"Little Compton"
Harris engages the power of imagery in “Little Compton” in a particularly creative fashion; it is one of the collection’s strongest pieces of evidence for just how talented he really was. The opening paragraph uses images of an antebellum tavern having been torn down to make for a three-story hotel, references to increased traffic into the city of business travelers and phrases like “new order” and “business boom” to suggest that business in one Georgia town actually improved as a result of ending slavery. The final paragraph is actually the conclusion of the long flashback which makes up the rest of the narrative—to a time before the “new order.” The imagery in that last line serves to intensify the power of the story’s opening as not just a “business boom” but the realization of a prophetic and almost hopelessly optimistic dream: “Perhaps he dreamed that what he had seen and heard was prophetic of the days to come, when peace and fraternity should seize upon the land, and bring unity, happiness, and prosperity to the people.”
The Poplar Tree
In the title story, former slave Free Joe is a man who belongs neither to the white world of other free man nor to his former world of black men still held in bondage. Without a home to go to, a place in the woods marked by a poplar tree becomes the closest thing to home. The author uses the poplar tree as imagery by associating several times with Joe and sleep. The first mention has Joe falling asleep against the tree and waking to find his wife—still a slave—has come to him. At the second mention, it is revealed that other slaves have ratted his wife out and she is sold off by her master out of town. Each subsequent mention of the poplar tree deepens this association between Joe and sleep until the final image of him there reveals his final slumber was his last on earth.
Lost Babe on a Mountain
The first two paragraphs—long paragraphs—of “Trouble on Lost Mountain” are the highlights of this collection’s demonstration of the mastery of Joel Chandler Harris in the art of creating imagery. The first paragraph is basically nothing but a feast of images describing the titular mountain. The second paragraph extends this strategy to how the character of a teenage girl who has spent her whole life on the mountain has come to view it “not as a picturesque affair to wonder at, but as a companion with whom she might hold communion.” Regarded out of context, these two paragraphs could be considered a masterpiece of literary technique, but Harris is not just showing off. The imagery here eventually proves not merely ornamental, but integral to playing out his narrative of the tragic consequences of an outsider to the mountain instilling an idea in the mountain girl for the very first time of the possibility of living a life somewhere off the mountain. An idea which the simple mountain boy she seems destined marry does not share in the least.
Dialect
Of course, the most prevalent imagery throughout Free Joe and Other Georgian Sketches is that which made Harris famous and successful in the first place: slave dialect. For many modern readers, this is where the appreciation of Harris stops, but for the readers he was writing for, the dialogue written in slave dialect was what made him worth reading. For those unaware of how this imagery actually works, keep in mind that while it is not engaged to nearly the same degree as in his Uncle Remus folk tales, certain passages still go on for pages at a time with no break:
"But dat candy wuz candy, mon, w'en she did come, en den de ole 'oman she tuck 'n' pull it twel it git 'mos' right white; en my young marster, he tuck 'n' writ back, he did, dat ef dey wuz anythin' in dat box w'at make 'im git puny wid de homesickness, hit uz dat ar 'lasses candy. Yassum, he cert'n'y did, kaze dey tuck 'n' read it right out'n de letter whar he writ it”
