Canción del sur

I am a lifelong Southerner. No one can gainsay that slavery was a terrible thing. It is our great national sin. But to dump all of that on these delightful folk stories seems to me a bit much.

I saw Song of the South as a small child. I didn't once think how dumb Uncle Remus was; I thought how dumb the smart aleck fox was! According to the foreword in my copy of Joel Chandler Harris' volume, these stories came from Africa originally where the characters were the lion, the jackal and whatever else they used. They are the Aesop's fables of a whole culture and they deal with how one who is weak and powerless--say a slave or a small child trying to survive his parents' problems--can deal with a world and come out with a whole skin. The race is not always to the swift nor the battle to the strong is the whole theme of the Uncle Remus tales. And everybody's gotta have a laughing place if they want to stay sane in this old world.

Good on you, Uncle Remus! Good on you!