books - Told by Uncle Remus: New Stories from the Old Plantation - while the other two come from his first, Uncle Remus, His Songs and His Sayings. We already looked at the story of the Tar Baby. This time, we're looking at the story of how Brer Rabbit tricked Brer Bear... minus the musical introduction.

From chapter XXIII...

Brer Rabbit's Laughin' Place

Uncle Remus stories furnished Joel Chandler Harris with a lifetime worth of material. His first book - Uncle Remus, His Songs and His Sayings - launched his literary career in 1880. In 1883 and 1892 he returned to his fable-telling alter-ego, amidst other literary works published at a rate of one a year. In 1904, 1905 and 1907 he published several more tales. Sadly he passed away in 1908 at the age of 60, but left behind enough material for several more books, published in 1910, 1918, and 1948... Two years after the release of Disney's Song of the South.

Of the three animated vignettes in Song of the South, the story of Brer Rabbit and his Laugin' Place hails from one of the later books: Told by Uncle Remus: New Stories from the Old Plantation (1905). It is astonishing to think of how many stories Disney's production staff must have gone through between Harris' nine Remus books, just to pick out three good ones for film. This is especially true given the difficulty in mentally translating the regional dialect preserved by Harris into a modern one. That amount of work, as well as the technical accomplishment of the film itself, makes it doubly unfortunate that Song of the South cannot be seen within the United States and Canada.

Nevertheless, let us commence with another wonderful story about how Brer Rabbit outwitted his adversaries...

Brer Rabbit and the Tar Baby

Song of the South - that most reviled and controversial of Disney films that most people who talk about it haven't actually seen - was based, in spots, on the "Uncle Remus" stories transcribed by Joel Chandler Harris. To be more precise, the three animated segments of the film adapt stories pulled from Harris' anthology of African-American folk tales, while the linking live-action narrative was penned by Dalton S. Raymond, Morton Grant, and Maurice Rapf. It is also the live-action segments that fuel most of the controversy, for portraying the complicated era of the Reconstruction with all the pleasantry and frivolity of a Disney movie. Though the African-American characters portrayed by James Baskett, Hattie McDaniel, and Glenn Leedy are friendly, positive, and full of song - acting as the well-adjusted foils to the broken family of the white plantation owners - Disney nevertheless “Disneyfies” a difficult time in American history, in the immediate wake of the American Civil War, when African-Americans were technically free but had nowhere to go, dealing with the trauma of slavery while racism was still rampant. It is offensive exactly because it is so inoffensive. Since I am not African-American myself, it is not up to me to tell people what they should or should not be offended by. Whether Disney ever resolves to release a DVD or Blu-Ray of Song of the South is up to them, and since Disney’s main product is their image, I can understand why they would be reluctant to do so.

It was this same time period that Joel Chandler Harris came into when he set about to transcribe and preserve the folk tales of African-American former slaves. Born in 1845 in Georgia to an unwed Irish immigrant mother and a father who fled immediately after his birth, 16-year old Harris took up work in a print shop on the Turnwold Plantation. During his time on the plantation, he became immersed in the lives of African-American slaves, feeling less self-conscious around them on account of his Irish heritage (including a shock of red hair) and illegitimate birth. The Uncle Remus character he later invented was a composite of several storytellers he knew, and Uncle Remus’ stories were those he heard around the evening fire. After the American Civil War, Harris moved from newspaper to newspaper, becoming a valued humourist and political commentator while promoting the vision of racial reconciliation in the “New South.” Eventually he set upon the task of transcribing the folktales he heard at Turnwold as a document of past times.

Like the movie based on them, Harris' writings are controversial. Some see his transcriptions as preserving an important part of America's cultural history, while others see him as having appropriated African-American culture. Some see his simulated slave dialect as a significant linguistic artifact, while others see it as demeaning. Some see the Uncle Remus character as a crude stereotype, others point out that according to slave narratives such personalities did exist. Harris was, on the one hand, a progressive advocate of racial reconciliation and African-American rights, and on the other he was paternalistic with a ingrained sense of nostalgia about the Antebellum South. In short, it may just be that in a country still dealing with the trauma of slavery 150 years later, it is simply impossible to write about it without courting controversy.

Uncle Remus, His Songs and His Sayings was published in 1881 as an anthology of stories told by an African-American Aesop. The most famous of these stories, due no doubt to Song of the South, is the story of the "Tar Baby." It begins in Chapter II...