In 1946, the Walt Disney Company released its first-ever foray into live action cinema with a film that blended animation and live actors to bring to life some of the most popular characters in American literary history. Song of the South is a musical about a seven year old boy who visit a plantation outside Atlanta where an old slave named Uncle Remus shares stories about anthropomorphic bears, rabbits and foxes brought to life through animation. The film is an adaptation of the stories of Joel Chandler Harris and the characters were as familiar to movie audiences in 1946 as Bugs Bunny, Mickey Mouse and Tom and Jerry. Over the course of five re-releases between 1956 and 1986, Song of the South earned more than 50 million dollars at the box office, further contributing to the standing of Harris as one of the most commercially viable American writers of all time, up there with names like Poe, Charles Schulz, and Stephen King.
Since 1986, however, Song of the South has never been released into theaters, sold into syndication for television or officially released on DVD in the United States. In the world of the mega-branding of Disney properties, the movie based on the writings of Harris has fallen from grace. It is as if the history of the film prior to 1986 exists in a strange parallel world.
The same thing can be pretty much said about Joel Chandler Harris. At one time arguably the most famous writer and unquestionably one of the most familiar in American history, today Harris is all but forgotten. Unlike a great many other writers whose fantastic success in their own time did not extend long past their death, the circumstances related to the fall from grace of Harris is not related to the quality of his prose. Regardless of how one feels about the socio-political aspect of his writing, it is all but impossible to read the long, densely constructed paragraph that opens “Trouble on Lost Mountain” included in this collection and deny that he is a truly gifted writer with an especially keen eye for imagery and talent for metaphor. From that opening paragraph onward, Harris reveals with this particular story the possession of a talent for combining both descriptive prose and dialogue into an elegiac story of tragically ironic romance capable of simulating envy in any writer. Were Harris to have pursued a career of this type of romance writing instead of folk tales perpetuating an unrealistically romantic view of slavery, he might not have been as popular in his lifetime, but he would today be as well-known and often studied as Hawthorne or Twain.
While the rest of the stories in Free Joe and Other Georgian Sketches do not rise to quite that height as a revelation of the mastery of literary arts that Harris could be, they are significantly less problematic from a socio-political perspective than his Uncle Remus tales. Which is not to suggest that they lack entirely the sort of content which has placed the legacy of Harris in that strange parallel limbo world. The most disturbing is the title story which directly implicates the pervasive view of Harris that slavery was a preferable condition to emancipation. Incredibly, for many decades this story was actually the recipient of serious literary criticism which extolled it as an example of the progressivism of Harris. No doubt his was a surprisingly liberal voice in the post-Reconstruction South, but not to that degree. In this case, the problem lies with the times; the reviewers were as quick to believe the plantation myth as Harris was to chronicle
Once past the opening story, the frequency of Uncle Remus-style portraits of servile slaves (actually, ex-slaves since most stories take place after the war) is consistently reduced as element of the narrative although they never disappear entirely. For the love of well-written short stories, reading these tales is an exercise in frustration. Almost every time one starts to get carried away by his considerable literary talents constructing character and story in tales like “Aunt Fountain’s Prisoner” or “Azalia” he suddenly has one of those characters or uses one of those events to remind the reader of his status as perhaps America’s most significant mythologist of the pre-Civil War South. The constant need to reiterate this myth through dramatic interpretation is crucible in which the legacy of Joel Chandler Harris been indelibly burned as literary irony of a most remarkable sort.
The very aspect which seems to have made him so successful and famous in his time is now the very thing which leads billion-dollar conglomerates and textbook publishers to erase his name from history.
