Uncle Remus Returns (1918) by Joel Chandler Harris (Children's Classics)

IN UNCLE REMUS RETURNS (Houghton Mifflin; Boston) we meet our old friend Remus and the same little boy who appears in Told by Uncle Remus - the son of the boy who listened to the earlier tales and of a mother most antipathetic to Uncle Remus, Miss Sally, and Mr. Harris. That the little boy should be shown to be so exclusively the product of his mother's theory of education is, by the way, a naive witness to the unfortunate in- significance of the father in the American family. Thc little boy is singularly lacking in the child's usual protective devices against education. But Mr. Harris has caught the folk-tale spirit, keeping to the expected theme or emotion or trait. Prig- gishness is the outcome of a quasi-scientific educa- tion, held Harris, and so his little boy--in this last picture of him at any rate--is consistently a prig. The stories the child listens to--there are six of them - consist of the familiar colloquies between the animals, superinzposed upon folk-tales or near- folk-tales. Impty-Umpty and the Blacksmith is a variant of the tale known to readers of Grimm as Grandfather Death. It has been collected in New England from Portuguese Negroes, but it has not been recorded before, so far as I know, in the South. Mr. Ridgeley Torrence tells me, however, that the tale is widely spread among American Negroes. The Most Beautiful Bird in the World appears to be a variant of The Birds Take Back Their Feathers, recorded in Jamaica, in New England from Portu- guese Negroes, and--further evidence of its Hispanic provenience--in the Southwest from the Pueblo Indians. Brother Rabbit, Brother Fox, and Two Fat Pullets consists of the European pattern of the false message or letter, the same pattern which ap- pears in the earlier Remus tales of Brother Rabbit and the Little Girl, and In Some Lady's Garden, and in a tale which was once told me in Newport, Rhode Island, by a white woman from the Azores. How Brother Rabbit Brought Family Trouble on Brother Fox is reminiscent likewise of Portuguese tales that I have listened to in New England. A variant of Taily-po I heard on Andros Island, Bahamas, and what is probably another variant Chatelain heard in Angola, West Africa. Brother Rabbit's Bear Hunt contains a less well defined pattern than the ot'her tales in the volume and, like some of the earlier Remus tales, it is, I suspect, one of those quasi-individualistic pieces of embroidery with familiar material which are not uncommonly forthcoming among Negro story-tellers and which may or may not develop into a true folk-tale.